The content argues that modern technocrats, driven by profit, have engineered social media and digital platforms to manipulate users, particularly youth, leading to a societal collapse of trust, fractured attention spans, and a loss of individual identity and genuine connection.
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We have become convinced that modern
technocrats are mighty, brilliant, or
exceptional because of their empires and
their inventions.
But I challenge this notion. These
people are no more exceptional than
ticks and leeches. Like these simple
creatures, the technocrat minds operate
only to satisfy a single need. They are
not brimming with intelligence. Is it
intelligent to corrupt an entire
generation of youth just to grow your
own enterprise? Is it brilliant to
proliferate misinformation and so hatred
within a society? No, it is not. It is
stupid. And those who act in this way
are stupid people. They are the weakest,
most pathetic sorts of humans evolution
has ever produced.
Through their stupidity, they have
encouraged us to surrender our world. We
know that social media use is bad for
the mind, for attention spans, for
self-confidence. This is all wellknown,
welltrodden ground. But we seem to
overlook the broader consequences at
play. These are the consequences which
have moved the world without us even
noticing and will continue to do so as
long as we remain ignorant to their existence.
Recently, a Reuters Institute report
found social media overtook TV as the
main news source for Americans. People
no longer trust institutions. They trust
personalities like for example Joe Rogan
who is now one of the most influential
figures in American media. His 2024
interview with Donald Trump has been
credited for boosting Trump's
presidential campaign more than any
traditional network. While each side has
their own take on that moment, it's
clear that traditional media has failed
us. And when trust in institutions
breaks, people follow whoever sounds
right, even if they aren't the wisest
voice in the room. That's why I think
ground news is one of the most powerful
tools for tackling one of today's
biggest issues, the collapse of trust
and transparency in our media. I'm very
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fact checks, and even who's benefiting
from you believing their version of the
truth. I think if you're watching my
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matters to you as much as it does to me.
Especially when it comes to war, the
environment, and other issues your
generation will be dealing with long
after the people creating these problems
are gone. I sincerely believe ground
news can help us turn confusion into
clarity and clarity into action more
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Smartphones are not bad, not inherently.
Instead, there was one development, one
monumentous shift which turned these
pieces of technology against us, which
since its inception has fractured our
culture to its very core and pushed us
onto a very dangerous road. The first
iPhone announced in June of 2007 was a
harmless device. It was little more than
a phone with a few useful everyday
tools. But then Apple created the App
Store. In 2008, when it launched, the
App Store featured 500 apps. By 2013,
there were over a million available.
This was mostly due to Apple's
introduction of SDKs, or software
development kits. With SDKs, third
parties could produce applications for
the iPhone and sell them on the App
Store. As with any sort of free market
model, this introduced enormous
competition. Large tech startups began
pouring millions of dollars into their
apps and settled upon an
advertisingbased model. Within this
model, the longer an app held on to a
person's attention, the more ads they
would see and the more money the company
would make. So there emerged a now
welldocumented race to manipulate users
into maximizing time spent on the app.
Children are easier to manipulate than
adults. So they became the primary
victims of these companies. This can be
seen when we examine some early
developments in social media platforms
like Facebook. In 2009, Facebook
introduced its like button. Twitter
created the retweet feature. Suddenly
every post became gamified. their
success quantified. At the same time,
Facebook introduced an algorithmic news
feed and the potential for viral posts
emerged. The platform, which had
originally been used for reconnecting
lost friends, became something else
entirely. It was performative, a source
of validation, a game which one could
win or lose.
This era added about 3 hours of
additional screen time per day for an
American child. If we fast forward to
today, few research has found nearly
half of teens use the internet quote
almost constantly. In his book, The
Anxious Generation, Jonathan Hate points
to the realworld effects of social media
obsession. Young people do not spend as
much time with their friends anymore.
When they do, they allow their time to
be interrupted by push notifications,
and they signal that their phone is more
important than their friendship. Young
people get on average 192 push
notifications per day. It is impossible
to focus under this barrage, and so ADHD
rates and symptoms have worsened in a
causal way with the advent of social
media. The people who run these
companies use longestablished
psychological methods of coercion to
keep young people returning to their
apps. Of course, none of this is
particularly groundbreaking. Quite the
opposite. It is the same old song.
