Ouroboros of insta

December 30, 2019 3:59 PM

Who is samsara?
posted by latkes (5 comments total)

This makes me think about the tipping point that youtube almost reached last year, or maybe this, where the bot traffic pushed 50%. If it had gone over, the algorithm would have decided the real people were bots, and started kicking people off the service. I don't know what the connection is between that and this, but I feel one.
posted by hilberseimer at 5:52 PM on December 30, 2019 [7 favorites]

This is probably something a Japanese youth culture movement did a decade+ before us Westerners, and much better, too.
posted by alex_skazat at 1:01 AM on December 31, 2019

Cooooool. (I say that as an old, no longer cool, person.)

Just finished reading W.Gibson’s Pattern Recognition trilogy which is a lot about this - the way ‘brands’ construct our culture and society. It’s interesting and feels, often that we are on the cusp of everything changing.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:47 AM on December 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

“We started it as sort of a joke. But now it is getting serious.”

Everything now, in a nutshell.
posted by chavenet at 2:53 AM on December 31, 2019 [13 favorites]

“Outside of social media, this reality does not exist.”

This is the perverse power of the “connected world” in general and social media in particular. It erodes our grasp on reality and, like book pricing algorithms on Amazon, tends to wildly inflate everything — jokes, off hand comments, art projects — all get made more real than real, usually to the detriment of reality.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:52 AM on December 31, 2019 [2 favorites]