Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • The Coldplay Apocalypse: Notes from a Smoothie-Drinking Future

    The Coldplay Apocalypse: Notes from a Smoothie-Drinking Future

    Welcome to the future—where the algorithm reigns, identity is a curated filter pack, and dystopia arrives not with a boot to the face but a wellness app and a matching pair of $900 headphones that murmur Coldplay into your skull at just the right serotonin-laced frequency.

    We will all look like vaguely reprocessed versions of Salma Hayek or Brad Pitt—digitally airbrushed to remove all imperfections but retain just enough “authenticity” to keep our neuroses in play. Our playlists will be algorithmically optimized to sound like Coldplay mated with spa music and decided never to take risks again.

    We’ll wear identical headphones—sleek, matte, noise-canceling monuments to our collective disinterest in one another. Not to be rude. Just too evolved to engage. Every journal entry we write will be AI-assisted, reading like the bastard child of Brené Brown and ChatGPT: reflective, sincere, and soul-crushingly uniform.

    Our influencers? They’ll all look the same too—gender-fluid, lightly medicated, with just enough charisma to sell you an oat milk subscription while quoting Kierkegaard. Politics, entertainment, mental health, and skincare will be served up on the same TikTok platter, narrated by someone who once dated a crypto founder and now podcasts about trauma.

    Three times a day, we’ll sip our civilization smoothie: a beige sludge of cricket protein, creatine, nootropic fibers, and a lightly psychoactive GLP-1 variant that keeps hunger, sadness, and ambition at bay. It’s not a meal; it’s a contract with the status quo. We’ll all wear identical sweat-wicking athleisure in soothing desert neutrals, paired with orthopedic sneakers in punchy tech-startup orange.

    We’ll all “take breaks from social media” at the same approved hour—between 5 and 6 p.m.—so we can “reconnect with the analog world” by staring at a sunset long enough to photograph it and post our profound revelations online at 6:01.

    Nobody will want children, because who wants to drag a baby into a climate-controlled apartment where the rent is half your nervous system? Marriage? A relic of a time when humans still believed in eye contact. Romances will be managed by chatbots programmed to simulate caring without requiring reciprocation. You’ll tell the app your love language, it’ll write your messages, and your partner’s app will do the same. Everyone’s emotionally satisfied, no one’s truly known.

    And vacations? Pure fiction. Deepfakes will show us in Bali, Tuscany, or the moon—beaming with digital joy, sipping pixelated espresso. Real travel is for the ultra-rich and the deluded.

    As for existential despair? Doesn’t exist anymore. Our moods will be finely tuned by micro-dosed pharmacology and AI-generated affirmations. No more late-night crises or 3 a.m. sobbing into a pillow. Just an endless, gentle hum of stabilized contentment—forever.

  • The Futility of Being Ready

    The Futility of Being Ready

    In December of 2019, my wife and I, both lifelong members of the National Society of Worrywarts, stumbled upon reports of a deadly virus brewing in China. Most people shrugged. We did not. I jumped on eBay and ordered a bulk box of masks the size of a hotel mini-fridge. It felt ridiculous at the time—a paranoid lark, like filling a doomsday bunker because you heard thunder on a Tuesday. But three months later, on March 13, 2020, the world shut down, and that cardboard box of N95s felt less like overreaction and more like prophecy.

    These days, I teach college in what I call the ChatGPT Era—a time when my students and I sit around analyzing how artificial intelligence is rewiring our habits, our thinking, and possibly the scaffolding of our humanity. I don’t dread AI the way I dreaded COVID. It doesn’t make me stock canned beans or disinfect door handles. But it does give me that same uneasy tremor in the gut—the sense that something vast is shifting beneath us, and that whatever emerges will make the present feel quaint and maybe a little foolish.

    It’s like standing on a beach after the earthquake and watching the water disappear from the shore. You can back up your files, rewrite your syllabus, and pretend to adapt, but you know deep down you’re stuck in Prepacolypse Mode—that desperate, irrational phase where you try to outmaneuver the future with your label maker. You prepare for the unpreparable, perform rituals of control that offer all the protection of a paper shield.

