Transmission 003 - Algorithm Delusion Theory
Algorithm Delusion Syndrome
Social Media Delusion Syndrome 10
From the Screens to the Streets 14
Foreword
‘The Power of Names’
Without a name, you can’t know something. Without a definition of that name, you can’t understand something. By defining our world we come to know it. Many phenomena exist constantly that we perceive but are not aware of because we have no name for it. It’s surprising how many different emotional words different languages have for the same things. English has one word for ‘love.’ Greek has three. Arabic has eleven. Sanskrit has ninety six. How well do you think you love the things in your life as an English speaker when you’re using the same word to describe so many different emotions? How does that translate in texts we read in English that are originally written in those languages?
Here, I’ve tried to not only name things but define them in the context of this book. While some of these terms have separate and specific meanings outside within scientific fields, those are not how I am using them. I am trying to use words to define a phenomenon that I believe amounts to a syndrome, and that this syndrome is a mind virus that is impacting massive parts of the human species at this phase of our development.
Without naming and defining this phenomenon, I don’t think the problem can be properly addressed, if it can even be addressed at all at this point in time. After all, social media can bury anything it wants with an algorithm.
‘Fear of the Unnamed’
I fear the man over there,
Because I know not his name.
I fear that noise from nowhere,
Because it has no name.
I fear what shadows show,
Because they have no name.
I fear which I don’t know,
Because it has no name.
Introduction
I’ve decided to write this book after coming to terms with my own affliction with the ailment of the modern age. I’ve spent months of my life behind the confinement of psychiatric wards, and my diagnosis for those instances has been bi-polar. I’ve always had a strong dislike of the diagnosis personally, unlike my diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder which I see clearly and makes total sense to my experience in this world. But when I read about bi-polar, I feel like there are things missing from the diagnosis that have never quite fit my particular circumstances.
During each of my hospitalizations, I was always called delusional by staff. Yet, not once did any of them do their homework and see if the things I was saying were based on any elements of reality. I’ve had journals in my life that allow me to look back and reflect on those times, and then I can follow a trail within those pages to the data I have before me on social media that backs up my delusions. It’s hard to tell someone they’re delusional when there are people in the digital world supporting their world view and creating content that validates it.
We live in a post truth world, where how something feels bears more relevance to its authority than its connection to truth. Popularity now determines what is mainstream, and the cult of ignorance Isaac Asimov warned of seems to have come to full fruition in the 21st century. We now live in isolated media bubbles, with everyone watching their source for news and information. Sources not within our bubbles are viewed with suspicion at best and derision at worst. How many people do you hear complain about how biased (fill in media outlet name here) is? Have you noticed that the complaints on the left and the right sound identical?
I’m on the left side of the spectrum, the far left. I’m an anarchosocialist, who believes strongly in the truth behind the works of Karl Marx. People equate socialism with the Nazi ideology, but that is a false narrative that doesn’t bear out in the facts. The Nazis were authoritarians run by a dictator. Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, these were not ideologies that were communist in nature, but again authoritarian doctrines used by dictators to control their masses. As best I can tell, no one has ever had a real socialist or communist government in the world, and capitalist powers tended to collapse those governments that made moves towards those ends due to their destabilizing effects on the capitalist order. Look at Iran, they had a democratic election which was leading to nationalization of oil profits to help the people, and the United States orchestrated a coup that put Ayatollah Khomeni in charge of the nation for life. Clearly the western views of the world are just as flawed as those they condemn, one of the many reasons that the United States has not joined the International Criminal Court in the Hague: the US would have to answer for its many war crimes, such as the torture of captured prisoners (many of whom were innocent) at Guantanimo Bay.
