Where’s reverse on this thing?
Who the hell is driving?
"We've entered a world where the difference between fantasy and reality is difficult or impossible to distinguish. It is a globalised world pulsing with information flows and data commodities, a place where infinite sub-cultures and mind cults live in their own pocket universes."
I don't know who wrote that, but it's brutally accurate, and we are all responsible.
The sinister part is that the wheel is in the hands of the few, and they don't seem to have our interests at heart.
We urgently need to teach people how manipulation works, encourage literacy and the ability to spot when you're being played. We must also reprice our attention. Treat it like cash and stop spending it like a drunk.
There's a reason the tech industry killed friction. Friction slows things down. It creates space for us between impulse and action. It forces us to think. That's precisely why they wanted to eliminate it.
This is not a bug in their system; it's their business model. The feeds, the algorithms, and the pathological scrolling - explicitly engineered to sublimate humans. They gamed our rage, confusion and addiction to be supremely profitable.
This anti-social economy is built on the premise that human attention is an extractable resource. Like coal or timber, except it regenerates daily. The business insight of our age was realising that you could mine people's consciousness and leverage what you extracted to the highest bidder.
But we can still alter our fate; our last chance is to use our judgment, think, and deploy our capacity to know what to stop.
How do we engage reverse? Delete apps, block sites, ignore the bullshit commercials, ignore the gaslighting news media, and if you really have to suffer news, check everything for the absolute truth. Pro-tip: If you get suckered, read beyond the clickbait headline and use your brain.
I guarantee that if we all did this, it would quickly change what measures business rewards. Somewhere along the line, we decided that keeping up matters more than understanding. That having an opinion matters more than earning one.
But do we still want to? Reversing means giving things up. The dopamine hit. The comfortable illusion that we're informed because we've scrolled through news via self-preferenced, biased bubbles living in our pocket universes.
It means choosing ignorance about things that don't matter so you can develop expertise about things that do.
Most people won't make that trade. Not because they can't, but because the systems have already learned them too well. And it all starts by recognising when you're being steered.
Then practice the most radical act - decide what matters, and ignore everything else. The system won't do that for you. And it's terrified you'll remember how.
What are you paying attention to that isn't paying you back?
