Welcome to the ‘Rabbit Hole’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/technology/rabbit-hole-podcast-kevin-roose.html

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Recently, I saw something on Twitter that annoyed me. It was an article from a local Ohio news site, describing a small crowd that had gathered outside the statehouse to protest the state’s coronavirus shutdowns. They were urging the governor to ignore social distancing guidelines and open the state for business, a move that could endanger public health and potentially put thousands of Ohioans’ lives at risk.

After fuming silently for a few minutes, I texted the link to my mother, who lives in Ohio, with the caption “Idiots!”

Then I caught myself. I wondered: Did a few dozen protesters doing something reckless and irresponsible thousands of miles away from me really deserve my outrage? Or had I allowed myself to be whipped into a frenzy by people I’d never met, on a platform engineered to capture my attention and convert it into advertising dollars? Was I ignoring the larger forces at work — like the professional partisans who have made a living exploiting the paranoid and fearful, or the long, slow erosion of trust in mainstream health authorities — in favor of dunking on an easy target? Was I actually mad, or did I just feel like I should be mad?

This is not a new thought pattern. I have it a few times a day, whenever I find myself behaving in a way that feels less like genuine self-expression and more like giving in to the invisible tug of a faceless internet platform. Is the salad I’m making for dinner actually what I want to eat, or do I just think the photo will make me look healthy and responsible when I post it on Instagram later? Did I really want to watch “Schitt’s Creek,” or did I just trust Netflix’s recommendations more than my own taste? Which of my tastes, thoughts, and habits are really mine, and which were put there by an algorithm?

I’ve started calling this sensation “machine drift,” and I feel it every day. Especially now, when millions of Americans are stuck inside during a pandemic, the question of how our personalities and preferences are being shaped by our digital surroundings seems more pressing than ever.

After all, for many of us, the world has been reduced to what we experience on screens. And the things on those screens are not neutral or inert. They’ve been put there on purpose and arranged, often by a combination of humans and sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence, to accomplish some goal. Maybe that goal is to make us click, buy or share. Maybe it’s to persuade us, or harden some part of our identity. Most of the time, what these machines want from us appears harmless. Once in a while, it actually is.

Marshall McLuhan, the 20th century media theorist, is often credited with saying, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

We know, by now, how we’ve shaped our tools. The origin stories of our internet mega-platforms have been told over and over again, in glossy business magazines and cable news specials. We know that Twitter ignited the Arab Spring, and that Facebook ads helped elect President Trump. We know that Google knows everything about us, and that Instagram’s effect on our culture has been immeasurable.

Less clear, though, is the answer to the question raised by the other side of McLuhan’s aphorism. How are our tools shaping us?

I’ve been obsessed with the internet since I was a preteen, and I’ve been fascinated as things I used to consider niche phenomena — things like ad microtargeting, meme culture and online conspiracy theories — have wormed their way into the center of the national discourse. In the past few years, internet culture has emerged not just as a nerdy subculture, but as mass culture itself. And our reliance on the internet as a primary source of information, entertainment and community seems to be changing the ways we talk, the things we enjoy and the sources we trust.

As a tech columnist, I’m inundated with both the good and bad parts of the internet every day. And often, I have a hard time telling where the internet stops and my personality starts. These days, more of my thoughts arrive as trite, Twitter-size observations, and my more offbeat tastes have been transformed into smoother, more mainstream ones by the centripetal force of algorithmic recommendations. I’ve heard stories of people I know struggling with their own versions of machine drift — a friend whose political views were upended by a Facebook group, a friend who reoriented her life around chasing Instagram fame, an acquaintance who dropped into a dark corner of 4chan and never came back.

Last year, after the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand — a heinous mass murder committed by a white nationalist with ties to far-right internet groups, whose actions seemed to be calculated to produce maximum internet virality — my colleague Andy Mills and I decided to try to figure out where the internet was leading us, and what made its pull so powerful.

With the help of a small team of talented colleagues, we set out on a yearlong project to make a narrative audio series that would tell the stories of people who were shaping, and being shaped by, the internet.

You might have read versions of some of these stories in text form already. But by telling them in audio form, they’ve come alive in a new way. And although we didn’t plan to release the series during a national lockdown, it might turn out to be the right time to explore the contours of the internet — this place I’ve spent my entire adult life, this strange ecosystem we all now inhabit — and figure out how, and why, it’s changing who we are.

The series comes out on Thursday. It’s called “Rabbit Hole.” I hope you’ll listen.