The Internet rewards quantity over quality and the value of knowledge suffers as a result.
We want things, and those desires fuel our existence. Our wants come with us wherever we go in real life or online. Throughout history, our wants have always had to be managed. The Code of Hammurabi was chiseled into stone sometime around 1750 BC to do just that with the rule of law. In the world today, practically all governments have some type of legal system to moderate their populations. Every religion tries to instill moral principles in its followers to try to steer behavior. But the internet only serves our wants and does minimal to control them. Behavior is a factor of our wants. If you see a picture of a beautiful woman, you click it because you want to see more. You see sociological research and bypass it, regardless of its beauty, because you do not understand or care about it. But one thing everyone wants is money, and that desire shapes society.
We don’t just live in the real world anymore. A big part of our existence occurs on the internet, and mainly social media. While being online, we still possess our wants, and are on a constant search for them while browsing. On the other side of the internet, the makers of the web are competing to fulfill those wants. The better the webmakers are at fulfilling your wants and needs, the more the free market respectively rewards them. Their pursuit of our attention is fueled by an enormous amount of data. The data is objective in its ability to inform the pursuer how to enrapture us, and we know what they have found with all that information.
The internet is a reflection of ourselves. Nothing reflects that better than the creation and growth of social media. To where if you did not know human nature, you could study or observe social media to learn it. In the real world, there are laws, societal norms, and standards, and we are all inevitably judged based on them. However, the web is socially private, where an individual user can easily be anonymous or someone else entirely if they so choose, and even though our data is gathered, that information is in the hands of corporate “Big Brother,” and not friends and family. Almost everything about our online activity has no effect on our real-lives. But if you went to an adult theatre or out to buy XXX films at a brick-and-mortar store regularly, you would be labeled negatively for doing so. As soon as society’s judging eyes are removed, the old saying, “sex sells” has become more true than ever on the internet. Which is a pure example that on the web, human nature often prevails.
Out in the world, most of us have little voice. Strangers, most of the time, do not care what you think. Also, whether it be physically, intellectually, or by wealth accumulation, most of us, by definition, are not elite. Our lack of eliteness plays a significant role in our worldly social lives. And the result of our averageness is that some things are socially out of reach. Not everyone is the center of attention, many of us are not the life of the party, we commonly view ourselves as not good enough for something or someone, we shy away from public speaking, we will avoid places we feel we do not fit with because of material possessions, and plenty of us are just introverts. That reality all leads to wants going unfulfilled in real life. Those real life barriers disappear once we are surfing. We then follow human nature to fulfill those wants that are unachievable in reality. Each person who rids themselves of the social shackles of real life, the effect of them doing so, compounds.
The more people that react to anything online, the greater the result of that reaction. With the result being increased corporate income. Just think of the number of views a YouTube video gets, or how many ‘Likes’ a tweet receives. Big Tech needs that quantity for revenue, and they leave quality far less desired and in the background. As a result, the algorithms that conduct social media reward and positively reinforce the behavior and content that appeals to quantity like meme stocks and clickbait, and not quality.
In case you do not know what they are, meme stocks are equities made attractive by large online communities. They push them for reasons unrelated to their fundamentals, and often use memes instead, hence the name. The return on a meme stock is not related to the quality of the respective company, but rather the quantity of people exposed to the community generated hype machine. You do not need to know or understand any of the relevant information surrounding stocks to gain from the meme-fueled hype. This directly results from our social media experience that makes it more financially rewarding and opportunity cost worthwhile to invest with and follow a nonsensical stock group than to offer quality investment research or advice. This is because Big Tech has made the Internet about the size of the group, and not the quality of the content. Meme stocks are worth worrying about because people almost always want money. So every tangible opportunity for more of it, people will jump at even if it’s irrational, like meme stocks. But if the corporate constructed internet spills out into the real world too much, and an irrational market fabricated by social media communities is the consequence, those markets would fail and result in a complete financial collapse. We are a long way from that, but if there are no changes, that meme stock spillover will extrapolate exponentially because we all want more money. This is just one solitary example of the threat of the Internet adversely changing our real world. There are countless others. If quality was the thing rewarded by the internet instead, it would marginalize communities that exist to misinform.
