Content is not the king. It’s a drug.
Dopamine is a chemical secreted in human brain that is pivotal to major brain functions such as movement, thinking, mood, etc. It’s the reason we experience pleasure. But, recent study shows that it also controls seeking behavior. The dopamine secretion is at its peak performance when there are cues — short pieces of information or events that give your brain a sense of craving, making it seek more, creating senseless curiosity in you, like the message tone, the banner alert on your smartphone, or the ‘you-won’t-believe-what-happened-next’ kind of a headline or just a new tweet.
Tristan Harris, a Silicon Valley insider held a cellphone in his hand and said, ‘This thing is a slot machine’. He continued, ‘Well every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see, ‘What did I get?” This is one way to hijack people’s minds and create a habit, to form a habit. What you do is you make it so when someone pulls a lever, sometimes they get a reward, an exciting reward. And it turns out that this design technique can be embedded inside of all these products.’ And he calls it ‘brain hacking.’ (See interview here (read later, not now): http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brain-hacking-tech-insiders-60-minutes/)
Okay, now that we’re fucked anyway and we know that it’s almost impossible to get out of this template-life, I’d like to draw your attention to the morbidly stupid practices that we’ve accustomed ourselves to. In my opinion, the following are few of the things that have gone wrong with humanity in wake of the Internet revolution.
Fetish for violence: In 1989, we lived in a small house in Narayanguda, the heart of the city of Hyderabad. I was seven and life was beautiful. But one evening, I heard a lot of commotion and stepped out in the verandah, to look through the window. My curiosity didn’t meet the desired gratification. Through the window, I saw a man being beaten up by another. The one beating was younger than the victim and he was hitting his face with a brick. He bled. It went on for a long time. The man was beaten and paraded through the street. I do not remember who he was, because I think he had just moved in to the area. Neither did I recognize the perpetrator. Then suddenly, my neighbor, another boy of my age, came by and asked me, ‘Do you know what happened?’ I was about to say I didn’t. But I thought for a brief moment and instantaneously made up an answer. I said I knew. He asked me, ‘Why?’ I looked straight into my friend’s eyes and told him that the guy getting beaten up had falsely accused the guy beating of a theft at their workplace. The kid looked at me and said, ‘Oh, then he probably deserves it.’ But inside, I burned. I writhed in pain. I couldn’t see the man suffer. But, I wanted to feel better. Inside my seven-year-old mind, I wanted to justify the violence. So, I made up a story. A lie. And I passed on that fake justification to my friend. That’s what we do — we seek justification. And we’re not satisfied unless it’s a reasonable explanation that satisfies us and is compliant with our sensibilities. This incident has haunted me forever. I still remember that man’s face, his nose covered in blood. As an adult, I still think the man had a reason strong enough to necessitate a public thrashing and humiliation.
As of 2017, people watch beheading videos, family fights, ghetto fights, Russian dash-cam videos, cctv videos of murders, animal attacks on humans, stabbings and rampages while sipping coffee. And then, like fever with every infection, there’s WhatsApp that only enhances the pain by being a platform for distribution of all the above-mentioned forms of content. Addictive, dopamine-friendly, repetitious content.
Self-improvement bullshit: There are few things more foolish than believing a viral video can inspire you. Inspirational videos that go viral, just like the violent videos, only cause instant gratification. I’ve never met anyone achieve great things after watching an inspirational video on Facebook. That video will bring you tears, but it will not solve your problems or motivate you to do things. But it will definitely do something — make you watch more such videos, especially if you aren’t in a great mood. Or you’ve hit a rough patch.
There is only one way to self-improve. It’s the hard way. By reading (books), hard work and discipline. That’s not changing anytime soon. Did I mention books?
Listicles: Imagine the internet to be a bathtub full of shit. At the bottom of the bucket, is a layer that can only be removed by an iron scraper. That material is what listicles are all about. 10-ways-to-do-this, 14-things-you-didn’t-know, 8-types-of-ringworm-affecting-your-genitals and so on. My problem with these people is that they are highly presumptuous. The brazen arrogance of the articles that say, ‘XYZ you-didn’t-know’ is just unbelievable. Once in a while, these bad grocery list-writers must pull their head out of their ass and look at the real world. I’m not urging them to be humble. That would take a brain surgery. They just have to sound less stupid.
Oh, and the click-baiting that comes with this filth has to die a gory death. Making a listicle titled ‘top-30-types-of-dental-problems-with-pictures’ that you have to scroll horizontally, while encountering ads every three scrolls is just not making the cut anymore. It’s time we cut through the bullshit. The image at No. 1, that will appear after 40 scrolls is not worth your time. It’s just feeding the instant-pleasure-seeking corners of your brain.
Health-related articles: I am fucking tired of reading uncertified, unsubstantiated propaganda about health. An internet page called ‘I fucking love science’, a page I have been a great fan of, recently published an article that said coconut oil is as harmful as beef fat. Fuck IFLS. Purely on basis of personal experience, as a person who comes from middle-class India, I can tell you that it is just a propaganda article. If any of my Malayali friend’s mother reads that article, she is going to rip the research to shreds and set IFLS off on a journey in search of some integrity.
Show me two articles that agree on diet and I will show you a unicorn that solves Sudoku. Diet, diabetes, gluten, baldness, dairy, back pain, sleep, sugar, carbohydrates, cholesterol, or pick any of these buzzwords. There is too much inconsistency in the content available today. Guess what, the best person to ask if you have any questions about these topics is still your doctor — a profession which still is accountable and stands strongly on pillars of integrity, barring a minority, which happens in every other profession. The internet health-based-content writers have a porn window open in the background while they’re typing it. Who will you trust?
Advertisements: Advertising was so much fun. It used to bring about a sense of excitement. I remember having a collection of rare commercials and print ads on my home computer in 2003 which I used to admire. Today, if you want to read a news article, as soon as you land on their page, they throw a full-page subscription ad that blocks your view. And won’t close until you click something. Then while reading the article an ad scrolls along with you — bottom or top. Once you get rid of that motherfucker, there are video ads that start playing automatically and loudly. And then they fold the article into parts and you have to ‘click’ again to ‘read more’. What did they think? We only want to read half the article? And the ads as such are of depressing nature, undermining human intelligence to the fullest extent. The last time an internet-advertising guy displayed a shred of intelligence, Google didn’t know about your itching problem.
What Google Ads, Facebook Ads and so many other things including how there’s no such thing as privacy anymore, is a larger discussion for some other day.
I understand, every business needs money. And advertising is the sole revenue stream for many organizations. I don’t say that people should stop running ads on their websites. Just do it elegantly. Without causing a pain in the ass. If you’re going to throw a Ford ad on my face every time I open a website, I might come back to that website, but I’ll never buy a Ford.
As time passes, the quality, purpose and accuracy of content is declining. But the quantity is rising fast. Day in and day out, there are hundreds of thousands of articles dished out with the sole purpose of assaulting your critical thinking ability. And all of us (with some exceptions), the entire internet-using, template-life livers are marching up fast to the top of a cliff. And there’s no ‘END’ sign there. It’s high time we control the amount of bullshit we have to deal with every day. Bit by bit, filter out material that increases the death toll of your original thoughts.
I know, even this article is ‘content’. But there was no other way. That’s just the beginning of the ironic conundrum we’ve gotten ourselves into.
The Internet is a place where millions of corporations are battling for your eyeballs. Just take your eyes away and all they have is …
— Deepak Karamungikar
