The Future of Social Networking (Surrogate 2.0)

On the internet, sometimes the most popular people are quite often people who, by consensus, are annoying, stupid, or straight up ridiculous.  This is not constrained just to the internet, nor is it anything new (for reference see: Howard Stern, Alex Jones, or the collective media concept "TMZ").  Like other more easily recognizable forms of consumption, the internet simply facilitates the desire to watch a train wreck from a safe distance.  Of course not only does the internet make it happen, but it happens faster and more effortlessly, so you can fit this entertainment in more easily in between going to work, sleeping and masturbating.

I'm convinced the purpose of Web 2.0, with social networking and sophisticated multimedia integration is to make massive amounts of money and collect personal information and psycho-social profiles from you.  However, a welcome side effect to this is that one can easily find many sources of entertainment, people frantically petitioning your attention in an attempt to validate their online existence, shedding petty, unnecessary human hangups like "dignity" and "introspection" in favor of pushing the post button a few seconds faster.  And while clicking through a particularly funny rant I eventually came across a web site with facebook comments and found a comment sort filter called "facebook rank".

I had never heard this term before, although I am well aware that for however long now fb has been sorting people's news feeds using something called "edgerank".  Without going in to a lot of detail, edgerank basically works like this:

And higher score = higher up on the page and more likely to be there.  If you want to read more about how this works and how to exploit it, you can surf on over to this website.  It is pretty interesting stuff, but not what I'd like to talk about.

The point is, I read through a few sites like this, advice towards marketing departments and aspiring Andy Warhol types who think thousands of likes and upvotes and whatever will help sell their shitty art, or at least draw enough suckers to their website so Adsense will support their lifestyle.  The sites give tips, how to get legit people visiting their site, generating the much desirable buzz that will keep their edgerank bumped toward the top of the pile.  But they also give some other advice, less reputable methods of achieving the same end.  This largely consists of hackers (or any kind of programmer, really) writing program to automatically "bump" existing posts, post other media, and make comments using vaguely human sounding AI.  Not only that, but using google images and some face recognition software, programs that could create new profiles, which could then subsequently make posts, comment, etc.  There has already been a wave of this happening years ago, I'm sure it happened to you too, someone you don't recognize with 1 picture and a bland, generic profile tries to friend you.  Facebook managed to suppress it somehow, to some extent, but it won't happen forever, especially once corporations with big money see value in it.  And as artificial intelligence develops, not only will the bots get smarter and better at evading deletion by posting realistic status updates, photos, etc. but the AIs may themselves start to reproduce via social network.  I'm certain the first real artificial intelligence will aquire millions of followers, and say and post really really really stupid shit.