Designed to Seduce: Epistemically Retrograde Ideation and YouTube's Recommender System

Up to 70% of all watch time on YouTube is due to the suggested content of its recommender system. This system has been found, by virtue of its design, to be promoting conspiratorial content. In this paper, the author firstly critiques the value neutrality thesis regarding technology, showing it to be philosophically untenable. This means that technological artefacts can influence what people come to value (or perhaps even embody values themselves) and change the moral evaluation of an action. Secondly, he introduces the concept of an affordance, borrowed from the literature on ecological psychology. This concept allows him to make salient how technologies come to solicit certain kinds of actions from users, making such actions more or less likely, and in this way influencing the kinds of things one comes to value. Thirdly, he critically assesses the results of a study by Alfano et al. He makes use of the literature on affordances, introduced earlier, to shed light on how these technological systems come to mediate our perception of the world and influence action.