    And through it all comes that strange, electric sensation—Dreadrenaline. It’s not just fear. It’s a kind of alertness, a humming, high-voltage awareness that your life is about to be edited at the molecular level. You’re not just anticipating change—you’re bracing for a version of yourself that will be unrecognizable on the other side. You’re watching history draft your name onto the roster and realizing, too late, that you’re not a spectator anymore. You’re in the game.

  • Psychedelic Mushrooms and the Art of Saying “Meh”

    Psychedelic Mushrooms and the Art of Saying “Meh”

    People I admire—deep thinkers, seekers, trauma survivors, even that old roommate who once confused a lava lamp for God—swear by magic mushrooms. They describe transcendence, tearful reunions with their inner child, and conversations with the universe where the universe speaks perfect Jungian. Apparently, psilocybin is the shortcut to enlightenment, the divine inbox where angels drop PDFs of your truest self.

    And yet, I remain a bastion of Mushroom Apathy Syndrome (MAS)—a spiritual condition marked by an impenetrable indifference to the fungal fanfare. While others are melting into cosmic unity on some mossy hillside, I’m thinking about whether it’s time to reorganize my spice rack. I don’t want to chew sacred mold to glimpse the divine. If I need an ego death, I’ll just read my old poetry.

    Sure, I’d love to encounter the Divine—maybe Spinoza’s glowing web of pantheistic awe, maybe a seraph with decent taste in jazz. But I just can’t take mystical advice from a guy in a woven beanie yelling about chakras while wearing Crocs. If I want a head trip, I’ll queue up Yes, The Strawbs, or Crosby, Stills & Nash and lie on the floor until my chakras align from sheer harmonic exhaustion. Or better yet, I’ll abstain from sugar for ten months and then unleash nirvana with a single bite of decadent, spice-laced carrot cake.

    My condition is also rooted in a kind of Fungal Nihilism—the belief that no mushroom, no matter how ancient, artisanal, or Amazonian, can fix the howling absurdity of existence. You can’t outrun entropy with a spore. If I want to stare into the abyss and laugh, I’ll binge-watch George Carlin eviscerate modern life with nothing more than a mic, a ponytail, and a pair of skeptical eyebrows.

    Ultimately, I practice Spore Snobbery—a reflexive contempt for the breathless mythologizing of psychedelic fungus. These aren’t sacred portals. They’re glorified mushrooms with a publicist. For some, they offer spiritual clarity. For me, they sound like a gastrointestinal trust fall with no one there to catch you but an ayahuasca-shaman-turned-life-coach named Brad.

  • From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    To mock Brian Johnson, aka the Liver King, feels like low-hanging fruit off a poisoned ancestral tree. The man is a walking satirical sketch, a steroid-soaked cartoon preaching “natural living” while pumping $11,000 a month of growth hormone into his glutes. He branded himself the King, his wife the Queen, and his sons with names fit for a Mad Max reboot about a paleo militia family eating spleen jerky by moonlight.

    His entire enterprise was Caveman Cosplay with a GoPro: gnawing on cow testicles at a blood-slicked picnic table, barking into the void like a tribal prophet in a trucker hat. He promised salvation to a nation bloated on Cheetos, Twinkies, and Red Bull—offering raw liver as the Eucharist for the metabolically lost.

    Netflix’s Untold: The Liver King makes a flaccid attempt at chronicling his rise and fall. The documentary is weirdly deferential, like it’s afraid he’ll burst through the screen and challenge the viewer to a push-up contest. YouTube, in contrast, has done the real exhumation—countless videos dissecting his addiction to fame, vanity, and unregulated supplements with far more insight and bite.

    Still, the Netflix film does offer one crystalline moment of pathos-turned-parody: Johnson, preparing to repent for the lies and the deception and the overpriced ancestral liver gummies, admits on camera that he’ll need to Google the words “repentance” and “atonement” before proceeding. Imagine Martin Luther, nailing his Theses to the church door—then pulling out his phone to ask Siri what “contrition” means.