Algorithms bad retweets dangerous teens
using their phone too much. It is
material which has been repeated so many
times that even saying it here feels
tremendously mundane. You see, often
this conversation is centered around the
individual. Phones create problems for a
person. But we all live on this planet
together and we must all work with one
another towards some better moment in
time. As it turns out, this phone
obsession is not just detrimental to the
individual. It is pushing us entirely as
The internet was once free information.
That was fine for a time. But as Jordan
Lanyard pointed out in the book, Who
Owns the Future? This idea starts to
fail when information becomes our
economy. When the biggest movements of
money take place for the sake of these
social networks or the information on
them, we can no longer use the word
free. Now the stakes are higher. So too
is the cost for this information. We
often think of social media as an idle
thing to do to pass time or perhaps
waste time. It is the opposite of work.
But perhaps this isn't true. When we are
using social media, someone is reaping
the rewards of our time. People are
making money off of us. Be them
advertisers or the CEOs of these
platforms. Every tap, every video, every
swipe is building and improving these
platforms and their algorithms. As we
use social media platforms, we are quite
literally building them. We are engaging
then in a form of unpaid labor. This is
a strange labor because it is a labor
leisure hybrid while providing the
benefits of neither. We do not earn
capital nor are we allowing ourselves
the benefits of idle leisure. It is
during this sort of idle time when we
reflect on and consider our truest
selves. There is an off-re repeated joke
about the frightful perils of those
moments before a person falls asleep
when they are alone with their thoughts.
This joke comes from truth. It is at
these kinds of moments those of pure
relaxation when we are flooded by the
most severe, serious and consequential
lines of thinking. Although daunting and
not even always enjoyable, these
minations are crucially important in our
selfdiscovery. Attending to push
notifications and news feeds interrupts
and even severs us from the beauty of
empty mental clarity. It is mighty
unfortunate to surrender an opportunity
like this to abdicate our own selves for
the sake of rich men becoming richer men.
men.
And so of course this type of surrender
In his book, Stand Out of Our Light,
author James Williams provides a
metaphor for our modern social media
landscape. Imagine you purchased a GPS
device and put it in your car. You punch
your desired destination into the device
and it provides directions. But as you
travel along its route and arrive, you
realize it has taken you to a place
entirely separate from where you asked.
You needed to go to the grocery store,
but you have arrived at a golf course or
a movie theater. Perhaps once or twice,
you would tolerate this and chalk it up
to a simple glitch. But imagine that
over the course of a dozen instances,
the same thing happened each time. The
GPS would only take you to the wrong
destination. You would, of course, never
use that device again. Now, I ask the
viewer of this video to consider their
goals in life. Where would you like to
With those in mind, the question is now,
does Facebook share that goal for you?
Does Tik Tok, does Instagram or Google
or Apple? Are these companies goals
aligned with yours? Certainly not. The
goals of social media companies are not
your goals.
For whatever reason, we do not think
about the story of our lives in the same
way we think about physical space like
the GPS example. This is because
companies like Facebook, Google, and
Apple, as Williams suggests, are not
only in the business of making devices.
They are too in the business of making
users. They engineer people to cast off
their values and replace them with those
of the company. The addictive nature of
these devices and platforms trains our
minds. Williams further points to what
he calls starlight. That is the ability
to navigate towards one's goals and
ambitions by only the stars in the
proverbial sky of our minds and our
souls. Social media trains us to chase
immediate short-term satisfaction and in
doing so places clouds in the sky. It
blocks our starlight, our ability to
navigate by our own spirits. This
changes a person's habits, but also
their ultimate destination, their
values. You begin to value things which
have no value. You are conditioned to
think that likes, reposts, followers are
watermarks of fulfillment. So even when
removed from the screen, you search for
such mundane pleasures. Periods of rest,
contemplation, and reflection are
replaced by time spent chasing instant
gratification on your phone or
otherwise. Let us examine culture at
large to see this. The functional
details of political processes go mostly
unnoticed. But when a liberal governor
roasts Donald Trump on Twitter, the
result is breaking news. In America, we
have elected twice a president who has
said and done things which violate
universal moral values we all hold in
the hopes of him fulfilling some
short-term political promises. We shop
from major corporations who we all know
actively harm our planet and exploit
laborers around the globe. Polarization
is regarded as a major problem of our
times. Perhaps, as Williams notes, we
have become something much more profound
than polarized.
We have more than a disagreement about
simple ideas. We have a division about
who we fundamentally are as a people.
