…So I Decided To Go Blind.
I was caught in traffic on my way to work the other day.
Already several days late in my preparation for a talk I was supposed to give, I was beginning to hyperventilate. I really needed time to prepare, and what better time to let loose the faucet of ideas than when you’re stuck in the super-famous, super-ugly gridlock Lagos tends to churn out daily?
Right.
Like every peace-loving citizen of the Republic, I instead decided to kill the time by scrolling through my social media feed. Which led me to the website of the Greatest Custodian of information as it pertains to the quintessential Nigerian.
What I am trying to say is: somehow somehow I started reading Linda Ikeji.
There was news of someone being burnt to death on some street in Lagos. That’s disgusting, I thought. The pictures would upset me; I don’t want to look at those images.
So I did what every rational human being would do and spent the rest of the trip…looking at THOSE IMAGES.
THE MAN WAS BURNT TO A CRISP, GUYS. AND THEY JUST KEPT BURNING HIM. AND HIS TEETH WERE WHITE IN CONTRAST WITH HIS BODY, WHICH WAS BLACK ON ACCOUNT OF ALL THAT FIRE FROM THE SMOLDERING TYRES. AND SOMEONE KEPT TAKING PHOTOS LIKE IT WAS A CASUAL PAPARAZZI DAY IN VENICE.
It made me think. Why do I continue to look at the things I really don’t want to look at? I have a mountain of things I need to study, to prepare for, to report on, things I need to have a look at, but my eyes insist on betraying me: God, I hope to never count the number of hours I waste on Twitter, or on YouTube, or looking at the same old gifs on your favorite listicle website.
Why do I sabotage myself so? If you’re like me, you’re wondering too.
Of all my five senses, the sense of sight is the one that tends to get compromised easily — the drunken guard of my information centre, letting ANYTHING BRIGHT AND SHINY AND WEIRD through. Am I merely indisciplined, or…is there some grand conspiracy at play here?
Exploring a Conspiracy
Indulge me.
Imagine for a bit that there’s a market out there that deals in a different form of currency. That currency is called ‘eyeballs.’
Human Eyeballs.
Every time you look at a tweet, play a video, read a post, take a quiz or scroll through a gallery, you are paying in eyeballs.
Imagine that somewhere out there, there are people in this market, right now, buying and selling human eyeballs. They will go through any lengths to have more of your eyeballs. They spend nights looking at charts, studying data and spending actual, green money, on working out ways to hijack your eyeballs for more…well, eyeball currency.
But why do they need my eyeballs, oh God, you ask?
Imagine that there is another group of people who, on demand, buy a truckload of eyeballs from our eyeball-research-guys (let’s call them the Eyeball Milkers). These guys have a lot of money and they sell a lot of crap and when they want people to buy the crap, they buy a lot of eyeballs from the Eyeball Milkers.
Imagine that this conspiracy exists: a bunch of people are conniving to have you look less and less at what you want to look at and more and more at what they want you to look at.
You’d better imagine it. Because this conspiracy isn’t one of those far-fetched ones.
This one is true.
Consider the sketch above. The Eyeball Milkers (the blue house) create something designed to catch your attention, like sugar for ants (the ‘Eye Grabber’) and the more you look, the more successful the blue house gets.
The anonymous buyers buy these eyeballs because it’s useful to them. Anyone who can pack a ton of eyeballs controls you. They tell you what to see, and how to react and they become your compasses in this world. They take this hold they have on you and sell it to strongmen with capitalistic intent. These men then use the eyeballs they have purchased to push their own agenda upon you (luckily most of them just want you to buy a new Chinese phone, not go on a killing spree. Well, more often than not.)
You are all too familiar with this idea, I’m sure. People tend to call it ‘marketing’.
Note that whenever a new media platform is created (a new social network, a new vlog, etc), they are betting that they can take more of your time. The message may be wrapped in something as noble as ‘redefining how people consume content in Africa/Asia/any convenient continent’ but it’s the same thing.
They are betting on taking more of your eyeballs.
*Cue the eerie soundtrack, preferably something from Enya*
I am willing to bet that this generation (where this generation = the generation after the one that started with Nokia 3310) has more knowledge of trivia than any before it.
You know about 1,000 phobias, complete with their correct spellings :) good for you.
I find myself knowing things that, for the life of me, I shouldn’t know. Nor do I want to know. It’s no big deal, I am sure, but I am getting increasingly nervous about the debris in my brain when I still don’t know half of what I actually need to know.
So I decided to go blind
I have begun to actively curate my content list and categorize the things I consume. It’s tempting to suck on the candy of a Mannequin Challenge, a Daily Show video with Trevor Noah, or some random pointless listicle, but in this game of numbers, it’s stack-on-stack until I realize months of my already-short lifespan have been eaten up by dank memes.
So.
I have begun the interesting task of thinning out my Twitter account — muting extraneous accounts, filtering out words — and only reading things pertaining to my career (with side dishes in things that I should know, like the political state of America, Russia and China. And, perhaps, idk, Nigeria.)
I am curating the people I talk with. More learning, less teaching. One must learn to always be learning.
It’s me deliberately enforcing tunnel vision, because the end of the tunnel is the most interesting thing anyway — and why is anyone putting cat memes on tunnel walls?
I am TheVunderkind on Twitter.
All illustrations supplied by obaranda.com.
