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In this past weekend’s Styles section of the New York Times, Siegel uses “The Lonely Crowd” to analyze the putative “Yelpification” of contemporary life: according to Siegel, Riesman’s view was that “people went from being ‘inner-directed’ to ‘outer-directed,’ from heeding their own instincts and judgment to depending on the judgments and opinions of tastemakers and trendsetters.” The “conformist power of the crowd” and its delighted ability to write online reviews led Siegel down a sad path to a lackluster expensive dinner.

What Riesman actually suggested was that we think of social organization in terms of a series of “ideal types” along a spectrum of increasingly loose authority

On one end of the spectrum is a “tradition-directed” community, where we all understand that what we’re supposed to do is what we’re supposed to do because it’s just the thing that one does; authority is unequivocal, and there’s neither the room nor the desire for autonomous action

In the middle of the spectrum, as one moves toward a freer distribution of, and response to, authority, is “inner-direction.” The inner-directed character is concerned not with “what one does” but with “what people like us do.” Which is to say that she looks to her own internalizations of past authorities to get a sense for how to conduct her affairs.

Contemporary society, Riesman thought, was best understood as chiefly “other-directed,” where the inculcated authority of the vertical (one’s lineage) gives way to the muddled authority of the horizontal (one’s peers).

The inner-directed person orients herself by an internal “gyroscope,” while the other-directed person orients herself by “radar.”

It’s not that the inner-directed person consults some deep, subjective, romantically sui generis oracle. It’s that the inner-directed person consults the internalized voices of a mostly dead lineage, while her other-directed counterpart heeds the external voices of her living contemporaries.

“the gyroscopic mechanism allows the inner-directed person to appear far more independent than he really is: he is no less a conformist to others than the other-directed person, but the voices to which he listens are more distant, of an older generation, their cues internalized in his childhood.” The inner-directed person is, simply, “somewhat less concerned than the other-directed person with continuously obtaining from contemporaries (or their stand-ins: the mass media) a flow of guidance, expectation, and approbation.

Riesman drew no moral from the transition from a community of primarily inner-directed people to a community of the other-directed. Instead, he saw that each ideal type had different advantages and faced different problems

As Riesman understood it, the primary disciplining emotion under tradition direction is shame, the threat of ostracism and exile that enforces traditional action. Inner-directed people experience not shame but guilt, or the fear that one’s behavior won’t be commensurate with the imago within. And, finally, other-directed folks experience not guilt but a “contagious, highly diffuse” anxiety—the possibility that, now that authority itself is diffuse and ambiguous, we might be doing the wrong thing all the time.

Siegel is right to make the inference, if wayward in his conclusions. It makes sense to associate the anxiety of how to relate to livingly diffuse authorities with the Internet, which presents the greatest signal-to-noise-ratio problem in human history.

The problem with Yelp is not the role it plays, for Siegel, in the proliferation of monoculture; most people of my generation have learned to ignore Yelp entirely. It’s the fact that, after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information.

There are several reasons for this. The first is the nature of an algorithmic response to the world. As Jaron Lanier points out in “Who Owns the Future?,” the hubris behind each new algorithm is the idea that its predictive and evaluatory structure is game-proof; but the minute any given algorithm gains real currency, all the smart and devious people devote themselves to gaming it. On Yelp, the obvious case would be garnering positive reviews by any means necessary.

A second problem with Yelp’s algorithmic ranking is in the very idea of using online reviews; as anybody with a book on Amazon knows, they tend to draw more contributions from people who feel very strongly about something, positively or negatively. This undermines the statistical relevance of their recommendations.

the biggest problem with Yelp is not that it’s a popularity contest. It’s not even that it’s an exploitable popularity contest.

it’s the fact that Yelp makes money by selling ads and prime placements to the very businesses it lists under ostensibly neutral third-party review

But Yelp’s valuations are always possibly in bad faith, even if its authority is dressed up as the distilled algorithmic wisdom of a crowd. For Riesman, that’s the worst of all possible worlds: a manipulated consumer certainty that only shores up the authority of an unchosen, hidden source. In that world, cold monkfish is the least of our problems.

Greg Rutkowski, a hugely popular concept artist, has been used in a prompt for Stable Diffusion upward of 100,000 times. Now, his name is no longer attached to just his own work, but it also summons a slew of imitations of varying quality that he hasn’t approved. This could confuse clients, and it muddies the consistent and precise output he usually produces. When I saw what was happening to him, I thought of my battle with my shadow self. We were each fighting a version of ourself that looked similar but that was uncanny, twisted in a way to which we didn’t consent.

In theory, everyone is at risk for their work or image to become a vulgarity with A.I., but I suspect those who will be the most hurt are those who are already facing the consequences of improving technology, namely members of marginalized groups.