The philosopher Rouso cautioned against
this, noting that as a population is
misled by elites and subdivided into
opponent groups, that population
abandons their membership to an
original, larger group. The modern
manifestation of this could be a result
of our lost starlight, our goals, the
grand narrative we seek to weave, those
are the things which truly make us who
we are. So as we lose track of them, we
also lose track of our identities.
Without an idea of identity, we cannot
know what we share with one another. How
can we possibly see mutual values if we
can't even see our own? Instead of this
connection to one another, we are now
connected to the world outside of our
world, to events we can do nothing
about, and to people who are irrelevant
to our lives. We are closer together
than ever and yet vastly removed from
the very people which populate our
day-to-day existences. It's like we've
moved into a highrise in a densely
populated city. In theory and abstract,
we are closer to other people, but we do
not even know our neighbors or the
people we see every day coming to and
In our western capitalist society, money
follows money. In fact, most things
follow money. Time, labor, resources,
the massive amount of money chasing its
own tale. And the social media world
rearranges our actual world. Given the
money and power and social media
networks, those who operate them
effectively control the culture of our
society. So it has become bizarrely
quite normal to see tech leaders rubbing
shoulders and cowtowing to a given
present administration. These people
bend at the waist and drop to their
knees for the promise of fiscal growth
at the hands of whoever is in political
power. They give the president and his
ilk the girlfriend experience. They say
what they want to hear. They whisper
compliments in the form of donations.
They changed their dress, speech, and
selves for their clients, for the
administration in power. All of this
behavior takes place in a sort of modern
era elites only gold rush. But instead
of gold, these people seek data. They
are obsessed with it because data
produces capital. Indeed, it has been
suggested that we are living in an era
of dataism. In an article for the New
York Times, Chris Anderson wrote, "If
you asked me to describe the rising
philosophy of the day, I'd say it is
dataism. We now have the ability to
gather huge amounts of data. This
ability seems to carry with it certain
cultural assumptions that everything
that can be measured should be measured.
That data is a transparent and reliable
lens that allows us to filter out
emotionalism and ideology. That data
will help us do remarkable things like
foretell the future. The data revolution
is giving us wonderful ways to
understand the present and past.
Contemporary philosopher Bjang Chulu Han
has discussed this dataism in his work psychopolitics.
psychopolitics.
He notes that in theory big data
promises a sort of liberation a freedom
from arbitrary notions about humanity.
It is a truly objective glance at our
species. But to make this reality, big
data has morphed into something entirely unprecedented.
unprecedented.
As Han has suggested, big data, big
business, and big brother have long
existed as three separate ideas. But in
today's world, big data has absorbed
these other two. And the three together
are now a singular entity. This entity
spies on the consumer like big brother.
It harvests information like big data
and it monetizes this data and trades it
freely on a marketplace like big
business. For the purpose of this essay,
we will refer to this entity as the big machine.
machine.
Within the big machine, the lives of
human beings like you and me have become
commodities. Commodities have grading
systems. diamonds, corn, wheat, beef.
These each have rigid classification
systems whereby the individual piece is
determined to have a poor or outstanding
value. Now, thanks to the work of the
big machine, humans have such a system
even if you do not know about it. Axiom
is a data brokering company which trades
the personal data of 300 million US
citizens. The company has a grading
system for individuals in which humans
are divided into 70 categories based on
market value. In this system, the top
market valued customers are put in a
group titled shooting stars. People with
low economic value are in a category
literally called waste.
And so, as Han notes, the big machine
has created a new digital class society.
Those with low credit scores, low
income, or who otherwise are either
useless or harmful to the market system
are cast out of it. Those who are
valuable are welcomed with open arms,
valued and lusted over. One of the
groups who fiends over such data is of
course politicians.
They desire to get this dataist promised
crystalclear objective assessment of the
public. So they buy data with the help
of donations from that same public, I
may add. They tailor messages not just
to groups or regions, but to individuals.
individuals.
Though we may wish to resist, we are
often powerless in this fight. If a
politician tailor his campaign to you,
you precisely, and tells you everything
you want to hear, why would you not vote
for that candidate? And so I wonder
where this fits into the concept of free
elections. We are free to vote for
whoever we please once our brains have
undergone a targeted 24-month election
cycle and our minds have been bent and
squished and manipulated like pieces of
clay. I consider those mice who are
tested on and experimented on, who are
given cheese each time they press a
button. The mouse is certainly free to
not press the button, but why wouldn't he?
he?
