The word is killed.
Not un-alived, the new weird word younger generations use because it’s less triggering. I’m reminded of the barely passable movie “Demolition Man” and how, in that future, the term for homicide was Murder Death Kill, a kind of verbal overkill that almost seems delightful in an era where the hard edges of everything are being rounded into cultural padded rooms. We surely didn’t predict the future well at least as far as language was concerned.
But the algorithm doesn’t like certain words so people have to use symbols, strange spellings, and ridiculous words not to trigger the algorithm. It was able to get us to change how we speak and, ultimately, how we think.
Algorithms feed on what people want, and what people like are the 7 deadly sins. The content that gets the most attention fits in them somewhere.
There’s Nikocado Avocado, a talented young man who wanted to play violin on Broadway but found that the algorithm loved him better if he ate food in front of the camera. We can watch him consume while he talks to us.
There are the teenage girls who have strangely learned to pose like a celebrity on the red carpet, angling their body, legs, hips, hands, and face just right for the paparazzi (i.e., their mom or friends). We see it so much we don’t even see it anymore, but compare it to photos from earlier decades, before digital life ruled, and it hits you. The algorithm trains the girls that sexualized and adult poses get more responses.
Let’s not forget all the different influencers who put on makeup, try out products, unbox new items, and find unimaginably mundane yet intrusive ways to live their lives in front of the camera for ad revenue. There is no space for regrouping or retrenching; taking in breath means potential ad revenue. We either try to emulate them or forget to live our own lives because we’re watching theirs.
The algorithm encourages us to mimicry as if we’re all African Gray Parrots or mockingbirds, put on the earth only to emulate the thoughts, speech patterns, dress, and personality of those influencers and thought leaders. If we aren’t riding the trend, we’re being run over by it.
The list goes on, what the algorithm does, but it will eventually end in dopamine.
There are two neurotransmitters vying for control over you.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that creates cravings because it floods us with good feelings as a reward for behavior. Oxytocin is different. It creates the feelings of love, satisfaction, connection, and happiness.
Guess which one of those neurotransmitters we get from the algorithms of social media? Guess which one you can’t get through virtual activity? (Hint: it’s the reason Zoom calls fall just short of fulfilling at first and, over time, wearying.)
Dopamine responds to the algorithm by enslaving us and depriving us of oxytocin. We mainly feel sad, and, as Bilbo Baggins said in The Fellowship of the Ring, we feel “sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
Real, personal connection doesn’t encourage talented musicians to put their instruments down and pick up a fork. It doesn’t tell young girls to strike a pose for their prom picture or their profile. It doesn’t encourage us to forfeit the unique life God has for us to seek out ad revenue or be just like someone else.
But the algorithm needs warm bodies to function. It needs meat. And meat is not the product of something that’s alive but of something that’s dead.
In trying to find news or information, I proceed so cautiously knowing that the algorithm is always at work if a screen is involved. I brace myself that I am going to be exposed to all kinds of strange ideas and emotions that have nothing to do with the focus of my search but which the algorithm has thoughtfully included because there’s a profitable rabbit trail it would like me to travel down for the sake of its advertisers.
I would like to take a photo of a family event, but odd poses in body or face are applied moments before the shutter clicks, and the algorithm, with its tentacles of training us to what sells and what will bring us tomorrow’s dopamine, slips in and interferes. I would like to write just to write, but the algorithm really wants me to write according to what it needs.
It even whispers quietly into places where there are no screens and changes the process.
The algorithm knows, soon enough, what you look at, what you want, what you need, what you crave, how you think about yourself, and where your weakness is.
It will get you soon enough.
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