It was 2 am and I was just about to call it a night. I lazily opened nypost and noticed an article about the latest chris rock episode on netflix. And it caught my curiosity. I immediately went to Netflix and tried to get to the part where Chris rock responds back to the infamous slap episode, but Netflix wouldn’t let me fast forward. So, I had to watch the entire episode and there are times where the material was brilliant and there were also times where the material was meh. Regardless, there was a lot of cursing, probably too much to my liking, but once you get past the cursing and the bad words, I enjoyed it. I don’t expect everyone to like it, but I did notice that Mr. rock successfully managed to make everyone uncomfortable and squirm in their seats, thereby accomplishing the mission of a successful comedian: Use humor to point out the evils and the biases that have been creeping into our society.
In the corporate world, we have been paying lip service to a lot of things and have been silently following them due to the fear and taboo of not going against the crowd. Who would want to point out the obvious fallacy of Emperor has no clothes. Only a child could because they don’t understand the repurcussions of their actions. Or in this case, a comedian could, because they get paid 40 million dollars! In our society as it exists today, we don;t condemn a crime based on its nature. We first look at the perpetrator and the victim and then decide whether we should condemn or not. If the perpetrator is to our liking or of our own kind, then we figure out fancy, mind bending ways to either defend the crime or to avoid condeming it. Lady justice has been depicted blindfolded for a reason. But, in this age of social media and twitter, where we have given a voice to every person, we have failed to also provide some sanity and reason to those voices. So, we have a world thats full of angry voices, looking with a microscope and a telescope to find either a minute or a distant reason to voice their outrage. And because anger evokes passion and likes, we have incentivized angry voices and bitter personalities to become the voice of our society. Our journalism standards have also plummetted for the same reason and now depending on the paper you read or the site you watch, the same incidents are twisted and turned to suit their propaganda. The agenda is set and they are looking for events that suit their agenda.
We may accuse that we have bots on twitter and elsewhere (or trolls) who are causing this, but the reality is that twitter is made of people and people are feeding this troll culture or whatever else. As a society, we have lost the appetite to take the bitter-pill and as a result, we are venting out and conjuring things to show us as a victim. If someone gives you a critical feedback, we instinctively deflect it from us to other things. We no longer take responsibility for our actions and we have a million sources we can point out to (thanks chatgpt!) that this was not our fault and it was someone else’s. Our society is also no longer a fan of owning your mistakes and correcting them, instead it is a fan of playing victimhood.
Internet was supposed to bring our societies together. Internet was supposed to provide a voice to everyone in the room. But, what it did was brought biased people together and put insurmountable barries between people who don’t think like each other. Internet provided a megaphone to the loudest, bitterest and the nastiest voice in the room and has relegated the sweeter and reasonable voices to the back.
We can only change this if we use these machine learning(ML) algorithms to reward good behavior. And this cannot be trusted to corporations (as they are people too!) and instead, we the people do it in the way we use internet every single time and every single day for a significant period of time. Its hard but not impossible even though we are fighting against stanford trained neuro scientists and billion-parameter trained ML algorithms because we are eight billion people on this planet!
Humanity has overcome far worse problems before when people weren’t empowered. Imagine what we could do with a smart phone and chatgpt by our side this time around.
