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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video.
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
careful about who I choose to partner
with. So, when I talk about ground news,
it's for good reason. Unlike other
platforms, they don't push or suppress
stories to influence your perception of
the world. Their app prioritizes giving
readers full transparency on today's
issues by pulling in the world's
perspective on them. Ground News can
detect each socalled unbiased outlets
political lean, any history of failing
fact checks, and even who's benefiting
from you believing their version of the
truth. I think if you're watching my
videos, responsible media consumption
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
than doom scrolling ever will. Ground
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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.