    The man is a moral dumpster fire, ablaze with the fumes of self-delusion, influencer marketing, and raw meat. But that dumpster fire casts a telling glow on the cultural cave we all inhabit—where attention is currency, truth is performative, and the algorithm rewards the loudest lunacy.

    So let us name what we’ve seen:

    • Brovangelism – The sacred zeal of gym bros converted to primal living by a shirtless messiah with abs and a coupon code.
    • Swoleblindness – The ability to overlook blatant fraud if the fraudster has veins on his deltoids.
    • Rawthenticity – Mistaking uncooked meat for unfiltered truth.
    • Cloutuary – A public, slow-motion social media death staged for likes and shares.
    • Crashfluencer – He went from virality to liability, taking his followers on a nosedive into madness.
    • Declinefluencer – An influencer whose main content is his own collapse.
    • Brandamaged – A man whose brand has outlived his dignity, but not his desperation.

    Watching Johnson spiral felt eerily familiar. It brought to mind Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I once assigned to bright-eyed freshmen before they lost their souls to TikTok. Lanier warns that algorithmic performance rewires the brain, dragging us back to our reptilian roots. It doesn’t make us more “authentic”—it makes us worse. Dumber. Meaner. Hungrier for clicks and validation. Johnson is not just a cautionary tale. He’s the caution in full, swollen flesh—drenched in growth hormone and influencer pathology.

  • The Hobbles and the Honker: A Tale Told Twice—One Soft, One Sharp

    The Hobbles and the Honker: A Tale Told Twice—One Soft, One Sharp

    The Hobbles and the Honker (Soft)

    In the land of Gumbolia, wide and quite long, The Hobbles once sang a democracy song. They rallied and voted and marched in the rain, Till a creature called Honker slithered into their lane.

    Now the Honker was flashy, all feathers and noise, He juggled and shouted and promised new toys. He hollered and danced with a smirk on his face, And somehow he slithered into first place.

    “He’s a joke,” cried the Hobbles, “a prank, a buffoon!” “He’ll fade like a hiccup! He’ll pop like a balloon!” But the Honker kept honking and puffing with pride, And more folks in Gumbolia climbed on for the ride.

    He wore silly hats and he growled mean things, He barked about bogeymen, gave fear some wings. He sold golden slippers, he sold magic beans, He crowned himself King of the Vibe Machines.

    And the Hobbles, poor Hobbles, just stared and they sighed, As their inboxes filled and their hope slowly died. They once had opinions, they once had a fight, But now they just doomscroll alone in the night.

    Their thinkers were thinkers, with language so slick, They wrote fancy essays, with words deep and thick. But while they were drafting a twelve-page reply, The Honker was honking a pie in the sky.

    So the Hobbles grew sleepy, their courage went dry, They numbed out with snacks and a five-season cry. They shopped in bulk, they hopped on a bike, And hoped that the Honker would vanish from spite.

    “This can’t last forever,” some Hobbles would say, “He’ll melt like a snowball some blustery day.” But others just shrugged and stared into space, Feeling shame that they’d once run a noble race.

    Yet not all was lost in the town of despair, For a few little Hobbles still dared to care. They met in small corners, they whispered and planned, They lifted each other and took little stands.

    “We may not feel brave, or witty, or bright, But we’re still here breathing, and that means we fight.” They called up their neighbors, they stood at the polls, They swapped out their doomscrolls for nobler goals.

    For though Honkers may honk and the noise may be thick, History moves, though never too quick. And Gumbolia, though weary, was not yet done, For courage is quiet, but strong when it runs.

    So if you should feel that your hope’s lost its fizz, And your soul’s stuck in reruns of all that there is, Remember the Hobbles who once felt that way, And dared to keep going anyway.

    The Hobbles and the Honker (Sharp)

    In Gumbolia’s sprawl—long, loud, and absurd—
    The Hobbles once voted and marched undeterred.
    They sang songs of justice, they rallied with pride,
    Till the Honker came honking, all smirk and no stride.

    This Honker was flash wrapped in carnival sleaze,
    A circus of feathers and catchphrases teased.
    He juggled fake promises, shouted in rhyme,
    And tap-danced his way to the front of the line.