Misinformation lacks quality and intelligence. Yet with quantity behind it, similar to meme stocks, it can be a force, and corporations that drive the internet love when they get lots of clicks. Even though it will never be admitted, based on their model, Big Tech is fine with misinformation. They designed the internet so that quantity, not quality, creates their wealth, and enriching their shareholders is their primary goal. If FAANGS (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and the rest of social media were against misinformation, then they would have a model that eliminates or at least tries to isolate it. The best ways to eliminate misinformation is to identify and delete it, or reward correct information. The latter is far more workable because of Freedom of Speech, and how we can do it will be theorized later, but misinformation is a concept that must be explored first.
Let’s fictionally say there is a popular physics community whose bread and butter is misleading experiments. They represent misinformation. Most members of the community do not know correct physics from incorrect physics or care, but like that they feel as if they belong here with all the content seemingly made for them. A kid ‘Likes’ the group on social media, and a physics PhD ‘Dislikes’ it, their actions have an equal effect even though they are surely not equal in physics. Another person who is a casual physics savant also ‘Dislikes’ the community, then produces scientifically accurate rants proving the community’s negligence that he shares in random places throughout social media. He literally has a handful of friends and followers that read or understand his explanations. The Physics misinformation community has fifty thousand members. The genius’s valuable rant will hardly be seen and die a lonely death on the internet’s harsh desert of quality.
Big Tech and social media will do nothing to help the high quality, and displace the misinformation or protect it from their brigade. They will not positively reinforce the low-click-volume accurate intellectual content with monetary rewards like they do with clickbait and seductive misinformation, so no more intellectual quality will probably ever be made again to challenge the Physics misinformation. On the internet, being right does not matter, quantity is the measure that is rewarded. The PhD and savant are on the outside looking in because corporations reward getting quantity by any means, over quality. Identification could be used as a simple way to add value, but in doing so, we would lose the treasured anonymity of the web. If quality of the input was the measure of value, who did it wouldn’t matter, the content would.
This goes right along with clickbait. It is not so much that clickbait itself is bad; it is what it signifies. The value is with the click, not what is behind it. As things get more intellectual or technical, the people that understand them or want to deal with them decrease. Likewise, your clicks often decrease, and the money dries up. Influencers are good at what they do, but the barrier to entry is virtually non-existent because it takes limited skill or knowledge. Often you just need the right title and thumbnail to get the monetary reward. A female in a bathing suit is a universal winner at all times, regardless of anything online. Big Tech is distorting now multiple generations’ value structure by what they reward because so much of our life is lived online now. Economic philosophy is definitely a niche, and its value, like other similar disciplines, comes from what its message. On the internet that is most often worthless, because rewarding knowledge is not the model.
The internet and social media are a huge part of our lives, and the corporate model where quantity is rewarded over quality is the internet. Like we all know, and I mentioned before, most of us aren’t elite. And out of the few who might be, some of them were not always that way. So, for a lot of us, things are simple. We value what is valued. Doing what gets a ton of clicks, followers, or subscribers is what’s instilled in us as valuable and desired because that is rewarded. Our world is a dynamic place, and the internet is a big part of it. The web will continue to play a role in where we are and where we are headed.
As we head on our course, it is known knowledge brings positive progression. Discovery can lead to improvements, and intellect often brings creation. Both things align a lot more with quality. For the good of our future, the model of the internet needs to reward knowledge and quality. To do this, a lot of the algorithmic infrastructure that steers our online lives would have to change and be overridable. Above it, whatever institution(s) that make and conduct the internet shall form multitudes of specialized think tanks that assess and select quality content to reward for the good of society rather than solely pay for quantity. These plentiful think tanks would also take on misinformation while still valuing free speech by labeling content and groups that fit that definition. Eventually, there could be algorithms that take the place of those think tanks that can reward quality, knowledge, and tamper misinformation. We would all still click whatever we like, but the reward structure would change for the good of man. This would create a demand for intellectualism and instill the value of knowledge and education throughout society. Now that we live online, humanity has reached a new era where we need to make a humanistic assessment of our situation to make sure we are on the best course for our future because there is no turning back.
