Hype by Gabrielle Bluestone

Author:Gabrielle Bluestone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2021-01-26T16:40:38+00:00

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In retrospect, social media users and the influencers who star on these platforms couldn’t have been more primed to get snookered en masse by something like the Fyre Festival. The only surprise is that it took so long to happen.

For one thing, we’re hopelessly addicted to social media. What started out as a way for Mark Zuckerberg to rate attractive Harvard students quickly turned into a way for all of us to judge—and be judged. It was so fun and exciting, consuming this constantly updated feed of all the things our friends, family, and the celebrities we identify with were consuming that we didn’t even mind as we became the product and our feeds turned into lifestyle catalogs.

“In today’s age, we’re the commodity and we’re kind of being sold over and over again on social media. There are all these ideological and moral inconsistencies in how we behave on social media, and how our tech giants behave. And there’s a lot of room for concern and it can be very scary. You can get scammed and you can be lied to and you can be catfished,” explained Natalia Antonova, a security expert and former Bellingcat editor. “I think we could all learn from this story and maybe encourage our tech giants to tell people, ‘Hey you have to mark this as an ad,’ if it is in fact an ad. But you know, our tech giants don’t always have our best interest at heart do they? So that’s kind of the other elephant in the room here, right? Instagram makes so much money, they even revamped their entire platform just to appeal more to shopping.”

“I think it’s just an evolution of what we’ve had for a long time already, but I think that the peer-to-peer interaction that happens with social media makes it obviously much more direct. You don’t have multiple layers of approvals, and people making decisions and policing these things,” Borte, the writer and director of The Joneses, said. “You have people say, ‘I’ll pay you to do this.’ And you have a direct connection to those followers at that point, without really any guidelines.”

The average social media user might be the customer for influencers, but at some point down the line, we also consented to selling our own data for the privilege. In exchange for some social interaction and a big hit of affirmation, these apps get to track us across the internet—and off it—and sell the information to advertisers and shadowy data brokers who compile profiles of us and then sell them to other advertisers until every ad we see has been carefully targeted just for us. But worse than that, the platforms are constantly learning how to keep us locked into their sites for as long as possible, which means algorithmically learning how to arouse our emotions in a manner not unlike a slot machine until we’re drunk, spinning around on our digital swivel seats, pulling the refresh screen like a lever hoping that maybe this time we’ll hit.

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