I’ve watched with growing concern as more and more people on the planet become untethered from any semblance of Consensual Reality (a term that will be defined at length in a chapter), where no agreement can now be reached between opposing parties on what is true. Everyone has retreated to their tribal strongholds, and view all other tribes as enemies. Only those tribes that align completely with the worldview of one’s tribe are viewed as acceptable. This is how the Republican Party of America can go from being so anti-Russia to now openly embracing Russian talking points against their own country. Russia is a nation that supports authoritarian regimes, and that appears to be what the modern American Republican party is looking towards: a time when elections are all decided by the politicians and freedom is just a catchword for blind nationalism. Republicans no longer have opponents across the aisle they disagree with, they only have enemies that must be crushed. And now I’ve watched the democrats fall into the same fold. I was brought up believing that it was country first, party second. Looking at the 2024 election that is shaping up in America, it feels more like ‘Dear Leader First, everything else second’ no matter which party I look to.
This phenomenon is not American alone, but rather has spread across the globe. Every nation I look to, I see people becoming more and more polarized, more and more insulated, more and more detached from a reality everyone can agree on. I speak with many people around the globe online, in many countries. All of them seem to be reporting to me the same thing, this general sense that sides are being drawn where they are.
The reason I think this has become a global phenomenon is because the Internet and smartphones have allowed social media to become omnipresent in this world. I can’t go out without seeing people staring at their social media, at concerts taking pictures and filming bands, even my girlfriend takes pictures of our food before we eat it. Social media is everywhere, with every business having a page on each of their clientel’s relevant apps. You can rate anything you want with services from any webpage on earth.
When I look at all of my delusional phases of my life, I notice some similarities that have left me with some stark conclusions about what this technology of social media is doing to the human condition.
A little about myself first: I’m an autistic language savant who was studied as a child. I spent 20 years in college, obtaining an associate’s degree in liberal arts and a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. I studied a lot of psychology and social work while I was there as well. I read 3-5 books a week. Psychology, propaganda, consciousness, and the digital world are obsessions of mine in an autistic manner. I have to study them compulsively, and when I find a book that is on those subjects that seems like it will teach me about those things, I have to compulsively read it. I compulsively write. These beautiful words coming out of my fingers onto my word processor and to these pages you read I very much view as a mental illness beyond my control. If I don’t spend time in front of a keyboard typing, I begin to unravel mentally (thus locking me in a psych ward with zero stimuli causes degeneration of my mind the longer I am kept).
I had some eccentricities before I was 25, but nothing that raised itself to the level of needing a hospitalization for being delusional. But when I was 25, a new element was introduced to my life that would radically change me and the way my mind interacts: MySpace.
I was an early adopter of MySpace, I had friends in LA who told me to sign up in the first few months. It was fascinating to me, people friended me, commented on my writing and poetry, and I became somewhat of an icon. Then, I started going down some rabbit holes. Crazy concepts that have no place in reality but where there were people with endless amounts of (bad) data that supported their thesis. I went deep into these places, and my mind began to become warped by the online world I was interacting with. Soon, I was in another country and in a psych ward after writing on all of my walls.
After my hospitalization, I went back to normal, ignored those things, and was fine. Yet soon I found myself drawn back in and once more hospitalized. Over and over this cycle kept repeating itself, yet no one asked me how I’d come to believe the things I did, where I got my information, or even if I was talking to anyone else about these things. There were many faceless profiles on the Internet I was speaking with, some of which I’m sure of who they were, others I have no idea the face behind the profile. All of them could have been fake, in fact I find that everyone on social media is entirely fake. Authenticity isn’t about getting likes or selling yourself, authenticity is about being yourself.
During this time on social media, I watched what I’ve come to fondly refer to as The 2000’s Memewars, where memes went from an idea in a Richard Dawkins book that led to a burgeoning and serious field of inquiry to simply being pictures with words on them. It’s funny how the change of one word by popular use can dry up funding for research. The war was twofold, one with the people legitimately trying to study the phenomenon of mentally transmitted genes through symbolic language (thus the term memes) against the term simply being a picture with words on it, as well as the fight towards the structures that we now know as traditional memes. Go back far enough, and you have trouble calling some of the earliest memes a meme in anything but the loosest terms, and there was often a one upmanship in making shocking and offensive material. The battlefield was mostly in the Chan’s at that point.