We are perhaps posed against the
technocrats much more like this mouse
than we may think. Psychologist Carl
Young was the first to identify the
concept of the collective unconscious.
On a personal level, we each have our
own unconscious desires. That is things
we want or even need without really
knowing it. These can manifest in
behavior, speech, or actions. The most
clear examples are in children. One
adolescent may misbehave upon the
arrival of a newborn child in the
household stemming from jealousy, but
certainly the child would not be able to
identify that as the source of his
misconduct. So too exists a broader
collective unconscious. Humans in a
culture act in certain ways driven by
things we may not recognize or
understand. We may not even as
individuals notice these broad patterns
of behavior, but the big machine can.
It's entirely possible that the big
machine even possesses an understanding
of ourselves which is more accurate and
objective than our own. Data mining
unveils the scope of human actions. It
draws lines between groups and the
things they do. But certainly there is
no reason for the big machine to share
the results of these findings. Instead,
it can and will use this data to
generate capital and exercise power.
Through the use of data mining, the big
machine can break into our collective
unconscious entirely undetected and it
can see truths which we ourselves
cannot. It can thereby manipulate our
unconscious and our behavior. It can
change the trajectory of the society or
The big machine is also a little
machine. It offers ways for the
individual to datify their existence.
How many hours spent sleeping? How many
steps taken per day? What is your
resting heart rate? And so on and so on.
These things are useful and important,
but much less useful are the ways we can
datify our lives through social media.
How many likes did your last photo get?
How many friends do you have? How many
DMs did you get this week? These metrics
reveal nothing to answer the very base
question of who are you. In fact, they
do much more than nothing. They actively
push us away from discovering our true
selves through the datification of our
lives. The previous concept of starlight
is relevant here again. Added to that,
as Han notes, data counts numbers. It
does not recount. It does not reflect.
It does not re-examine events at
different times in life with earned
perspective of living in the real world.
The understanding of ourselves comes
from exactly this process, repeated
serious consideration and reconsideration.
reconsideration.
Instead, we surveil our lives through
the lens of hard data, making
assessments and judgments upon ourselves
like some nightmarish out-of body
experience. When we make these judgments
and decisions based upon these numbers,
it is no wonder they fail to provide
peace or happiness. But still, we pursue
further such decisions under the guise
of self-improvement. When in truth, we
are just closing the door of a prison
built with our own hands. Like Han
suggests, we become both the guard and
the inmate. There exists another flaw in
the big machine. Another fundamental gap
in the understanding of the human
experience. Han notes the big machine
can tell us about A and B. It can tell
us A causes B or B has some determinant
effect on A. It can tell us that as A
goes up so does B or that B is reversely
proportional to A. But it leaves out a
third variable that is C. That is the
human spirit. It is the arena in which A
and B exist. It is the chaotic, complex,
unknowable human element which provides
that landscape for all other things.
This is why the big machine is so often
wrong. It can only predict what is
predictable. Consider the most
cataclysmic events in the course of
history. Those that realign society,
several of which we have experienced in
the past 20 years. Consider more acutely
the events which impact an individual on
the most foundational level. Those which
change your life. These events are of
course the most important that we
experience as a society or an
individual. The big machine cannot
predict or prepare us for these things.
So instead, they occur. And the big
machine is like a vulture which just
feeds on the chaos they create.
So the answer to all of this, one might
The idea of stop using your phone sounds
good. It sounds simple, but it pins too
much blame on the individual. Older
generations may say kids these days are
on their phones too much. Those with
harsh libertarian sensibilities might
declare that you can just put down your
phone. However, such ideas are formed in
a vacuum in an imaginary world which
rejects the material realities of modern
life. In some cases, anxiety-ridden
helicopter parents need to know at all
times what their children are doing. So,
they give them phones to keep the
children safe. But the pedophiles and
offenders of the modern world do not
linger in parks and playgrounds. They
are now in fact in the digital world on
the phone.
Young people are immensely more
susceptible to peer pressure. Friends
and culture discuss social media
discourse. Kids do not want to miss out
on these things and be otherred. While
such a claim, a worry from a child may
seem melodramatic, it is not. Social
media is a huge part of the modern youth
experience, unfortunately. So, there is
some merit to the child's worry. This
peer pressure mounts on parents.
