Soliloquys

What happens when you see the blue pill for what it is? When you realise that Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future has been weirdly perverted?

The journey of getting hooked onto a social network begins by us buying an expensive device called a phone. We purchase it off our own volition, agree to terms and conditions.
Sign away our rights willingly (click agree).
Then every day we log onto the Network, we freely give up our data (name, age, identity, banking details, likes, dislikes etc) and, most egregiously, we give up our time, our lives too exist in a virtual reality – a simulation.
Then we allow that world to form the bulk of our lived experience.

Having read Digital Minimalism in 2019 and been an avid user of social media platforms for the past decade, I must say – social media and its interconnectivity is now becoming very detrimental to psychosocial development and human interaction.
Not only that, but what started off as a useful tool (SM), now controls the master.

The global pandemic of 2020 (COVID-19) has given me pause. In particular because of the disinformation we see online.
I have had to purge my Facebook timeline and unfriended many a person who insist on spreading lies (yes, lies) on the platform.
Some people might say, why don’t you push back. Why don’t you use your knowledge to be a fount of knowledge on the app?

The truth is; I’m tired. I really have neither the patience nor emotional fortitude to spend hours of my days trying to dissuade a person who thinks making medical decisions based on dubious YouTube and MemeGenerator imagery is normal.

They have fallen into the System and are allowing the malware in it to infect them.
The fundamental problem is not disinformation or propaganda:
It is allowing oneself to be erased, one’s own critical thinking subverted, one’s desires to be moulded by a network and one’s neural pathways to be rewired by internet companies with only one singular interest:
Monetising your life and the time you have by giving you brief Dopamine boosts.

We, as a species, have been enslaved to the system.
Enslaved to the “social” network.

The time has come when we must choose: Do we continue taking the anodyne that numbs our cognition – the blue pill, and ignore how hooked up to the Matrix we are?

Or do we take the red pill, and choose to see reality for what it is?