I stayed away from that, though I did have a favorite where I posted a picture of myself holding up a finger to a tank at Tiananmen Square while I was on my flip phone saying, “One sec? Yeah, I’ll take the General Tso’s Chicken.” What struck me was how few of my peers recognized the scene, and how even fewer of them knew who Tankman was and the kind of strength of character that a regular man showed against a column of tanks. One man stood off against an army of tanks, and the tanks stopped. In those days Pepe had not yet been corrupted, and meanings were very much for the taking. Now things have cemented, and one who knows the memes and their origins in the Web can tell what places those posting them frequent.
All but one of my hospitalizations came with an enormous digital footprint leading up to it but one, and that one I was suicidal so a different breed altogether. Each time, I’d go into the nether to enter a profile, and find more and more faceless people to interact with. I’d often get large followings on pages and profiles I built, only to delete them once out of the hospital or let them languish. Yet each of these exercises in madness had wide support and followers along the way. I got external validation from real people professing the truth of my madness. I’ve had people call me a Prophet, a Buddha, an Enlightened One, an Old Soul, on my final incarnation, and a host of other religiously associated terms that each of them read into my experiences. Others called me a genius. Others called me mad. Lots of views in the open seas of the World Wide Web.
I’m just a Sufi Muslim convert trying to do the best they can. I don’t believe in magic, but I do believe in miracles. I think life is a miracle, and if you need a bigger miracle than that I’m not sure what you could be looking for.
As I’ve looked over my journal, and some profiles, I’ve come to realize that this phenomenon I am suffering from is global and has dire consequences. I’m just some crazy guy ranting on the Internet. Some people who suffer from Social Media Delusion Syndrome kill people. Social Media Delusion Syndrome killed many people during the Covid crisis. Social media Delusion Syndrome has all of the political parties of the world in its grip because all of them exist on popularity, even authoritarians. Without a measure of support of the populace, a state runs the risk of being overthrown. Enough people develop Social Media Delusion Syndrome of the same strain in a country, they can start a civil war… or lower the defenses and invite the enemy in.
Social Media companies like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) hold more power globally right now than any individual state. Only TikTok appears to be controlled by a state actor, though I trust it least of all due to the format it thrives in: short video clips atrophying the attention span of the generations addicted to their smartphones.
The first time I watched the documentary ‘The Social Dilemma,’ I quit all social media for six months. I barely touched my computer for anything but video games. Then, I got back on, but I regulated myself, thinking I could be smarter than the algorithm. No one is smarter than the algorithms. Teams of psychologists, engineers, and computer programmers designed them and the algorithm knows you better than you know you. You have one mind and other things to do, and cannot compete with an entity that’s sole existence is to get you to like, comment, and share things, and scroll if you don’t do any of those things. The second time I watched it I deleted everything but Instagram, because I like having a place to put my art for my friends to see. I’ve got an Instagram following of about 55, and I’m very comfortable with that. Those people who see my stuff at least know me from seeing me do art around town, they’re actual fans of me as a person and not fans of a faceless person on the Internet.
Social media isn’t free, it costs users their time, my most valuable resource. I think it’s tragic how much of my life I’ve lost to it. To scrolling, to liking, to pointless comments. No war has been stopped by a Tweet, and if the footage of Gaza and Ukraine coming in live all day hasn’t stopped either of those conflicts, I’m not exactly sure what good social media really is. The real product being sold in social media is you, the user. Your mind is what’s being sold off to the highest bidder in advertising, designed with ads catered to your likes to separate you from your money.
Everyone keeps worrying about the world falling into dystopia. Social media took over the minds of the world, and dystopia arrived without anyone noticing.
