Yuval Noah Harari

Oh, these are all kind of conspiracies to deceive us.

But they do trust the algorithms that show them all these stories.

So it's not that trust completely evaporated from their mind or from the world.

It shifted from humans to algorithms.

And this is happening in more and more systems.

The other thing which is less essential but has been very important over the last decade or two...

is that the algorithms of social media, they were given as their goal, not the creation of trust, not the creation of truth, but the creation of engagement.

Like the goal given to the Facebook algorithm, to the X algorithm, to the TikTok algorithm is increase user engagement, right?

Which sounds nice, engagement, that sounds like a good thing.

But what it really means is that the algorithms experimented on millions and billions of human guinea pigs to see how do we make humans more engaged?

How do we make humans spend longer on the platform and react to it more?

For instance, by sharing the posts with their friends.

And I discovered that the easiest way to make people engaged is to press the hate button or the greed button or the fear button in their mind, in human minds, because hate is very engaging.

Fear is very engaging.

If something threatens your life, you are engaged.

And they have been flooding the world with hate and fear and anger and greed and so forth.

And we are now living in a hyper-engaged world.

And, you know, engagement is very close cousin of another word, which now is very dominant in our language, which is excitement.

Excitement simply means that your nervous system is like working in a hyper level.

And excitement is good in some situations, and to some extent, just as engagement is good in some situations.