Near-constant crash out levels of anxiety
Some successful people never actually interface with twitter/X/social media directly. They have "virtual" assistants, who are hired remotely from places like the Philippines that use their apps for them. Tim Ferris doesn't actually use X himself - he's aware of the psychic damage that it can cause.
He sends a message to his virtual assistant. His virtual assistant logs onto his account and makes the post for him.
Trump, one of the most famous tweeters, doesn't actually use his phone to post. He just friendly-yells it at one of his assistants, they write it out, and he reads it over and approves it. He's too busy to use social media apps. The business prevents him from getting hacked by the sea of engineers working together to mouse trap him into behavioural cycles.
I am a youtube power user. I'm good at watching videos. But the product is slowly getting filled up with mouse traps. Each short, a mouse trap. When I issue a search, I get 2 pages of shorts before I see any videos that I might have actually searched for. Looking up a meme on google search has a row element has 8 shorts.
They're holding information hostage. They're forcing me to walk through the shorts. They're forcing me to decide. Would a drug addict be able to avoid his dealer's house, if it was on the way back from work?
They have a monopoly on the network, the brand, and the infrastructure. You need to use it. You're not going to find any useful videos off of youtube. It's a good service - it takes engineers, effort, land and power to run these systems. You should pay for it. I pay for youtube and other social media platforms. But my eyes are my eyes man. And I'm tired of getting mindfucked.
It's not just that they have the cheese behind the dopaminergic mouse traps. There is no cheese anywhere else.
You're being forced to look
But what if you send a robot mouse to get the cheese?
The urgency
I feel urgency. I’m an aunt, and they’re growing up fast. My nephew figured out that I use the remote to put on Jeremy Fieldings and Smarter Every Day on the TV when i visit. I might be just barely capable of avoiding youtube shorts, and other brainjacking content - but would a child?
I'm aware of how smart they are. Babies, children. 1 year olds are capable of using computers, a keyboard and mouse. Kids are smarter than what most of us afford them. Most people don't remember what it was like to be a kid.
I don't want my nephew or niece to fall prey to them. The demonic engineers that work on converting children into addicts. I don't want them to see me use my computer as a consumer, rather than a creator.
I'm panicking. I panic, because I'm aware of how well this works. I'm panicking because they are doomed - unless I do something about it.
We have the technology
It would honestly be somewhat trivial to build something that does a single action. At the limit, Tim Ferris's virtual assistant get taught a set of common tasks that he needs done. You can think of each of these as a "function", or a unix program. A program, that does one thing and does it well. These can be distributed with some program, shared among users that have to do common tasks.
The technology can be completely open source. It doesn't even need to make any money. It's more the idea - the idea that you shouldn't use closed source proprietary software that you don't control.
And if each function is simple; they can be easily maintained and updated in case they break. You just need the infrastructure to support them, and the marketing to share it among folks.
How much more can they push ordinary people around, until they revolt?