K.G.S. 3/21/2024
Definitions
Most works place a glossary with definitions at the end of their pages, but due to the specific nature of the language being used here, it felt important to define the ideas that will be discussed so that everyone is working from the same linguistic framework on meanings. If words don’t hold the same meanings between people, miscommunication is inevitable.
Consensual Reality - This concept will get its own chapter, but definitionally what I mean by Consensual Reality is the reality between which two parties can agree is real. Consensual Reality varies widely, and no two parties overlap entirely. If two overlap entirely, it means that groupthink has taken over and an individual has been consumed.
Reality - What someone determines is real for them. Reality is different for every human on planet earth.
Groupthink - When people stop thinking for themselves and start allowing a person, group, or organization to do their thinking for them as a collective.
Reality Bubble - The cocoon of reality we choose to surround ourselves with. This includes media, people, places, and activities. Modernity has allowed us in the industrialized world to be very selective about what reality we choose to pay attention to and support.
Media - Any place that distributes information or data. There is News Media, Entertainment Media, Government Media, Social Media, among others.
Social Media - A media platform where commenting, liking, and sharing content is part of the user experience (UX). Intrinsic to being a social media platform is having algorithms that direct users to content that will catch their interest.
Delusion - A belief that is not held by the majority of the authorities around an individual.
Delusional - A state where beliefs not held by the majority of the authorities around an individual are acted upon in a state of mind that concerns people not in that same state.
Syndrome - A group of symptoms that together form a pathology.
Algorithms - A process in rules to be followed or calculations to be made. In relation to social media, the rules to be followed are getting users to spend more time with the platform and the calculation is how to make the user they know intimately perform this task. More of the user’s time means more money for the platform because more advertising will be observed.
Consensual Reality
I first tried to define this term in a book I called ‘Thoughts of an Unquiet Mind.’ As I said there, it is the reality that two parties can agree is real between them. I thought I’d come across an idea then that had merit. As I’ve watched the years go by, I can’t help feeling how odd it is that society still hasn’t come up with a linguistic strategy to talk about phenomena that people are separately speaking about. At best we refer to media bubbles people are interacting with.
Liberals talk about how conservatives are locked in their media bubbles. Conservatives talk about how liberals are in their media bubbles. News networks can’t cover the news without having to constantly interject fact checks because, again, we live in a post truth world. No matter how much information you bring to the table to prove your point, someone with fake information will have an equal amount of garbage they can drop on the table as theirs. People now select their facts.
The internet has led to a distortion of Consensual Reality by fracturing the shared experience of human beings. Evolutionarily, most people lived pretty much the same lives with nature a momentous part of everyday life until very modern times, and then as cinema and music began it was a limited variety, so everyone remembers the same bands. There’s a reason they said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. More people can quote the Beatles.
There was a time when people were reading the same newspapers, watching the same national news, even listening to the same national broadcasts. Now, people have selected what they are tuned into and therefore the overlap between shared experience has dramatically diminished. Two people living next door have entirely different experiences of reality.
Without that shared Consensual Reality to bridge our interpersonal worlds, we have become fractured and disjoined from each other’s very real experience. In truth, we all have far more in common than dissimilar. We all need to eat, breath, clothe ourselves, and find things that allow us to live a fulfilling life. It is when we retreat to our tribal guidance that we see each other as enemies, as people who we have no common ground with. We see each other as different, or other.
This is a dangerous precipice to be on for when groups of human beings are othered, tragedies and crimes can be afflicted against them with the acts of violence appearing to be just in nature. I find no violence that is just in nature, save the violence of self defense. But when you’re not being directly attacked, one must stop that violence or one becomes the aggressor.
Social media has allowed us to find consensual reality with others no matter what reality we choose to ascribe to, since there is a waiting group of online community members to validate whatever absurd concept or belief one may come into. If people can continually be drawn into flat earth conspiracies, and believe them wholeheartedly and try so desperately to prove it to be true, then no one is safe.
