Social media platforms deploy finance-like visualization and obfuscation techniques on users

Evidence

Their design encourages immersive use and seems to replicate a chaotic order: endless streams of algorithmically produced, visually stimulating stacks of data flow incessantly on smartphone and computer screens. Users’ experiences of jarring lip-synching, bot-generated nursery rhyme videos, and repetitive and absurd sketches often resemble the “legibility and logic of a narcoleptic dream.” Such platforms increasingly draw on techniques of visualization and obfuscation similar to those of contemporary finance, with similar effects (immersion, acceleration, volatility) on social actors. This tension between visibility (the complexity that we are able to see through the technologies we use) and invisibility (the complexity that remains hidden beneath these technologies) has been central to our contemporary experiences of uncertainty. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 172

Categorization

• XREF: The visibility/invisibility tension doubles as the reader’s core polarity framing how speculation migrated from dark pools to the feed. — connects to: TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is deliberately obscure to protect its monetizing model — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 290
• SEED: The ‘narcoleptic dream’ legibility of algorithmic feeds could seed an essay on how algorithmic content trains user attention toward speculative, volatility-embracing perception.