 The reason that social media has become so popular, so ubiquitous in our society, is because it is tapped into something so perfectly about our psychology. But is that always good? Let's find out. The answer is no, but to get into it, now everyone nowadays is complaining about social media. Especially people who use it all the time. This vexes me, but we'll talk about that in a second. But let's be clear about social media. Social media, whatever its intentions originally were, is a machine for programming you. Nowadays people talk about NPCs. A lot of NPCs out there. NPCs, they don't just come from network news, they come from social media. Now there's one term you need to learn, and that is the concept of upcomies. What is an upcomie? It is a like. It is a share. It is a subscribe. It is a retweet. It is whatever you get on these sites. And this is the most powerful thing in the world, because it taps in, as I said, to something very deep about your psychology. Now in real life, when you are with friends, you're talking, there's a sense in which you are always assessing what people think about what you say. Now this isn't necessarily bad, but you're always saying, okay, did this person like this joke? Was this person, how does this person feel about that? Stuff like that. This is a natural part of life. And it's something we do every day. We think about what our friends think, we think about how other people think. Now it's not like that is the only determinant of what happens in your life, because you are an individual. You have your own ideas, you have your own likes and dislikes, and you are yourself. That's how it is. Your friends' opinions are not everything. But social media, it taps into this social acceptance framework. And it does something very pernicious. It makes liking and disliking things official. You can now get an official upcoming if someone likes your content or shares your content. And now it is measurable. For example, if you tell a joke and it gets 20 likes on Facebook, and your friend tells a joke and it gets 50 likes on Facebook, you feel, okay, that person's doing something right. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I need to adjust what I'm doing. Or if you have a political opinion and you say that and you get 20 likes and they get 50 likes, okay, maybe I should think about that opinion. You subtly think that. You don't say, maybe I should have, you don't in your brain say, well, maybe I should think what they think, so I will be more popular. There's a sense in which you are being programmed by the like function. And you're literally a kind of Pavlovian dog. You salivate to upcomies. When you get those upcomies, even if you're not overtly thinking about it, you are gradually becoming more similar to your friends. This isn't like in real life because everything is official. It is objective and measurable in the form of likes and shares and stuff like this. Now, if you want to see this compared, like how big a difference this makes, you can actually look at different site cultures. Now, most websites nowadays are upcoming based. Now, one out there is Reddit. So you upvote people. If they say things you like, you downvote them if they say things you don't like. And then if you're really popular, you'll get to the front page. That's a big deal on Reddit. Now, another site that often gets compared with Reddit is 4chan. 4chan works very differently. It is one of the few sites on the internet that is not upcoming based. On 4chan, the post that shows up on the front page is just whatever the most recent post is. So if you want to create a thread that gets on the front page of 4chan, you just need to make something inflammatory that someone will respond to, that someone will troll you on. So the site culture of 4chan infamously is based on counter signaling. It's based on creating arguments and trolling and stuff like this. This is the site culture of 4chan. And it's based on the fact that threads show up based on reply time. Now, every other site, like Reddit, like Twitter, like Facebook, a lot. Well, you know, some things are time-based, but the more upcoming you get, the more likely you are to get a larger and larger and larger audience. You're going to feel good about that post in a way that you can't feel good about a post on 4chan, especially because it's anonymous anyway. So that's what happens. And again, site culture is a function of this functionality. And in a world where every site is now consensus-based, more and more people are being programmed. They are becoming NPCs. They're becoming people who they might not be overtly thinking, oh, I have to believe what everyone else is believing. But they get constant incentives slowly moving them to a kind of bell curve, kind of political belief or social belief or just personal disposition, sense of humor. Everything is becoming normalized. People are becoming identical. They are no longer individuals. And frankly, they're boring. As someone who has never really used social media, it is very easy to tell who has versus has never used social media. It is like night and day. The people who use it, the people who are addicted to it, even though they know that they hate it and they feel like they want to get away with it, get away from it, they're just, I don't want to say they're all boring, but there's a tendency to be more boring, more consensus-driven. Now the funny thing about this, two more points. I want to talk about social media manipulation. I'll talk about that in a second. But before that, I want to talk about a weird kind of comment that I get. I get people sending me emails or comments saying, I'm on social media, but I want to quit. I can't do it. I'm addicted to social media. And this is very interesting. I mean, I've always found this very interesting because, you know, my perspective is you could just quit, just walk away from the screen. You know what I mean? But I understand one thing that's very annoying about social media is that it makes you feel