In the future, with A.I. technology, many more people will have a shadow self with whom they must reckon. Once the features that we consider personal and unique — our facial structure, our handwriting, the way we draw — can be programmed and contorted at the click of a mouse, the possibilities for violations are endless.

I’ve been playing around with several generators, and so far none have mimicked my style in a way that can directly threaten my career, a fact that will almost certainly change as A.I. continues to improve. It’s undeniable; the A.I.s know me. Most have captured the outlines and signatures of my comics — black hair, bangs, striped T-shirts. To others, it may look like a drawing taking shape.I see a monster forming.

Some embrace networked, data-driven lives and are comfortable volunteering embarrassing, real time information about what we're doing, whom we're doing it with, and how we feel about our monitored activities.

Put it all together and we can see that our conception of what it means to be human has become "design space." We're now Humanity 2.0, primed for optimization through commercial upgrades. And today's apps are more harbinger than endpoint.

philosophers have had much to say about the enticing and seemingly inevitable dispersion of technological mental prosthetic that promise to substitute or enhance some of our motivational powers.

beyond the practical issues lie a constellation of central ethical concerns.

It simply means that when it comes to digital willpower, we should be on our guard to avoid confusing situational with integrated behaviors.

it is antithetical to the ideal of " resolute choice." Some may find the norm overly perfectionist, Spartan, or puritanical. However, it is not uncommon for folks to defend the idea that mature adults should strive to develop internal willpower strong enough to avoid external temptations, whatever they are, and wherever they are encountered.

In part, resolute choosing is prized out of concern for consistency, as some worry that lapse of willpower in any context indicates a generally weak character.

Fragmented selves behave one way while under the influence of digital willpower, but another when making decisions without such assistance. In these instances, inconsistent preferences are exhibited and we risk underestimating the extent of our technological dependency.

they should cause us to pause as we think about a possible future that significantly increases the scale and effectiveness of willpower-enhancing apps. Let's call this hypothetical future Digital Willpower World and characterize the ethical traps we're about to discuss as potential general pitfalls

the problem of inauthenticity, a staple of the neuroethics debates, might arise. People might start asking themselves: Has the problem of fragmentation gone away only because devices are choreographing our behavior so powerfully that we are no longer in touch with our so-called real selves -- the selves who used to exist before Digital Willpower World was formed?

Infantalized subjects are morally lazy, quick to have others take responsibility for their welfare. They do not view the capacity to assume personal responsibility for selecting means and ends as a fundamental life goal that validates the effort required to remain committed to the ongoing project of maintaining willpower and self-control.

Michael Sandel's Atlantic essay, "The Case Against Perfection." He notes that technological enhancement can diminish people's sense of achievement when their accomplishments become attributable to human-technology systems and not an individual's use of human agency.

Borgmann worries that this environment, which habituates us to be on auto-pilot and delegate deliberation, threatens to harm the powers of reason, the most central component of willpower (according to the rationalist tradition).

In several books, including Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, he expresses concern about technologies that seem to enhance willpower but only do so through distraction. Borgmann's paradigmatic example of the non-distracted, focally centered person is a serious runner. This person finds the practice of running maximally fulfilling, replete with the rewarding "flow" that can only comes when mind/body and means/ends are unified, while skill gets pushed to the limit.

Perhaps the very conception of a resolute self was flawed. What if, as psychologist Roy Baumeister suggests, willpower is more "staple of folk psychology" than real way of thinking about our brain processes?

novel approaches suggest the will is a flexible mesh of different capacities and cognitive mechanisms that can expand and contract, depending on the agent's particular setting and needs. Contrary to the traditional view that identifies the unified and cognitively transparent self as the source of willed actions, the new picture embraces a rather diffused, extended, and opaque self who is often guided by irrational trains of thought. What actually keeps the self and its will together are the given boundaries offered by biology, a coherent self narrative created by shared memories and experiences, and society. If this view of the will as an expa

nding and contracting system with porous and dynamic boundaries is correct, then it might seem that the new motivating technologies and devices can only increase our reach and further empower our willing selves.

"It's a mistake to think of the will as some interior faculty that belongs to an individual--the thing that pushes the motor control processes that cause my action," Gallagher says. "Rather, the will is both embodied and embedded: social and physical environment enhance or impoverish our ability to decide and carry out our intentions; often our intentions themselves are shaped by social and physical aspects of the environment."

It makes perfect sense to think of the will as something that can be supported or assisted by technology. Technologies, like environments and institutions can facilitate action or block it. Imagine I have the inclination to go to a concert. If I can get my ticket by pressing some buttons on my iPhone, I find myself going to the concert. If I have to fill out an application form and carry it to a location several miles away and wait in line to pick up my ticket, then forget it.

Perhaps the best way forward is to put a digital spin on the Socratic dictum of knowing myself and submit to the new freedom: the freedom of consuming digital willpower to guide me past the sirens.

