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the loyalty kaleidoscope
a chiaroscuro of character
Ben Lazaroff
August 22, 2024
introduction | edition #002
fundamental to the beginning days of any society is placing a high premium on honesty. without it, commerce is impossible, governance nothing more than an exercise of power by those who happen to wield it at any given moment.
a prerequisite of the fully-realized practice of honesty is placing your loyalty to the truth above any other loyalty—especially circumstances, events, or people you have an opportunity to benefit from. it entails stating true things even when they’ll deeply and obviously hurt you.
honesty is also the shoreline shielding our collective island from the repeated waves loyalty gives rise to; religion, political parties, hometown-sports-team-level fervor for everything from vaccination to immigration.
this week’s 1-5 breakdown is a view from the overlooking cliffside, eyeing the waves and shoreline in their usual rhythm: a powerful erosive pummeling against a perimeter trained in the sisyphean school of self-defense. loyalty and honesty examined from all sides.
This week’s 1-5 breakdown:
4 quotes
1 question waterfall | what is loyalty’s real purpose?
why would someone ask for your loyalty, and stretch you beyond your natural baseline of honesty?
what are the costs of blindly adhering to the kind of person who would ask that kind of thing of you?
what freedoms do we compromise when we pledge loyalty?
what freedoms do we implicitly undermine when we demand loyalty of others?
why does loyalty still manifest beautiful things in the world?
are there many better feelings than realizing one of your longest-held loyalties is tantamount to genuine commitment?
and don’t we all have to be loyal to something in some way in order to fully function?
is it ever possible to fully know if your loyalties will turn out to be steadfast, honorable commitments, or instead reveal themselves poorly-reflected-upon biases which have done nothing except lead you off-course for years?
does loyalty spend more time in bars with honesty or manipulation?
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2 real-world stories | the mitosis of indoctrination; american gullibility; algorithmic tunnelling
real-world story #1: the dangerous fractionalization of american culture and ideology.
An excerpt from Derek Thompson in Vox’s, “Everything’s a cult now”, on “what the end of monoculture could mean for American democracy”:
The way we consume content, the way fandom works, the ways we sort ourselves into tribes and camps online, even the way lots of industries work, including the news business — it all has shades of culthood. This is easier to see if you set aside the more extreme examples of cults, like the ones that end in mass suicide or shootouts with the ATF, and instead think of cults as movements or institutions that organize themselves around the belief that the mainstream is fundamentally broken.
Understood this way, there are lots of cults, or cult-adjacent groups, and not all of them are bad. But if society keeps drifting in this direction, what will that mean for our shared democratic culture? How much fragmentation can we sustain?
I think of a cult as a nascent movement outside the mainstream that often criticizes the mainstream and organizes itself around the idea that the mainstream is bad or broken in some way. So I suppose when I think about a cult, I’m not just thinking about a small movement with a lot of people who believe something fiercely. I’m also interested in the modern idea of cults being oriented against the mainstream. They form as a criticism of what the people in that cult understand to be the mainstream. And cults, especially when we talk about them in religion, tend to be extreme, tend to be radical, tend to have really high social costs to belonging to them.
The extraordinarily high costs of cultism are a deliberate structure—the barrier to entry placed so high as to communicate the one-way nature of the ticket. the design reveals more features upon entry, where you’re soon faced with a stark reality: you’re in a room with no doors.
you either accept the intellectual (and potentially physical) confines of membership to make due with your existence, or attempt a Shawshank-tier escape, severing often extensive, intense relationships, potentially even your line of work.
it’s worth also mentioning the targeted statistical analysis conducted by Benjamin E. Goldsmith and Lars J. K. Moen in Political Psychology, “The personality of a personality cult? Personality characteristics of Donald Trump's most loyal supporters”. Even if you’re a 2024 Trump voter, understand this kind of information is something smart Trump advisors and campaign architects have been made well aware of — and leverage deliberately in their messaging. In a politically significant way, cult-level followership could be the strongest anchorpoint for a conservative (or democratic) base, so providing this information is hardly expressing an “opinion” on Trump or his followers so much as it’s simply describing reality:
To help understand U.S. politics from 2016 onwards, and particularly the unusual and disruptive role of Donald Trump, we point to Trump's self-presentation as a savior. In 2023, after declaring his presidential candidacy, he said: “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice…’. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution” (Haberman & Goldmacher, 2023). Our results suggest that Trump's attraction extends beyond policy and the politics of Conservatism or Populism…We contend that, for his most committed followers, the attraction is personality-based — both in terms of Trump's self-presentation to citizens and in terms of the personality characteristics making some citizens attracted to such leadership. Trump's appeal appears to fit Sundahl's (2023) three characteristics of a personality cult. The phenomenon of a political personality cult may have arrived in full force in U.S. democracy — and could potentially be its undoing.