Nefarious actors are well aware of these things, and act to control and move the followers of pliable Consensual Realities. While he does not know the meaning of the word consensual, Donald Trump is a master of manipulating those who’ve bought into an alternate reality into doing his bidding. Just look at the Consensual Reality he and his allies built around lies they told concerning a stolen election, and how those people were able to collectively galvanize a coup in America against Congress.
It’s funny to me now how many of those same sitting members of Congress who helped and supported a coup are now trapped by those lies and their dear leader spouting them for the rest of their lives. It’s clear to me that none of those people are students of history, or they would have known how history remembers such cowards and traitors. There’s a reason Mitch McConnel was given the nickname, ‘The Gravedigger of Democracy.’ That single senator organized what has functionally weakened America, which has led to the degeneration of democracy around the globe. Future historians will be hard pressed to come up with a more fitting name for such a monstrous man. Sadly, he was probably the most brilliant legislative mind to ever pass through American democracy.
In the end, there can be found Consensual Reality between anyone. The problem we have is that all of our time and effort is spent focusing on our areas of disagreement, propelled on by leaders who capitalize financially and politically on these differences. If everyone got along and had their needs met, it would be much harder for those elites to maintain their lives of luxury because the disparity would become so obvious. Seriously, I have a hard time believing that a man like Trump who has a golden toilet is an everyman, yet all of his followers think he’s a person just like them.
We must find commonality and build out our Consensual Reality together, and we must bridge ourselves into realities that are less consensual to our own because without those bridges, we will be lost in a world where we see enemies in the face of every stranger.
Social Media Delusion Syndrome
So what exactly is Social Media Delusion Syndrome (ADS)? It is a syndrome characterized by an individual spending time on social media platforms both taking in and propagating delusional concepts through posts. Social media platforms are not designed to give one a wide array of divergent views to pick and choose from, but rather they offer up an assortment of content designed to get user engagement.
User engagement of content is more important than veracity or validity of content being interacted with. A social media platform would rather posts get likes and reshares even if untrue, because content is king and clickable content wins all contests. It doesn’t matter even if you agree with the content, by going in and commenting to correct an error you are now engaging with that content and your engagement helps spread it further. There is no way for a social media platform to lose by hosting content, since no laws exist that allow them to be sued or held liable for falsehoods or damages they do. Social media companies have a shield of immunity that allows them to host things that other media platforms could not, then ignore the consequences that those media houses would have to deal with when information is untrue, inflammatory, or libelous. As long as the content is getting user engagement the social media platform is happy, regardless of the content.
As people become accustomed to this warped perception of reality through social media usage, ADS begins to take over and they mistake the online digital world for the real one. The social media platforms themselves are designed to spread this inflammatory (and nearly always false) information because their algorithms show that people that go down those rabbit holes are the ones who score the highest on their user engagement metrics. A conspiracy theory with a lot of supporting videos, articles, and websites will get more attention by a social media platform than the much smaller amount of content clearly debunking it. It almost seems to me that the fact checking content is being suppressed by the algorithms because it inflicts damage to the propagation of their material that is high in user engagement but wrong on the facts.
Social media allows people who believe the same way to group up and congregate online. This allows for a sense of community among people suffering from ADS, and gives them an external avenue for validation. They don’t think they can be wrong, because they are in chat rooms and groups with people who believe the exact same things they do. None of them notice that they are in an isolated media bubble only getting information from the same sources as the rest of the group, they simply see story after story validating their warped views. It’s hard to argue with a written article, often with pictures, that says that the thing you’re so worried about is happening. Nevermind that anyone with a few hundred dollars can fake a media outlet online, and some who’ve faked such disinformation networks have now become major publishers of disinformation since our legal system hasn’t caught up to our digital world.