    “He’s a clown!” cried the Hobbles. “A walking whoopee!”
    “He’ll vanish by Tuesday! He’s nonsense! He’s loopy!”
    But the Honker kept puffing with bloated delight,
    While more folks joined in on his spite-powered flight.

    He wore hats like a toddler who lost a bet,
    He barked about bogeymen you haven’t met.
    He sold golden daydreams, snake oil in tins,
    And crowned himself Emperor of the Hot Takes and Spins.

    And the Hobbles? Poor souls—they wilted with dread,
    Inbox explosions, more bad news ahead.
    They once had a backbone, they once raised a fist,
    Now they scroll through despair like a Netflix watchlist.

    Their thinkers waxed on in twelve-paragraph threads,
    Deep dives that no one but bots really read.
    While they drafted rebuttals, pensive and slow,
    The Honker screamed, “Look! A conspiracy show!”

    So the Hobbles grew sluggish, resigned to their fate,
    Snack-drunk and bingeing past reason or date.
    They bought bulk distractions and hoped with a sigh,
    That the Honker would vanish by seasonal die.

    “This is a phase,” some would nervously mutter,
    “He’ll melt like bad butter, he’ll flap off and flutter.”
    But most just went mute, all spark drained and gone,
    Ashamed they once marched, now barely hang on.

    Yet in the gray murk of their grief-colored town,
    A few little Hobbles refused to stay down.
    They gathered in corners, whispered through fear,
    And plotted a path that might pull them clear.

    “We’re tired,” they said. “We’re jaded and sore,
    But if breath’s in our lungs, we must fight a bit more.”
    They rang up their neighbors, they knocked on a door,
    They swapped out their doomscrolls for something with core.

    For though Honkers may honk and the clueless may cheer,
    History lumbers but does reappear.
    And Gumbolia, frazzled, still had a drumbeat—
    Because courage shows up in blistered, worn feet.

    So if your resolve is as flat as old fizz,
    And your soul is stuck rerunning all that there is,
    Think of the Hobbles who once lost their way—
    But chose to keep going, come what may.

  • The Salma Hayek-fication of Everything and the Beautocalypse

    The Salma Hayek-fication of Everything and the Beautocalypse

    If technology can make us all look like Salma Hayek, then congratulations—we’ve successfully killed beauty by cloning it into oblivion. Perfection loses its punch when everyone has it on tap. The same goes for writing: if every bored intern with a Wi-Fi connection can crank out Nabokovian prose with the help of ChatGPT, then those dazzling turns of phrase lose their mystique. What once shimmered now just… scrolls.

    Yes, technology improves us—but it also sandblasts the edges off everything, leaving behind a polished sameness. The danger isn’t just in becoming artificial; it’s in becoming indistinguishable. The real challenge in this age of frictionless upgrades is to retain your signature glitch—that weird, unruly fingerprint of a soul that no algorithm can replicate without screwing it up in glorious, human ways.

    If technology can make us all look like Brad Pitt and Selma Hayak, then none of us will be beautiful. In this hellscape, we all suffer inside the Beautocalypse–the collapse of beauty through overproduction: When everyone’s flawless, no one is.

    Likewise, if we can all use ChatGPT to write like Vladimir Nabokov, then florid prose will no longer have the wow factor. Technology improves us, yes, but it also makes everything the same. Retaining your individual fingerprint of a soul is the challenge in this new age. 

  • “Good Enough” Is the Enemy

    “Good Enough” Is the Enemy

    Standing in front of thirty bleary-eyed college students, I was deep into a lesson on how to distinguish a ChatGPT-generated essay from one written by an actual human—primarily by the AI’s habit of spitting out the same bland, overused phrases like a malfunctioning inspirational calendar. That’s when a business major casually raised his hand and said, “I can guarantee you everyone on this campus is using ChatGPT. We don’t use it straight-up. We just tweak a few sentences, paraphrase a bit, and boom—no one can tell the difference.”

    Cue the follow-up from a computer science student: “ChatGPT isn’t just for essays. It’s my life coach. I ask it about everything—career moves, crypto investments, even dating advice.” Dating advice. From ChatGPT. Let that sink in. Somewhere out there is a romance blossoming because of AI-generated pillow talk.