Once again, if the democratic party could engineer this type of cult-like followership, they likely would. But the extreme behavior extreme loyalty generates is a psychological-behavioral link with extensions everywhere in society. Here’s a graphic on how those beliefs manifested in search-engine behavior:
Goldsmith and Moen’s surveyal of personality characteristics is much more robust than this single graphic they set out as background, but it’s a useful snapshot into society’s collective conscience at any given moment.
the broader deterioration of trust, siloing of information by design, and societal sub-dividing into cult-like social media molecules is both a product and continued causal agent of exploited loyalties. a flywheel of deeply-held beliefs and content to deepen them further.
real-world story #2; the extended engineering of indoctrination; the algorithmic bait-and-switch from anger and cynicism to blind party loyalty
algorithms are 100% design; 0% accident—they describe, analyze and drive behavior. unintended consequences surely occur, but algorithmic tracks are traceable.
Robert Elliot Smith’s Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All, he details the “increasing incidences of machine bigotry, greed and the crass manipulation of our basest instincts…how non-scientific ideas have been encoded deep into our technological infrastructure.”
what emotions are most likely to keep you engaged on social? anger, skepticism, conflict. political actors and marketing-dependent businesses of every size have long taken notice, but their sleight-of-hand should be laid bare as the emotive conversion machine that it is:
stoke anger and distrust at [insert untrustworthy enemy]
force you to consider an alternative to [untrustworthy enemy]
oh look! coincidentally, [ABC entity who wants your followership] is the alternative to [untrustworthy enemy]
follow me (ABC entity)
never leave [ABC entity]
how this looks in politics is simple:
stoke anger and distrust at [XYZ party]
force you to consider an alternative to [XYZ party]
oh look! coincidentally, [party ABC] is the alternative to [XYZ party]
follow [party ABC]
never leave [party ABC]
According to the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, this plays out in the social media arena — but is also due to the nature of the social media arena itself:
“If your main source of news is social media, you are more likely to perceive politics as hostile and angry,” Hasell said. “And beyond the feelings that political attacks provoke, it matters how people perceive and read the temperature of ‘public emotions’ because this can impact assessments about the country’s well being and its ability to solve problems and accomplish goals.”
sidecar to road-raging algorithms is a cynicism towards the other side no matter the subject at hand. think healthcare costs are rising? or is that just the liberal industrial complex that wants you to think that? would Kamala really say something that counter-productive, or is that just a conservative snippet designed to get you to perceive a gaff that never happened?
more importantly, even if you were wrong — how would you ever find out? better get some friends who are equally angry and cynical at the things you support for some “perspective.”
unless, of course, you conclude relatively quickly their opinions are outlandish—given they’ve also been pushed to an equal-and-opposite-social-media-driven-extreme. all you’re exposed to is their equal-and-opposite extreme ways of seeing the world, and they yours. sometimes opposites repel, and cast their opposites off as heretics. and so each of you retreats to his pew in intellectual repulsion—and flip your hymnal to the book of echo chambers.
on quite literally every issue of significance, viewpoints have been stretched like pins lodged into opposite poles of a globe, each believing the earth is flat, instinctively assigning the other as a subject of unquestionable distrust—because neither pin has ever even seen the other, not even at a distance.
“As more people turn to social media for news and information, it’s likely that they’ll be more repeatedly exposed to political attacks, which may further promote political cynicism,” said Hasell. “This is concerning because cynicism can make it harder for people to make sense of political information. It can lead people down a road of apathy and disengagement, or toward fringe parties and antidemocratic forms of participation.”
one last point worth keeping front-of-mind is that, political or otherwise, the leaders of these movements are apprised of every step. they have intelligent people running these operations, who fetch and analyze every metric they need to understand their underlying audience:
“Probably 99% of cult leaders are con artists [who] know exactly what they’re doing. Some of them may eventually become delusional because they get away with so much for so long…I think most of them are sitting back and laughing at their followers.”
their motivations often remain behind-the-scenes, in the same attic closet they hope to keep the inner workings of any algorithms they’re leveraging in service of those motivations. they mix anger, cynicism and distrust in varying proportions, conjuring up some witch’s brew anti-soup to depict the Other Party—an order so inconceivably watergate-9/11-monica-lewinsky-osama-bin-prince-harry’s-memoir-level unpalatable you’ll pretty much have to get their soup instead.
the build-a-cult-focused engineering that goes on at social media companies has evolved into the most poignant, modern cultural cancer to honest intellectual exchange at every level of society.
loyalty—metastasizing.