As the walls of reality break down and ADS grows to encompass all areas of thinking, extreme acts become more likely. If you believe someone is molesting children in the basement of a pizza restaurant and no one is stopping it, aren’t you a good person for going there with a gun to do so? This is the story of Pizzagate, and will get an entire chapter. If you thought vaccines give children autism, wouldn’t you stop vaccinating your children? That is the story of a fake report a man put out to make his new vaccine seem more appealing, and has cost countless lives. That will also get its own chapter. One conservative example of ADS being deadly, one liberal, then I’ll end on the example of Flat Earthers since they are neither liberal or conservative but merely people taking advantage of the algorithms that feed the minds of ADS sufferers.
There is no dividing line in ADS between liberal, conservative, or politically agnostic. If you use social media you’re being influenced and have probably already been infected to some degree with ADS. Social media platforms have to be aware of this, which I think is evident when you listen to their leadership speak about how strict they are with control over screens and their own children. It seems ADS is good for their general users, but not good for their own families.
Some of the symptoms of ADS are as follows:
-They only trust their sources and believe all other sources to be deceptive. This leads them to an insular belief that only their information is true.
-They believe in an absolute truth around their beliefs. This leads them to a fanatical devotion and a belief that they are a guardian of absoluteness and righteousness because they are on the correct side.
-They believe in things contrary to accepted reality. This comes from the distortion from the influence of an alternate reality presented by social media.
-They seek validation and community, usually online, around their beliefs to the exclusion of other groups. This insular bubble they find themselves in turns into an echo chamber where distortion becomes their reality.
-They have a short attention span. This comes from spending so much time in front of rapidly changing stimuli on social media platforms.
-While not always, often they believe in a conspiracy of people out to get them. This comes from a need for an opposing force to their absolute truth that must be told that is preventing their truth from becoming mainstream.
These are just some of the symptoms I’ve observed in myself and others I’ve met who I believe are also clearly suffering from extreme cases of ADS. Because of the pervasiveness of social media, ADS appears to afflict everyone who uses those platforms to some degree, but only a smaller portion of the populace becomes lost in the fantasy world of online profiles.
ADS Examples
Pizzagate
During the 2016 Presidential Race, there was a conspiracy theory going around conservative circles that falsely claimed that the NYPD had found a Democratic Party pedophilia ring in the seized emails of Anthony Wiener. People in the anti-Clinton influence sphere pushed this story until it hit a frenzy in online circles. There were multiple versions and locations, but the tragedy of this example of ADS comes with the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in America’s capital, Washington, D.C. when someone suffering greatly from the symptoms drove from North Carolina to that pizza restaurant with a gun.
Once there, the man fired a rifle in the store, demanded things be unlocked, but thankfully the entire thing came to an end without any lives lost. Police arrested the man, but that could have ended up much worse. He was looking for a basement full of children in an establishment that had no basement.
Without social media as a vehicle to propagate and propel this falsehood forward, this incident and the many death threats the pizza establishment received never happens.
This was my conservative example of ADS. My liberal example has cost many lives.
Anti-Vax Movement
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield perpetrated a hoax study showing a link between a commonly used vaccine and autism. Celebrities, long known for their intellectual prowess, jumped on this bandwagon and began spreading and moving this around social media. Everyone still mocks Jenny McCarthy for doing this, nobody seems to remember that Robert De Niro is in the same company.
ADS spread online, with articles popping up without citation, people claiming their child’s autism was the fault of a vaccine, lawsuits were threatened, and many children stopped getting life saving vaccines because their parents no longer believed they were saving lives.
While social media was not the beast it is today, the internet had been fast growing and early social elements were rising to help create these things such as AOL as a platform itself. I know many people that had wild times in AOL chat rooms as personas. Television media personalities are the medium this really reached peak propagation with.
Modern liberals look at the Anti-Covid Vaccine movement as conservative, but the roots of that movement’s ideas and methods lay squarely in an early ADS movement led and propagated by liberal movers.
Flat Earthers
Now one we can all enjoy together. Algorithms love to push ideas that lead to further engagement, and because there is so much content for it that melts one’s mind from my observation, the Flat Earth movement is fascinating as a case study in ADS. These people believe the planet is flat, and have a wide variety of ways that they ‘prove’ this in videos.
