The Social Media App is the Massage
~Note: I need to add the 19 images from Instagram to this essay later. The point of this is that I have adapted Marshall McLuhan's teachings to all of us being terminally online in America
I've just been a recluse. We have a 2nd backyard garden at our house now. It's coming along nicely. Limes, pear trees, squash, and more. But the main thing is I'm consuming and writing constantly. Watching, listening, reading, theorizing. The 20 image slides you see here are a media ecology
Let's cut to the chase: We're all being brainwashed on social media. You may swear that you're not terminally online. But let me flesh this out, with some history
Boomers sat in front of the television for 6 hours a night, totally transfixed by the cowboy Western shows and Home on the Prairie on the small living room screens. Eating family dinner, parents and children zoned out. Fast forward to the 2020s, and 6 hours is the average daily screentime of viewing ultra-content on our smartphones. These aren't just silly little apps
World of Warcraft addicts in the 2000s would grind for 72 hours straight to level up in the game. They were basement dwellers, but it was their vocation, if you think about the in-game currency.
Vitalik Buterin was big into WoW, and its economy inspired him to create Ethereum – 2nd highest market cap in crypto, Bitcoin is the top.
Everything on our TV, at the movie theater, on our iPhones is really meant to advertise to us, make us spend money on shit we don't need, or look high status. In the boomer days they called that “Keeping Up With The Joneses”
Or the government manipulates media to convince men to join the army. The propaganda has been here all along. I have some other childhood stories related to that, for another time
You've seen 5th Generation Warfare on Instagram Reels, Twitter, or Reddit now. Combat footage from the Ukraine War, the hell on earth that is Palestine after the IDF killed 680,000 innocent civilians
I know geopolitics and economics pretty well. We're fucked. Most Americans are in a metaphorical psychosis because of the Charlie Kirk assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald took over the news by killing JFK In the same way
Conspiracy theories have something to them. The CIA and Pentagon's DARPA control our minds. They admitted the LSD experiments of MK Ultra were real. Wake up, sheeple.