Bluesky and Zimbardo

Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, died last month at the age of 91. I read his book The Lucifer Effect in my early twenties. It was quite transformational for a young man who had seen several of his boyhood peers incarcerated - I won’t comment on their verdicts, I will say that they weren't all bad guys.

Paradoxically (for me, anyway), Zimbardo's experiment focused on the corruption of prison guards, not prisoners. A makeshift prison was set up in the university and two groups of students - prisoners and guards - were put inside and left to figure out their own social dynamics. After a very short time, the guards became abusive and continued to get worse until the experiment was halted to ensure the safety of the prisoners.

Zimbardo hypothesised that the guards were corrupted by their situation. They had the power to assert themselves on their environment, so they took it, and without oversight such assertion quickly degrades into abuse. Think of that what you will, but consider how often you've become "someone else" in a given situation.

That can be the difference between the "professional" you at the office and the "good time" you with a nasal problem on the weekends. Or the version of you that parades itself at family weddings. Or who you are on a first date versus who you are after ten years of marriage (well done if you made it). The point is that we all contort ourselves to the situations and circumstances we're in. And the contortion isn't limited to the real world - we change ourselves online as well, but you already knew that.

Regular readers will know that I quit social media a while back. That's partly because, as an early middle-aged white man, I found myself targeted by content that was designed to enrage me into holding views that I don't want. And partly because, as an educated and affluent professional, I was targeted by content that sought to enrage me into holding the opposing views, that I also don't want. Worse, though, was that some of the poison got through, mixed with my own insecurities, and a little seeped back out as a new toxin.

I was hardly a troll. I made no more than a handful of honestly-not-all-that-bad posts. But when you find yourself arguing with one user calling you a "migrant-loving snowflake" and another calling you a "colonising fascist," you know you've sandwiched yourself between two poles of insanity and it's time to leave. I quit all my accounts in one evening.

Five minutes later, the economic reality of being self-employed without LinkedIn became apparent, so I resurrected my account there (and only there!), and I actually didn't mind too much. LinkedIn allows you to configure your feed so that posts show chronologically, which removes you from all algorithmic content delivery except ads. It doesn't matter how much engagement some piece of inflammatory clickbait is getting, the algorithm can't pump it into your feed, over and over again, because the chronological ordering means anything from more than a few minutes ago is buried. It essentially disappears.

Bluesky offers the same functionality with the invaluable bonus of zero ads. And Bluesky has suddenly started growing at a phenomenal pace in the wake of a post-election Twitter exodus. I don't know if that's a good thing. Like Twitter, Bluesky restricts posts to ultra-short character counts, which forces them into simplistic statements devoid of any elaboration or nuance. My gut feeling is that such character restriction allows everyone to assert themselves on the platform without putting enough thought into the things they write. Thus, we all become barely literate Zimbardo prison guards.

All the same, Bluesky's sudden growth spurt means it will probably be a major part of the web for some time to come, and its API is just honey to a data scientist (which I still call myself). Anyway, I've joined... for now. My handle's @benjclarke.me

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