    At that moment, I realized I was facing the biggest educational disruption of my thirty-year teaching career. AI platforms like ChatGPT have three superpowers: insane convenience, instant accessibility, and lightning-fast speed. In a world where time is money and business documents don’t need to channel the spirit of James Baldwin, ChatGPT is already “good enough” for 95% of professional writing. And therein lies the rub—good enough.

    “Good enough” is the siren call of convenience. Picture this: You’ve just rolled out of bed, and you’re faced with two breakfast options. Breakfast #1 is a premade smoothie. It’s mediocre at best—mystery berries, more foam than a frat boy’s beer, and nutritional value that’s probably overstated. But hey, it’s there. No work required.

    Breakfast #2? Oh, it’s gourmet bliss—organic fruits and berries, rich Greek yogurt, chia seeds, almond milk, the works. But to get there, you’ll need to fend off orb spiders in your backyard, pick peaches and blackberries, endure the incessant yapping of your neighbor’s demonic Belgian dachshund, and then spend precious time blending and cleaning a Vitamix. Which option do most people choose?

    Exactly. Breakfast #1. The pre-packaged sludge wins, because who has the time for spider-wrangling and kitchen chemistry before braving rush-hour traffic? This is how convenience lures us into complacency. Sure, you sacrificed quality, but look how much time you saved! Eventually, you stop even missing the better option. This process—adjusting to mediocrity until you no longer care—is called attenuation.

    Now apply that to writing. Writing takes effort—a lot more than making a smoothie—and millions of people have begun lowering their standards thanks to AI. Why spend hours refining your prose when the world is perfectly happy to settle for algorithmically generated mediocrity? Polished writing is becoming the artisanal smoothie of communication—too much work for most, when AI can churn out passable content at the click of a button.

    But this is a nightmare for anyone in education. You didn’t sign up for teaching to coach your students into becoming connoisseurs of mediocrity. You had lofty ambitions—cultivating critical thinkers, wordsmiths, and rhetoricians with prose so sharp it could cut glass. But now? You’re stuck in a dystopia where “good enough” is the new gospel, and you’re about as on-brand as a poet peddling protein shakes at a multilevel marketing seminar.

    And there you are, gazing into the abyss of AI-generated essays—each one as lifeless as a department meeting on a Friday afternoon—wondering if anyone still remembers what good writing tastes like, let alone hungers for it. Spoiler alert: probably not.

    This is your challenge, your Everest of futility, your battle against the relentless tide of Mindless Ozempification–the gradual erosion of effort, depth, and self-discipline in any domain—writing, fitness, romance, thought—driven by the seductive promise of fast, frictionless results. Named after the weight-loss drug Ozempic, it describes a cultural shift toward shortcut-seeking, where process is discarded in favor of instant optimization, and the journey is treated as an inconvenience rather than a crucible for growth. 

    Teaching in the Age of Ozempification, life has oh-so-generously handed you this cosmic joke disguised as a teaching mission. So what’s your next move? You could curl up in the fetal position, weeping salty tears of despair into your syllabus. That’s one option. Or you could square your shoulders, roar your best primal scream, and fight like hell for the craft you once worshipped.

    Either way, the abyss is staring back, smirking, and waiting for your next move.

    So what’s the best move? Teach both languages. Show students how to use AI as a drafting tool, not a ghostwriter. Encourage them to treat ChatGPT like a calculator for prose—not a replacement for thinking, but an aid in shaping and refining their voice. Build assignments that require personal reflection, in-class writing, collaborative revision, and multimodal expression—tasks AI can mimic but not truly live. Don’t ban the bot. Co-opt it. Reclaim the standards of excellence by making students chase that gourmet smoothie—not because it’s easy, but because it tastes like something they actually made. The antidote to attenuation isn’t nostalgia or defeatism. It’s redesigning writing instruction to make real thinking indispensable again. If the abyss is staring back, then wink at it, sharpen your pen, and write something it couldn’t dare to fake.

