Content is the host of societal cancer
Huxley's Brave New World is real and no. one. is. batting. an. eye.
“None of us honours our souls as we should.”
Plato
Mindless consumption
Our time and attention are slipping away. Content distribution platforms like TikTok present themselves as tools of expression while destroying our brains at scale, especially young ones. Dopamine is dispensed at calculated intervals to keep us hooked. A minute becomes an hour, then a year. Suddenly, a decade is gone. For a 20-year-old, that’s an era. We’re exposed to countless images and contemplate foreign ideas as if they were ours, making us less likely to observe or even value our own thoughts.
The heart of this problem is how algorithms cultivate and optimise content without having our best interest at heart. Their ad-based business model are no different from TV:
“The audience’s brain must be available. Our programs have the aspiration to (...) distract and relax to prepare it between two messages.[…] What we sell to Coca-Cola is available brain time.”
Patrick Le Lay, former CEO of TF1 (France’s most popular commercial TV channel)
Algorithms are more subtle than TV programming. Not only are they getting smarter by the day, but they are also influencing the unconscious part of our brains.
Eric Sadin, a technology philosopher, encapsulates this phenomenon within the spectral life concept. A life guided by unseen voices nudging our decision-making. Just like an autocomplete feature can write emails in our stead or dating apps can design our succession, content anchors themes, ideas, or memes in our brains which, in turn, influence our everyday decisions and the people in our surroundings.
Content grinder
There was a time when Netflix produced interesting hits. Nowadays, their titles are rarely arresting or perhaps their sheer number drowns out the remarkable ones. And yet we browse until finding the piece of content that will satisfy us, akin to pornography.
News also have an addictive dimension. Some documentaries are harder to tell apart from fiction. More often than we'd like to believe, they're manufactured to carry hidden agendas. They can be force-fed to us as a diversion from reality when given a disproportional share of voice within news cycles. This accentuates their actual urgency and makes us prone to take an unconscious stance on a given issue.
Intentional consumption
To free ourselves from this invisible form of control we need individual revolutions.
Cutting our ties to social networks is still the most effective strategy, but this can be too much for the addicts we have become.
Understanding our dependence to content, with social networks as industrial dealers and AI acting as the new sophisticated producer, is a critical first step.
Asking companies what metrics their algorithms are optimising for is a long shot, but we need to prevent losing our authenticity and free will.
At the very least, let’s become a conscious and intentional audience before we forget how important this is.
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