"I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot...."

"When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard.... I believe 'Twitter poisoning' is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.... Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning...."

From "Trump, Musk and Kanye Are Twitter Poisoned" by Jaron Lanier (NYT). Lanier is a computer scientist and author of “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” 

In early operant conditioning, pioneered by famous behaviorists like B.F. Skinner, animals were given positive and negative feedback in the form of treats and electric shocks.... People receive little positive and negative jolts of social feedback....

[A]lgorithms that optimized the individualized advertising model found their way into it automatically, unintentionally rediscovering methods that had been tested on dogs and pigeons....

Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets.

Lanier began by homing in on 3 men — Trump, Musk, and Ye — and now he's broadening his view — but it's still about men — alpha men....

This works because his followers are similarly poisoned and can relate so well....

... and beta men.

When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground. When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults — over and over, because the algorithm has settled on that pattern as a powerful way to engage us — habit formation restimulates old patterns that had been dormant. We become children again, not in a positive, imaginative sense, but in a pathetic way. Twitter poisoning makes sufferers feel more oppressed than is reasonable in response to reasonable rules. The scope of fun is constricted to transgressions....

Lanier never says I'm only talking about males relating to males, but that is what he's doing. Maybe he'd say something similar goes on with females, but he doesn't — and shouldn't — make that claim. 

***

By the way, this got me thinking about the much-discussed question what it means to claim to be a woman when you were born with the anatomy of a man. I've been trying make my way through Joe Rogan's podcast with Matt Walsh. Walsh made that movie "What is a woman?" which shows various people flummoxed when asked to say what it means to be a woman. It's a 3-hour podcast, so that's a long journey. I'm more than halfway through, but it's easy to understand Walsh's point: If people can't specify what, other than anatomy, defines womanhood, then anatomy must define womanhood. 

It seems to me that Lanier offers a path to an answer. Not that he intends to. He seems to be haplessly talking about people without noticing (or admitting) that he's only talking about men:

When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground. When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults....

We?

... grumpy old men... bratty little boys in a schoolyard.... 

I'm not identifying with this.