  • Jia Tolentino Explores the Neverending Torments of Infogluttening

    Jia Tolentino Explores the Neverending Torments of Infogluttening

    In her essay “My Brain Finally Broke,” New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino doesn’t so much confess a breakdown as she performs it—on the page, in real time, with all the elegance of a collapsing soufflé. She’s spiraling like a character in a Black Mirror episode who’s accidentally binge-watched the entire internet. Reality, for her, is now an unskippable TikTok ad mashed up with a conspiracy subreddit and narrated by a stoned Siri. She mistakes a marketing email from Hanna Andersson for “Hamas,” which is either a Freudian slip or a symptom of late-stage content poisoning.

    The essay is a dispatch from the front lines of postmodern psychosis. COVID brain fog, phone addiction, weed regret, and the unrelenting chaos of a “post-truth, post-shame” America have fused into one delicious cognitive stew. Her phone has become a weaponized hallucination device. Her mind, sloshing with influencer memes, QAnon-adjacent headlines, and DALL·E-generated nonsense, now processes information like a blender without a lid.

    She hasn’t even gotten to the fun part yet: the existential horror of not using ChatGPT. While others are letting this over-eager AI ghostwrite their résumés, soothe their insecurities, and pick their pad thai, Tolentino stares into the abyss, resisting. But she can’t help wondering—would she be more insane if she gave in and let a chatbot become her best friend, life coach, and menu whisperer? She cites Noor Al-Sibai’s unnerving article about heavy ChatGPT users developing dependency, loneliness, and depression, which sounds less like a tech trend and more like a new DSM entry.

    Her conclusion? Physical reality—the sweaty, glitchy, analog mess of it—isn’t just where we recover our sanity; it’s becoming a luxury few can afford. The digital realm, with its infinite scroll of half-baked horror and curated despair, is devouring us in real time. To have the sticky-like tar of this realm coat your brain is the result of Infogluttening (info + gluttony + sickening)–a grotesque cognitive overload caused by bingeing too much content, too fast, until your brain feels like it’s gorged on deep-fried Wikipedia.

    Tolentino isn’t predicting a Black Mirror future. She is the Black Mirror future, live and unfiltered, and her brain is the canary in the content mine.

  • Languishage: How AI is Smothering the Soul of Writing

    Languishage: How AI is Smothering the Soul of Writing

    Once upon a time, writing instructors lost sleep over comma splices and uninspired thesis statements. Those were gentler days. Today, we fend off 5,000-word essays excreted by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—papers so eerily competent they hit every point on the department rubric like a sniper taking out a checklist. In-text citations? Flawless. Signal phrases? Present. MLA formatting? Impeccable. Close reading? Technically there—but with all the spiritual warmth of a fax machine reading The Waste Land.

    This is prose from the Uncanny Valley of Academic Writing—fluent, obedient, and utterly soulless, like a Stepford Wife enrolled in English 101. As writing instructors, many of us once loved language. We thrilled at the awkward, erratic voice of a student trying to say something real. Now we trudge through a desert of syntactic perfection, afflicted with a condition I’ve dubbed Languishage (language + languish)—the slow death of prose at the hands of polite, programmed mediocrity.

    And since these Franken-scripts routinely slip past plagiarism detectors, we’re left with a queasy question: What is the future of writing—and of teaching writing—in the AI age?

    That question haunted me long enough to produce a 3,000-word prompt. But the more I listened to my students, the clearer it became: this isn’t just about writing. It’s about living. They’re not merely outsourcing thesis statements. They’re outsourcing themselves—using AI to smooth over apology texts, finesse flirtation, DIY their therapy, and decipher the mumbled ramblings of tenured professors. They plug syllabi into GPT to generate study guides, request toothpaste recommendations, compose networking emails, and archive their digital selves in neat AI-curated folders.

    ChatGPT isn’t a writing tool. It’s prosthetic consciousness.

