That's a nice essay from Lanier. Operant conditioning is certainly something everybody on HN has experienced, watching the numbers next to their posts go up and down.

All of what currently ails western society online is likely to be a russian psyop. All of it. We've left ourselves open to direct manipulation.

No, we did this to ourselves. Blaming Russia is the easy way out... even when it's likely true, as in the trajectory of Trump's career.

A healthy, rational society would be much harder to bamboozle -- by Russians or demagogues or preachers or billionaires or anyone else -- than Americans have proven to be. Over the last 10-20 years, many events that I thought would serve to immunize us to BS have fed an addiction instead.

Not all, but much. Years ago here on HN I said that social media is a weapon more powerful than nuclear fission and we created it and handed it to our enemies in exchange for a small group of people becoming extremely wealthy. I was promptly downvoted.

It’s the closest thing to a mind control device that’s ever been created, and sites like Reddit, Facebook, and even HN openly allow bot traffic in exchange for either dollars or a claim of “open discourse”. HN hates the solution to this problem even more than they hate the problem, so I won’t even start the debate.