Of course it does. And words get really tired. They get well-tread, and ubiquitous, and diffuse, and they lose their original point of origin.  So I think that we can stop leaning on that one word and try to talk about all the aspects that affect our lives when a lot of money comes to town and people are displaced, and the character of the neighborhood changes.

There are a lot of class issues at the heart of capital coming to the neighborhood and displacement and all of these factors that are a part of what we loosely call gentrification. But at the end of the day, we can’t operate in a bubble in 2015. We have to acknowledge all the historic context, all the different forms of discrimination, particularly red-lining, these sorts of practices, that have made the class issue a race issue. At it’s heart it’s a class issue, but in the States, through our history, we’ve made it a race issue. It very much is a race issue.

in most parts of the world, languages and genes occupy the same areas and even appear to have traveled along similar trajectories.

These data have been available for some time, but never examined in the same place. “The thing we’ve done that no one else has is match worldwide genetic populations to their languages, so that you’re looking at a comparable set,”

Another finding is related to isolation: When small populations separate from the gene pool, genetic diversity falls. In language, the opposite is true. The study shows that isolation leads to more diversity in phonemes.

Two days later, in the town of Codogno, some 60 kilometers (40 miles) from Bergamo, a 38-year-old man known as "patient one" was diagnosed with the virus. But by then, according to research reported by nearly 20 Italian specialists, the virus had long been on the move.

But in other respects, life in Spain went on pretty much as normal. Bars and cafes were open; unseasonably warm weather brought Spaniards out into common spaces. Rallies for International Women's Day on March 8 brought tens of thousands onto the streets across Spain, including a crowd estimated at 120,000 in Madrid. Two female cabinet ministers who attended the event later tested positive for coronavirus, although it's not known how they contracted the virus. Opposition parties have criticized the government for allowing those events to go ahead.

In addition to brain scans, the children were also given cognitive tests. When it came to screen time, kids who used screens more than one hour a day had poorer emerging literacy skills, less ability to use expressive language, and tested lower on the ability to rapidly name objects.

In contrast, children who frequently read books with their caregiver scored higher on cognitive tests.

Another aspect of development that may be happening for her is a stage that the psychologist Erik Erikson called “identity versus role diffusion” (also referred to as “role confusion”), which is shorthand for children figuring out their position in the world. “This is the first time when kids have questions about their own existence, questions about self-identity, the meaning of life and the changing role of authority,” Hunter said.

we’re networked organisms who move around in shifting surroundings, environments that have the power to transform our thinking

Annie Murphy Paul’s new book, “The Extended Mind,” which exhorts us to use our entire bodies, our surroundings and our relationships to “think outside the brain.”

In 2011, she published “Origins,” which focused on all the ways we are shaped by the environment, before birth and minute to minute thereafter.

“In the nature-nurture dynamic, nurture begins at the time of conception. The food the mother eats, the air she breathes, the water she drinks, the stress or trauma she experiences — all may affect her child for better or worse, over the decades to come.”

a down-to-earth take on the science of epigenetics — how environmental signals become catalysts for gene expression

the parallel to this latest book is that the boundaries we commonly assume to be fixed are actually squishy. The moment of a child’s birth, her I.Q. scores or fMRI snapshots of what’s going on inside her brain — all are encroached upon and influenced by outside forces.

awareness of our internal signals, such as exactly when our hearts beat, or how cold and clammy our hands are, can boost our performance at the poker table or in the financial markets, and even improve our pillow talk

“Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. One psychologist has called this guide our ‘somatic rudder,’

The “body scan” aspect of mindfulness meditation that has been deployed by the behavioral medicine pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn may help people lower their heart rates and blood pressure,

techniques that help us pinpoint their signals can foster well-being

Tania Singer has shown how the neural circuitry underlying compassion is strengthened by meditation practice

our thoughts “are powerfully shaped by the way we move our bodies.” Gestures help us understand spatial concepts; indeed, “without gesture as an aid, students may fail to understand spatial ideas at all,”

looking out on grassy expanses near loose clumps of trees and a source of water helps us solve problems. “Passive attention,” she writes, is “effortless: diffuse and unfocused, it floats from object to object, topic to topic. This is the kind of attention evoked by nature, with its murmuring sounds and fluid motions; psychologists working in the tradition of James call this state of mind ‘soft fascination.’”

The chapters on the ways natural and built spaces reflect universal preferences and enhance the thinking process felt like a respite

The volatility of chatbots has made it impossible to predict their impact. In one second, the systems impress by fielding a complex request for a five-day itinerary, making Google’s search engine look archaic. A moment later, they disturb by taking conversations in dark directions and launching verbal assaults.

The result is an industry gripped with the question: What do we do now?

