The book Simulacra and Simulation, published by Baudrillard in 1981, shows this process of gamification as ongoing even without software.[1]<p>> Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that nothing like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation</a>
The more I think on this, the more I don’t see the distinction that the internet makes in the everything game (aka living as a human). The examples given are typical human quandaries but “with computers.” A lot of reputation and authenticity has been unknowable for all history, but these days digital forensics can be used to verify or deny some claims of authenticity previously unknowable. The internet has enabled many spaces which are allowing people to self select into the groups they most identify with, which is a win for authenticity (although sometimes that means they are authentically in a hate group, is that better than them being unauthentic and alienated from a hate group?).<p>I’m rambling and I’ll stop here before I become a nihilist.
Thanks for clarifying the etiology of that nagging feeling that I've had in recent years about online behavior.<p>Now I know why the only thing I do online these days (besides work-related things, HN occasionally or utilities like navigation) is participating in (pre-weird times) "human scale" communities and non-commercial browsing.<p>Much of the rest feels so synthetic, unrelatable or incomprehensible it might be best to live in ignorance of it. These dynamics leave their confines soon enough anyway.
The idea that everything becomes a signal gets even more disturbing if you realize that the field of mechanism design is concerned with presenting you options where identifying the truth about yourself or not play at all is your only rational options.<p>Famously applied in auctions and amazon algorithms to extract the maximum welfare from the consumer. Also the reason why FAANG hired so many mathematical economists recently.