I use this example because to most of us, this is an absurdity. How can someone not believe the world is round? We literally have pictures of the entire globe, can look at satellite images of the whole thing, there is a mountain of data. You can fly or sail around the whole thing, there are no pictures of an edge. No one could believe this stuff, right?
Kyrie Irving was a believer. Looking at the things he was saying prior to 2018, I’d say he was clearly suffering from ADS. It makes sense, athletes have to spend a lot of their lives revolving around social media platforms at this stage of the entertainment industry, and it isn’t like you can buy a special service in the app not to be manipulated by the algorithms.
From the Screens to the Streets
The most terrifying assemblage of ADS sufferers I’ve seen were the January 6 rioters and coup plotters. Months of social media feeds filled with lies within their isolated social media bubbles led people to actually believe that their democracy was over. A former disgraced president stood in front of that mob of people suffering from this particular pathology and launched them violently at the capital.
It’s only by the strength of the capitol police officers and luck that American democracy held. Had anyone started shooting on either side, like the men in the trees with guns who had shown up to the rally, or the police, or anyone, I’m not sure there’d even be this semblance of democracy left that America still desperately clings to.
If this can happen in America, how long until it starts happening elsewhere? It was tried with Bolsenario, and it barely didn’t work there, too. Eventually, if ADS is allowed to go unchecked, this will become a regular occurrence and possibly even at smaller locales.
When you believe in absolute truth and that you have justice and righteousness on your side, you will do things that a normal person would not. You will take risks you wouldn’t under normal circumstances. You might find yourself with people you wouldn’t normally hang out with, and going to places that are not your normal places.
What’s most terrifying to me is the speed at which this can happen. It doesn’t take long from taking your first steps into the rabbit hole of ADS to being in a dark place where Consensual Reality is no longer found between you and your loved ones.
The Future of ADS
I’d like to say I see a future where we move past this, but I think the worst is yet to come. With the advancement of AI speech, video, and text it seems inevitable that misinformation, disinformation, and the products of the delusional will so outweigh the works of merit in the online world that it will become a place where no real sources can be trusted, and we will finally be in a world where it is no longer post truth, but Popular Truth.
What is popular will be true at that point. This thought chills me to my core, because all of the atrocities I’ve seen committed in history have all been done with someone’s popular approval.
Epilogue
Writing this lifted a burden from my shoulders. It allowed me to express something I’ve been trying to grapple with for twenty years now, and finally name it. By naming this thing I feel I’ve gained a measure of control over it. It’s been more than two months since I’ve used any social media besides Instagram, which I use for my arty stuff, and FlipBoard, which I use as a news aggregator
I will admit that I thought about commenting on an article I was reading a few days ago where I totally disagreed with what was written, but I caught myself as I was about to click on the comment button, and told myself I’m not important enough to need to give an opinion there. And I flipped to the next article.
Books, I think, are the things that have saved me throughout my time suffering from ADS. Reading books, with their long texts and drawn out pages, allow the mind to enter a different state of being. I notice that younger people often barely read, and have noticed this trending that way over my 20 years in college. It’s not that they can’t, but that they don’t have the attention span.
We’ve essentially been field testing new cognitive technology, i.e. Social Media Platforms, on all of humanity with no safety rails or regulations. I’m worried about the state of our collective minds, and how this technology could be used if it were intentionally manipulated. I firmly believe these manipulations are happening right now, especially now that I’m two months unplugged as I watch the rest of the people around me. The interconnectedness and knowledge of the algorithms is intimidating, to put it mildly.
I’ve always said I’d like to move off and live in a cave away from people with just an internet connection. Lately, though, I’ve been looking around the world around me and how everyone is more interested in a small screen in their hands than the real world around them and I’m starting to wonder if that internet connection in my cave is a good idea.
If you use a social media platform, I hope you have a stronger mind than I do.
