by bonoboTP | 2025-05-17 10:03:23+00:00
> When you use any social media, you're not really choosing what you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides what you're going to look at next.

This was even more true with TV, and especially before there were a million cable channels.

And it makes me think about the even wider time scale. A few generations ago, "the outer control loop" was also not in the individual's hand, but instead of computers, it was built on social technology. The average person didn't have much to decide about their lives. They likely lived within a few (or few dozen) km of where their ancestors did, in the part of town and a type of home fitting for their social class, likely doing the same job as their father, following a rigid life script, hitting predefined ritualized milestones. Their diet was based on whatever was available at that time of the year based on local production, cooked essentially the same way, as handed down by mothers and grandmothers. There was very little to the tune of letting their inner true self blossom through taking fun colorful decisions. They couldn't choose from some endless repository of stories. It was mostly a rotation of the local folk stories and the stories of the dominant religion.

Just wanting to "consume" and follow a script without the weight of decision making isn't some modern "disease".

The key difference is a new kind of fragmentation of culture (and the non-local nature of it). A long time ago, culture was also fractally fragmented, in a way where "neighboring" villages in a mountainous area would have their own dialects. Then with long-distance travel and electronic communication and media, globalization happened where distant parts of the world started to sync up and converge on some shared part of culture (of course fused with a continuation of the local one), everyone wearing T-shirts, listening to Michael Jackson and rooting for their football/soccer team. If you were dropped to some random place on the planet, you could likely converse with them about some fairly recent cultural cornerstones in entertainment and basic global news topics. But you still likely weren't "dropped" there.

Then the internet appeared and you could suddenly talk to all those people in other parts of the world (or just other parts of your country). But search and discoverability weren't so great so there was friction. You build communities around shared interests and compatibility of personality and it required effort and participation. Usenet, forums, IRC. But these isolate you from your neighbors and local connections. And people often explicitly wanted that. Nosy neighbors and know-it-all gossipy townfolk weren't such a rosy thing, people wanted to escape that to find peers who understand and validate them and can build a shared culture with.

In schools, subcultures already existed from the 70s and 80s onwards for sure, but they were few, like maybe 2 main camps or 3 or so, and information flow was slow therefore change was slow. Some new album of a popular band was released, then it was the thing for a long time, you didn't get an endless stream shoved in your face, you got the album and listened to it over and over. Today subcultures can't even be meaningfully counted because people follow personalized streams and come together in random configuration in streamer chats etc.

So basically, in the old internet model, there were lots of opportunities to choose from, but it needed effort to find it and to forge belonging. Then with more commercialization, things started to consolidate on fewer platforms. It made it easier for creators to reach a wider pool of users simultaneously, and made it simpler for users to just learn to use one or a few platforms. But this made it also easier to pick and choose your "content diet", buffet style. A little from here, a little from there, with little friction. But with so much on offer, how do you choose? Discoverability was still an issue until recommendation algorithms became strong enough to know what will drive engagement. Turn that up to 11 and you get the current day where even the front page grid of options is obsolete and you get a single linear feed again, which is like watching TV and channel surfing (pressing the "next channel" button over and over), except it's personalized and never boring.

Of course this applies to many other things as well, such as dating apps etc, which also feed you an algorithmic stream of options with the goal of maximizing profits for the company.

I don't think individual people's rejection of the trend due to "makes me feel much better" will make a dent. In many cases the use of these things isn't mere convenience but implicitly mandatory because other things are designed around the assumption that people use them. Schools announcing stuff to parents in Facebook groups. There's less traffic report announcements on the radio, because people use Waze and Google Maps that has real time traffic info and reroutes you automatically.

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But then what might happen? I think we're seeing glimpses of it in the rejection of AI in certain circles of cultural thought leaders, which might grow towards a rejection of more tech. But instead of "makes me feel better", the only actually working mechanism will be social shame, similar to what often appears nowadays when some product turns out to have used AI. If it becomes established that you're obviously a loser if you Shazaam a song, or open TikTok, it could flip. Of course companies won't sit by watching idle. What's more likely is that the "rejection" of tech will just lead to other levels of meta-grift and engagement optimization. It may just fizzle out in a whimper of angry malaise and meta-ironic apathy.