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3 long-term dilemmas | the future of loyalty-engineering; a default submission to algorithms; four tiktoks later
as algorithms become more sophisticated and ensnaring, how much earlier in life will indoctrination take place? is this technical possibility anything more than an extension of “sunday schooling” of religious groups from a pre-pubescent age? is this tactic not parallel in structure to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime’s description of how extremist groups capture and radicalize children? what’s stopping this phenomenon’s acceleration through more intelligent, nuanced engineering? If major tech investors capitulate to what they feel is an “inevitable” AI-infused algorthmic social network in the very near-term, how far could this go? how far along are we already?
why have we accepted such a passive relationship with algorithms by default? is their another option besides some hegemon-to-its-subjects relationship between (a) people and (b) public-facing machine-learning algorithms (tiktok, instagram, linkedin, etc.)? a relationship where it’s not we tell them when we want to scroll—by logging on and staying on—and in return, they’ll tell us what we see? how is that not the bad end of the trade? wouldn’t this be the exact kind of design you’d want if you were (a) designing these algorithms for unimpeachable psychological influence, and (b) looking to extract every eyeball-to-dollar conversion possible? why can’t someone build something that challenges the supremacy of this business model—by getting creative about what a useful social engine might entail for sociopolitical exchange?
what does an ai-turbocharged social-media machine look like 4 iterations after tiktok? could a future not include reading facial signals? or synced information with apple-watch-esque metrics to know when you’re blood pressure spiked? or your entire search history? how good is controllingly good—to the point where a social-media machine could specifically target—and slowly change—your beliefs to match whatever picture they wanted to paint? what exactly is in place to prevent that again? isn’t congress still getting to the bottom of exactly how the plug in the wall makes their printer print?
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4 quotes | loyalty and its mask
The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
The second greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world he’s the good guy.
I held a Jewel in my fingers —
And went to sleep —
The day was warm, and winds were prosy —
I said "'Twill keep" —
I woke — and chid my honest fingers,
The Gem was gone —
And now, an Amethyst remembrance
Is all I own —
Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.
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5 predictions | loyalty’s shifting tectonics
loyalties, especially to political parties, will only become stronger as social-media businesses become more widespread in the developing world, and their algorithms become more sophisticated through much larger, much higher-fidelity data powering their decision-trees
everyday people will be assigned de facto loyalty scores with ways to rate and measure your response to every activity, brand, idea and beyond— and that information will make for even more proxies for targeted advertising. this is already happening, but algorithms will become so much more precise, granular, and personal—nutritional intake, location histories, self-reported ratings and reviews of every experience you’ve ever had—all integrated to build the blueprints of you, and understand exactly what makes you tick (read: buy, read: vote). some of these datapoints may even be public-facing, but all contribute to a deep pool of information someone will want to buy. it’s hard to see most, if not all, being sold for the right price.
not everyone will give away the privilege of sociopolitical discourse to clusters of morally deferential business models designed by tech conglomerates. in his own way, Jonathan Haidt’s recent public tour (the purpose of which is summarized in “The Case for Phone-Free Schools” in his publication, After Babel) contributes to this defensive front in an imporant way. incredibly, we’ve reached the point where eliminating distraction and access to social media during time reserved for learning has become so anathema it for some reason requires a case to be made. this backwardness is the consequence of our tacit handing-over-of-the-wheel to algorithms in terms of what we see and how we think. not everyone is ready to stand by while that transition of power is made. education and maturity in the realm of argumentation is essential for every discipline and line of work — stunting that growth dismantles the foundation from which we can actually step beyond social media and converse with one another to get things done. cultism is trendy, but not inevitable.
loyalty in relationships will change with algorithms, too. It’s odd to think that something as brick-like as our cell phone could change something as fluid and feeling-laden as our romantic lives. But recent research from Science suggests people are “Swiping more, committing less” (2020 C. Alexopoulos, et al.). In a 395-person study, these researchers found “people's perceived success on a dating app was positively associated with their intention to commit infidelity through self-perceived desirability...the dating app environment may not only challenge the boundaries of a committed relationship if a partner perceives themselves to be desirable, but also has consequences for singles users, as they might have difficulty settling or will be more likely to cheat on their future partners.” apps and behaviors will change, but as algorithms improve and dating apps improve (they’re not going anywhere), relationships might begin taking on a more “pre-designed” bend. not yet arranged marriages, but not entirely unarranged either.
many more laws will be passed to regulate algorithmic structures, social media and digital advertising as the coming generations of digitally-fluent individuals take to congress, as well as state and city legislatures. concerted efforts will need to be made, but some are already underway, including New York’s own governor signing a bill to regulate social media algorithms, becoming the first U.S. state to do so in June. 2024-2030 will be a period of intense catching-up, but this movement for social-reengineering will be fueled by people who grew up with warner brothers, not woodstock. dark days ahead, punctuated by scattered starlight.
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one final thought
anything created with the potential to monetize emotions and manipulate political opinion should be questioned with the same level of scientific scrutiny we take to evaluating treatments for disease.
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