The A.I. systems could disrupt $100 billion in cloud spending, $500 billion in digital advertising and $5.4 trillion in e-commerce sales,

As Microsoft figures out a chatbot business model, it is forging ahead with plans to sell the technology to others. It charges $10 a month for a cloud service, built in conjunction with the OpenAI lab, that provides developers with coding suggestions, among other things.

Smaller companies like Box need help building chatbot tools, so they are turning to the giants that process, store and manage information across the web. Those companies — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — are in a race to provide businesses with the software and substantial computing power behind their A.I. chatbots.

“The cloud computing providers have gone all in on A.I. over the last few months,

“They are realizing that in a few years, most of the spending will be on A.I., so it is important for them to make big bets.”

Yusuf Mehdi, the head of Bing, said the company was wrestling with how the new version would make money. Advertising will be a major driver, he said, but the company expects fewer ads than traditional search allows.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, has reason to both love and hate the chatbots. It has declared a “code red” because their abilities could be a blow to its $162 billion business showing ads on searches.

“The discourse on A.I. is rather narrow and focused on text and the chat experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “Our vision for search is about understanding information and all its forms: language, images, video, navigating the real world.”

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of ads and sea of blue links is a thing of the past,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription-based search engine.

As that underlying tech, known as generative A.I., becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce. Late last year, Manish Chandra, the chief executive of Poshmark, a popular online secondhand store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots building profiles of people’s tastes, then recommending and buying clothes or electronics. He imagined grocers instantly fulfilling orders for a recipe.

“It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Mr. Chandra, who has made integrating generative A.I. into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities over the next three years. “That layer is going to be very powerful and disruptive and start almost a new layer of retail.”

In early December, users of Stack Overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, began posting substandard coding advice written by ChatGPT. Moderators quickly banned A.I.-generated text

t people could post this questionable content far faster than they could write posts on their own, said Dennis Soemers, a moderator for the site. “Content generated by ChatGPT looks trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,”

When websites thrived during the pandemic as traffic from Google surged, Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a tech news site, warned publishers that the search giant would one day turn off the spigot. He had seen Facebook stop linking out to websites and foresaw Google following suit in a bid to boost its own business.

He predicted that visitors from Google would drop from a third of websites’ traffic to nothing. He called that day “Google zero.”

Because chatbots replace website search links with footnotes to answers, he said, many publishers are now asking if his prophecy is coming true.

, strategists and engineers at the digital advertising company CafeMedia have met twice a week to contemplate a future where A.I. chatbots replace search engines and squeeze web traffic.

The group recently discussed what websites should do if chatbots lift information but send fewer visitors. One possible solution would be to encourage CafeMedia’s network of 4,200 websites to insert code that limited A.I. companies from taking content, a practice currently allowed because it contributes to search rankings.

Courts are expected to be the ultimate arbiter of content ownership. Last month, Getty Images sued Stability AI, the start-up behind the art generator tool Stable Diffusion, accusing it of unlawfully copying millions of images. The Wall Street Journal has said using its articles to train an A.I. system requires a license.

In the meantime, A.I. companies continue collecting information across the web under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of material without permission.

the popular suffix “maxxing” for “maximizing” (e.g., “I’m burritomaxxing” instead of “I’m eating a lot of burritos”) is drawn from the incel idea of “looksmaxxing,” or “maximizing attractiveness” through surgical or cosmetic techniques.

Then there’s the word “cucked” for “weakened” or “emasculated.” If the taqueria is out of burritos, you might be “tacocucked,” drawing on the incel idea of being sexually emasculated by more attractive “chads.

These slang terms developed on 4chan precisely because of the site’s anonymity. Since users don’t have identifiable aliases, they signal their in-group status through performative fluency in shared slang

there’s a dark side to the site as well — certain boards, like /r9k/, are known breeding grounds for incel discussion, and the source of the incel words being used today.

finally, we have the word “sigma” for “assertive male,” which comes from an incel’s desired position outside the social hierarchy.

Memes and niche vocabulary become a form of cultural currency, fueling their proliferation.

From there, those words filter out to more mainstream websites such as Reddit and eventually become popularized by viral memes and TikTok trends. Social media algorithms do the rest of the work by curating recommended content for viewers.

Because these terms often spread in ironic contexts, people find them funny, engage with them and are eventually rewarded with more memes featuring incel vocabulary.

Creators are not just aware of this process — they are directly incentivized to abet it. We know that using trending audio helps our videos perform better and that incorporating popular metadata with hashtags or captions will help us reach wider audiences

kids aren’t actually saying “cucked” because they’re “blackpilled”; they’re using it for the same reason all kids use slang: It helps them bond as a group. And what are they bonding over? A shared mockery of incel ideas.

These words capture an important piece of the Gen Z zeitgeist. We should therefore be aware of them, keeping in mind that they’re being used ironically.