I’m sitting in bed with a laptop and a coffee, and a banana and two Tylenol coursing through my veins.  It’s rainy and weird outside.  Perfect day for a COVID vaccine hangover, the fourth I have experienced.

The introduction of the new COVID vaccine that covers the latest variants is something I have been looking forward to for a while now.  I got the original two shots, then the booster last November, then I got COVID itself in the spring, and not I’m boosted again.  I should be pretty darn protected by this point but this is the time of year when I tend to get extremely bad lung illnesses, so, that’s exactly what I want, I want to be insanely protected.

There was probably a point in time when COVID could have been stopped, but that window passed thanks in large part to the truly psychotic and delusional right wing political faction in the United States and their war on reality but also because, as a general rule, humans are bad at assessing risks and taking precautions.  So, millions dead, needlessly, and we all get to live with COVID as a fact of life from now on.  Cool.

My life has changed in many ways since the pandemic and it has never really reverted to pre-pandemic norms.  I am a bit of a shut-in these days.  I probably only venture outside of my homestead one or two times a week on average.  The rest of the time I have an endless list of projects to work on, dogs to entertain, books to read, food to cook, and the like.  I don’t love it, if I’m being honest.  I miss late nights at bars with live music, I miss casually hanging out with friends, I miss Chinese buffets, I miss a lot of stuff.  Sure, I know those things are still options but I fell out of the habit of them.  It feels like a big decision to get dressed up and drive an hour to a thing and do stuff.  I live in the middle of nowhere.  It was so much easier when work made me leave the house five days a week.  I would probably opt for working in my corporate office more often than I do except it’s so far away.  Every time I have to drive there it’s essentially taking two hours out of my day to do nothing but drive in commuter traffic.  Such a waste of time.

I recently read the book The Chaos Machine, by Max Fisher.  That title sounds like some sort of science fiction novel but it’s actually a book about how social media algorithms have turned the world inside out by exploiting our worst human impulses to drive corporate profits.   It is a book that has helped some things click for me that have been bothering me for a while now.  I’ve been trending more and more towards being disaffected with the internet, apps, smartphones, etc. for a few years now, realyl since the rise of social media.  In and of itself, that is not all that unusual.  I think a lot of people feel some sort of vague dis-ease over this trend towards having our attention steered by invisible and inscrutable machine learning algorithms and the corresponding creepiness of having all of our online motions tracked and monitized even as we continue to use these platforms to entertain, educate, and socialize ourselves.  It was something of an a-ha moment for me when I connected my sensitivity towards anything that feels like cult indoctrination with The Algorithms. I had this moment where I realized “oh, right, that’s why I am shying away from the internet, that’s why it all feels so creepy and weird and wrong… it all feels like the Watchtower Society”.

The thing about cults is that they are not about any particular beliefs, not really. One cult believes the earth is flat, another that space aliens are coming on a comet next Tuesday, another that a handful of poorly educated dudes in New York are the divine mouthpiece of the creator of all the universe and He says you need to shun your relatives. These are all the teachings but a cult is not it’s teachings. A cult is in techniques of persuasion that keep you, the individual, from thinking for yourself. A cult is any system of indoctrination that manipulates your beliefs, attention, thoughts, feelings, or actions to serve the ends of the cult leader rather than your own. Cults form around persuasive leaders, persuasive organizations, persuasive causes, or really just about anything where human rational thinking can be short-circuited by thought manipulation techniques.

The social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) have developed algorithms that train themselves on tracking and focusing user attention spans into whatever keeps you hooked on the content. These are blind algorithms in the sense that there is no ideology or message, no goal or plan beyond the capturing of eyeballs, the gathering of your attention, your mind, so that they can sell advertising time to companies. Something like YouTube isn’t a cult per se, it’s more like an engine designed to turn just about anything into a cult and, thanks to millions of years of human evolution, our basest instincts and emotions, our most fear driven urges, are the ones that monetize the most effectively. It’s happening all over the world, as social media usage spreads, and the overall feeling for me is as if the entire world is just turning into different flavors of cults. Having spent the first 30 years of my life in cult programming, the modern social-media-centric internet feels skeevy as hell.

I’ve already tuned out to a massive extent. I only get news from the Associated Press. I have all my web browsers set to block tracking. I opt out of cookies on most web sites. I have massively curtailed my time on Facebook. I rarely touch IG or Twitter. I sabotage the algorithms whenever and wherever possible, feeding them false information, declining all interest in all advertising (especially ads that are accurately targeted). I bought an entirely open-source hardware computer running Linux. I do most of my writing, photography, and music using purely analog gear. I try to be online less than an hour a day outside of work. None of this is because of some sort of paranoia. I do not fear that there is a nefarious cabal that is going to attack or hurt me because I like vintage sports cars or the new Flaming Lips album. No, I am just hypersensitive to the idea that somebody else is watching over my shoulder, nudging my behavior, attempting to manipulate my thoughts, feelings, or attention span to their own ends. I don’t care if the “somebody” is actually a faceless set of algorithms and tracking mechanisms strewn across the internet for the purpose of maximizing ad revenue or if the somebody is a religious organization that wants me to go door to door every Saturday morning and skip college, my mind is my own and I’ve had enough of others coopting it, thank you very much.

What really sucks is that I actually love technology. I think it’s awesome to have powerful tools to do cool things. I even think that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are themselves powerful tools that could do great things for humanity. They could solve large problems rather than corrupting societies globally and killing millions of people in order to increase revenue at a handful of Silicon Valley mega-corporations. It pisses me off to no end that more and more of the technology that I have some to rely on in my life has become infected by these social algorithms. I want to opt out, completely and forever, from anything that monitors my purchases or interests, anything that recommends anything I don’t explicitly ask for, and anything that informs any third party about me in any way but the way things are, you can barely make breakfast without your toaster reporting to the internet that you went bagel today instead of english muffin.

Fuck that.

I realize that money makes the world go ’round and that this is the inevitable outcome but man… it’s bad bad bad bad bad. The Chaos Machine fills in a lot of information I did not previously know about just how bad it really is, and really is a read I strongly recommend for everybody who is interested in how the world is actually working today. It doesn’t really offer answers but it gives a lot to think about. Go read it. And then make changes. Sabotage the algorithm. Decline those cookies. Move your media consumption offline. Read paper books. Turn off autoplay wherever you find it. Be intentional about what you put into your eye and ear holes. Don’t let your brain be hijacked by third parties who may or may not have your best interests at heart. It’s an affront to human dignity and an assault on us all.