Children say perhaps truthfully, they
will be outcasts without a phone. And no
reasonable parent wants their child to
be an outcast. And so as each parent
gives into this pressure and buys their
child a phone, each other parent feels
the mounting pressure to do just that.
We may also be tempted to say that
parents should just send their kids
outside. I suppose that is true to a
degree, but the modern parental
landscape does not really endorse this
type of thing. If a child is running
around by himself through a neighborhood
or a wilderness, this can raise
eyebrows. Suddenly, a neighborhood is a
wash with gossip about some mother being
an irresponsible parent. Perhaps a
particularly harsh individual even calls
social services. It's a difficult
situation. Not being a parent myself, I
cannot expound too much on these issues
responsibly, but the point may rest that
it is difficult for both parents and
children to shun social media. On top of
this, billions of dollars and years of
research go into making these apps. Do
we really genuinely earnestly expect a
16-year-old child to defeat such an
army? This is such a ridiculous notion
that I don't think it deserves much more
coverage. It is thinking from an old
world. The child of today is exposed to
everything adult with their phones.
Global catastrophes, pornography, lust,
cruelty of man. Then they are
simultaneously thrust into a classroom
which suggests information and education
exists in a tidy order with schedules,
lessons and subjects and structure. It
should really be no surprise that this
fractures the child's ability to parse
information and process the world around
them. If we earnestly want young people
to thrive in a new landscape, we must
give them the right tools. We must teach
As I type this, I can recognize two
major discrepancies in this whole thing.
The first is the fact that social media
has done some good. Social media can in
theory provide community and connection,
self-exression, or even relationships,
especially among those who may be
marginalized due to race, ethnic,
gender, or sexual background. But when
we search for more hardline data rather
than assumptions like these, we find a
lack of evidence that there is any
long-term benefit to social media use.
Certainly, as hate notes, there is no
wave of mental health currently sweeping
across the developed world. Quite the
opposite. Perhaps social media can
alleviate loneliness from a baseline of
absolute zero. But this kind of company
is far worse than the in-person
relationships it continues to replace.
This is indeed the broader point. Not
that social media is pure evil, but it
is currently on the whole more bad than
good. Many bad things have good effects.
It feels good to snort cocaine. It may
feel good to punch someone you don't
like. But we would not say that cocaine
or physical violence is good.
I can also feel the shouts of the
audience. They remind me that I in fact
am the emblem of participation in this
social media landscape which I
simultaneously deem so harmful. What can
I say to this? What argument can be
made? What excuse can I find? Of course,
the answer is really none. But I do
think when it comes to these platforms,
we can either work for them or they can
work for us. My hope is that I can
produce things which encourage the
latter, which encourage people to
consider social media, the world within
it, and the world without it. I'm
extremely hopeful where the future is
concerned. In the past, large-scale
societal issues have been corrected.
Everyone used to smoke cigarettes. Now
they do not. Civil rights movements have
made massive gains. Even if there is
work to be done, despite our current
environmental issues, collective green
action has won countless victories.
There are many feasible solutions for
change. The government could take
action, could establish some oversight.
They could, as some have suggested,
raise the online adult age from 13 to
16. There are two cultural issues which
could be sorted. Perhaps we should
reassess the idea of childhood
independence. Parents often fear letting
their children run free in the world
from the consequences on the child or
the social consequences on they
themselves. If we are being profoundly
optimistic, a practice which I think is
not always misguided, we could look at
the ever swinging pendulum of culture.
Perhaps with generation alpha or future
generations, the prospect of being
always online will simply be regarded as
uncool and elderly. Perhaps these young
people will on their own accord shun
social media. The fact is that media and
life within it has changed. Everything
is different now. Old people in power
are incapable of understanding the depth
of that change. Young people, however,
are powerful. They are smart. We must
ignore the ongoing generational shouts
that declare the youth to be perpetually
stupid. These shouts are arrogance and
cynicism. They are the rot of age on
stale minds. It is and always has been
the youth who perceive the world most
accurately. And it is the youth who
fuels changes. In time, the youth of
today will control the world of
tomorrow. They will not must not forget
the harsh indecency enacted upon them
upon their world by current era technocrats.
technocrats.
The youth can be more than idle
participants in the digital playground.
They can take it upon themselves to rip
the land apart and rebuild it. Rebuild
it into something which does not exploit
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