The Hype Machine – How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy and How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

January 7, 2022 – Thornbury

This was interesting - dense, academic, footnoted and referenced, citing many, many studies and looking verrrrry closely at the effects and emergent behaviours generated by the various networked apps and platforms we use online. Nerdy review because this is the area I work in.

If you've read Mike Monteiro's book Ruined By Design it describes, very convincingly, the harm being done by these services and the culpability of those working in tech. This book tries to answer the question of how we might start to unpick this mess, starting with a deep understanding of the mechanisms at play.

I found it interesting to read evidence about the effectiveness - or perhaps lack thereof - of advertising-driven online marketing, which suffers from the classic mistake of mistaking correlation for causation.

Touching on all different kind of apps - not just social media, but fitness tracking, dating, etc - Aral paints a picture of a world increasingly influenced (if not controlled) by algorithmic design and emergent behaviour of product design.

He mentions somewhat casually that if dating algorithms are responsible for most new relationships, we are essentially seeing those algorithms influence human evolution. 😅

His work spans the Cambridge Analytica era, Covid and Qanon/antivax misinformation, Facebook's controversial experiments (many of which seem quite important on closer inspection), the tech antitrust campaign, ML and AI research, the social dilemma, the impact on news and politics, the ethical tech movement and GDPR, and lands on a series of recommendations for building a better future.

Importantly, this book doesn't leave responsibility at the foot of any single person or group - instead he carefully explains the interrelation of tech companies, regulators, governments, political groups, and even philosophers (what is truth? How do you detect it?) who must come together to help shape a better world with technology.

I think anyone working in product, design, marketing or tech in general could benefit from reading this, if only to start thinking about the flow on effects of decisions made in the industry, not just on our users, but on the fabric of society.