It explains why this guys father ended up voting against his interests. But it also explains why this guy reporting on it ends up completely missing the point, and why the masses reading his article will probably agree with him.
They want to be deceived. They want to keep using social media, even knowing it’s rotting their brains away. Social media users are like any other addicts, except that your neighbourhood heroinists don’t spend their days gobbling up misinformation and hot takes.
That’s the main reason what we’re doing on the social web is so radical. Sure, we’re not on a platform that can be owned by billionaires, and that’s of course cool enough. But much more than that, we don’t take part in the attention economy at all. We accept the problem for what it is and we’re willing to commit to an alternative.
And that’s why I don’t give a fuck if everyone is on Bluesky. I’m sticking to Mastodon precisely because it’s not a fucking high precision attention magnet designed to suck in the masses. Anyone who doesn’t see the fundamental problem of the attention economy at this point wants to be deceived, and they’re dragging us all down with them.
It’s such a classic problem, the Latin phrase has a Wikipedia page:
The world wants to be deceived.
It explains why this guys father ended up voting against his interests. But it also explains why this guy reporting on it ends up completely missing the point, and why the masses reading his article will probably agree with him.
They want to be deceived. They want to keep using social media, even knowing it’s rotting their brains away. Social media users are like any other addicts, except that your neighbourhood heroinists don’t spend their days gobbling up misinformation and hot takes.
That’s the main reason what we’re doing on the social web is so radical. Sure, we’re not on a platform that can be owned by billionaires, and that’s of course cool enough. But much more than that, we don’t take part in the attention economy at all. We accept the problem for what it is and we’re willing to commit to an alternative.
And that’s why I don’t give a fuck if everyone is on Bluesky. I’m sticking to Mastodon precisely because it’s not a fucking high precision attention magnet designed to suck in the masses. Anyone who doesn’t see the fundamental problem of the attention economy at this point wants to be deceived, and they’re dragging us all down with them.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk and all that.