like you need it because you are getting a constant trickle of dopamine, even if you're not getting a lot of upcomies, you're getting a constant trickle of dopamine, of pleasure. When you're scrolling down your feed and you feel like you're learning something new, oh, look at this video. You know, a man made a lawnmower, made out of crocodile skin. Wow, that's so interesting. You know, you find these things that make you feel like you're learning something. Like, you feel like you're investing your time well. You're slowly hauling down your feed. And, you know, as for how to overcome that addiction, aside from forcing yourself to do it, I, to be honest, do not know, other than just replace it with getting out in the real world. That's all I can say. But I will admit that is a thing. And it's really one of the reasons why people use these sites. It's not because they get enormous amounts of pleasure. They just get this constant state of, I feel okay when I'm going through my feed. And if you feel that, you should not panic, but sort of, you know, jolt yourself out of it. Because that is the most dangerous. It's not having a bunch of fun on social media that draws people to it. It is that catatonic state where your brain is basically asleep and you're just sort of sucking in the programming. That is the most pernicious part. Now, as I mentioned before, there's one other aspect that people are talking about recently. And that is social media manipulation. That is, this was something that was going to happen inevitably. But it now happens quite openly and overtly. Now, what I mean by that is there are a lot of these people who run social media sites, who now run them for their own social, political, financial interests. And they do it quite overtly nowadays. Now, back in the day, let me give you an example from a non-social media site. I used to use this odious site 10 years ago. I'm embarrassed to say this. I used to use this odious site, Google News. Terrible site. And it's a terrible site because it does allow some customization of it. For example, if I want to learn about India, if I want to see news articles from India, I can select the topic India and I can create a news feed that has that and all the other topics I want. But there's one thing I can't change. And that is at the very top of Google News, the Google News feed, there's one thing everyone has to have. And that is the Google, I forget what they call it. It's either trending or like Google's picks for news. That's basically it. That is at the very top, there have to be three or four articles that are just the topics that Google wants you to see. Not just topics, but the particular editorial stances that Google wants you to see. And their objective there is to prime your... They're not telling you Orange Man bad or something. They're not telling you what to think. Their objective is to program you or prime your brain with something to process everything else you see that day. That is supposed to be the background radiation to everything else. Now this happens the same way in sites like Twitter now. For example, on Twitter, if you go to trending topics or if you go to hashtags, pretty much the first thing that comes up is not some post on Twitter, but a particular news article. I think sometimes they're chosen algorithmically by some kind of algorithm or something. But a lot of times it is simply a news article that Twitter has approved. They have said, okay, this is the editorial stance that we want out there. And this is so dangerous. Again, they're not saying believe this or believe that or Orange Man bad or anything. They're just priming your brain. They're putting out a news article title. And mind you, every single news article title is propaganda. Most people just read the title. And you can put in a title that is technically false but you can get away with it a whole lot of times. You can, you know, oh, I'm just abbreviating. If you read the article, it's a little more complex. You can get away with that kind of slimy stuff if you're a journalist, because these people can get away with any kind of slimy stuff. Because, well anyway, so you can do this kind of stuff and Twitter will end up manipulating what you think without even telling you overtly what to believe. And even if you're someone who sees that kind of stuff and says, oh, it's all propaganda. It's all garbage. I don't care. You know, this is all fake news. Even if you're one of those kind of people, even the things you say, once you see that article, your responses are going to be calibrated to that. It is still priming your brain. You are still responding to it. You're fighting on their turf. And, you know, I'm putting this in political terms, but even aside from political terms, just pretty much anything is going to be manipulated. I mean, the political arena is a high stakes area, but this is true in really any other kind of area as well. That is, these social media sites will manipulate you to push you to products they like. If you go to Amazon, basically all the Amazon pics or things that they have special relationships with, everything is manipulated. Now, I think that's about it. Now, I think everyone, again, hates social media. If you're using it, just stop using it. It's easy. I'll tell you, the water is fine away from social media. I've survived so long without it, and you're doing the world of service by leaving this stuff. The less people we have reliant on it, the better we will be. So I encourage you to quit it right now. Just stop using it. You don't need the upcomies. Real life has upcomies. You can get all the upcomies you want in real life. It is much more real. It is much more enjoyable. See, I'm just having fun out here in the forest with my think pad on my back. Anyway, so I'll see you guys next time. You can give this video, ironically, an upcomie if you want, but I don't think likes actually matter on YouTube, but at least I don't pay attention to them. So that's about it, and I will see you guys next time.