    And here’s the punchline: they don’t see an alternative. In their hyper-accelerated, ultra-competitive, cognitively overloaded lives, AI isn’t a novelty—it’s life support. It’s as essential as caffeine and Wi-Fi. So no, I’m not asking them to “critique ChatGPT” as if it’s some fancy spell-checker with ambition. That’s adorable. Instead, I’m introducing them to Algorithmic Capture—the quiet colonization of human behavior by optimization logic. In this world, ambiguity is punished, nuance is flattened, and selfhood becomes a performance for an invisible algorithmic audience. They aren’t just using the machine. They’re shaping themselves to become legible to it.

    That’s why the new essay prompt doesn’t ask, “What’s the future of writing?” It asks something far more urgent: “What’s happening to you?”

    We’re studying Black Mirror—especially “Joan Is Awful,” that fluorescent, satirical fever dream of algorithmic self-annihilation—and writing about how Algorithmic Capture is rewiring our lives, choices, and identities. The assignment isn’t a critique of AI. It’s a search party for what’s left of us.

  • Sociopathware: When “Social” Media Turns on You

    Sociopathware: When “Social” Media Turns on You

    Reading Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine is like realizing that Black Mirror isn’t speculative fiction—it’s journalism. Seymour depicts our digital lives not as a harmless distraction, but as a propaganda-laced fever swamp where we are less users than livestock—bred for data, addicted to outrage, and stripped of self-agency. Watching sociopathic tech billionaires rise to power makes a dark kind of sense once you grasp that mass digital degradation isn’t a glitch—it’s the business model. We’re not approaching dystopia. We’re soaking in it.

    Most of us are already trapped in Seymour’s machine, flapping like digital pigeons in a Skinner Box—pecking for likes, retweets, or one more fleeting dopamine pellet. We scroll ourselves into oblivion, zombified by clickbait and influencer melodrama. Yet, a flicker of awareness sometimes breaks through the haze. We feel it in our fogged-over thoughts, our shortened attention spans, and our anxious obsession with being “seen” by strangers. We suspect that something inside us is being hollowed out.

    But Seymour doesn’t offer false comfort. He cites a 2015 study in which people attempted to quit Facebook for 99 days. Most couldn’t make it past 72 hours. Many defected to Instagram or Twitter instead—same addiction, different flavor. Only a rare few fully unplugged, and they reported something radical: clarity, calm, and a sudden liberation from the exhausting treadmill of self-performance. They had severed the feed and stepped outside what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls gamification capitalism—a regime where every social interaction is a data point, and every self is an audition tape.

    Seymour’s conclusion is damning: it’s time to retire the quaint euphemism “social media.” The phrase slipped into our cultural vocabulary like a charming grifter—suggesting friendly exchanges over digital lattes. But this is no buzzing café. It’s a dopamine-spewing Digital Skinner Box, where we tap and swipe like lab rats begging for validation. What we’re calling “social” is in fact algorithmic manipulation wrapped in UX design. We are not exchanging ideas—we are selling our attention for hollow engagement while surrendering our behavior to surveillance capitalists who harvest us like ethical-free farmers with no livestock regulations.

    Richard Seymour calls this system The Twittering Machine. Byung-Chul Han calls it gamification capitalism. Anna Lembke, in Dopamine Nation, calls it overstimulation as societal collapse. And thinkers studying Algorithmic Capture say we’ve reached the point where we no longer shape technology—technology shapes us. Let’s be honest: this isn’t “social media.” It’s Sociopathware. It’s addiction media. It’s the slow, glossy erosion of the self, optimized for engagement, monetized by mental disintegration.

    Here’s the part you won’t hear in a TED Talk or an onboarding video: Sociopathware was never designed to serve you. It was built to study you—your moods, fears, cravings, and insecurities—and then weaponize that knowledge to keep you scrolling, swiping, and endlessly performing. Every “like” you chase, every selfie you tweak, every argument you think you’re winning online—those are breadcrumbs in a maze you didn’t design. The longer you’re inside it, the more your sense of self becomes an avatar—algorithmically curated, strategically muted, optimized for appeal. That’s not agency. That’s submission in costume. And the more you rely on these platforms for validation, identity, or even basic social interaction, the more control you hand over to a machine that profits when you forget who you really are. If you value your voice, your mind, and your ability to think freely, don’t let a dashboard dictate your personality.