We Are All Laboratory Rats

I have always had a jaundiced eye towards social media. First off, sites such as Instagram and Facebook are clearly anti-social capitalising as they do on a very human desire to seek approval from our tribe. An evolutionary quirk that worked well when we lived in small groups but quickly became our downfall when the pool of people to whom we can compare ourselves expanded into the millions. In that environment, there will always be someone richer, more beautiful, stronger, sexier, with a better house, car, pool, holiday, life, than you, and the more comparisons you make the less desirable your own life becomes.

Second, as highlighted in the movie The Social Dilemma, all this media to which we have become addicted - a not too strong word for some users - is really about the capitalists who run the world convincing you that more stuff is what you need. And it is truly amazing how the laboratory rats running around the internet (us) have become so thoroughly immersed in the world of social media that, as we pull the levers which reward us, we come to believe that this is the real world and we are independently functioning thinkers.

Yesterday I listened to an episode of Tina Muir's Running For Real podcast and was struck once again by how we have, in a modern day example of Stockholm Syndrome, come to identify intimately with our captors. Tina has laudable ambitions to only partner with "brands we totally trust" (sic) and so the advertising liberally interspersed throughout the episode highlighted how Tina personally uses the product she is hawking. As I listened to the podcast, I suffered through several highly personalised - and no doubt profoundly effective - advertising spiels. After all, Tina brags on her website that she will "sell your product with fierce passion."

In one advertisement, Tina begins by telling us she "literally has their sunglasses all over my house" and then continues by extolling the virtues of Goodr Sunglasses who are committed to "1% for the planet" and "carbon neutrality." But here is the thing Tina, and other listeners/readers, if you really want to do something for the planet how about having ONE pair of sunglasses. Because clearly, if we are all like Tina and have dozens of pairs of sunglasses 1% and carbon neutrality will make fuck all difference. This is merely capitalism virtue signalling. And, while I am on the topic, who in their right mind, has a brand they totally trust. A brand is a capitalist organisation that wants to sell you something.

The third and most troubling thing about our collective inability to distinguish the real world from the internet world is that activism - about climate, social justice, environmental protection - now takes place in the make believe world of social media. Here, we wear an armband in support of Black Lives Matter or we dedicate a mile of running to a person of colour, we post about it on all our social media channels, congratulate ourselves on being part of the solution, and get back to our real job in the modern world, consuming. Stockholm Syndrome has so completely taken over our lives that the capitalists running modern media have managed to turn our subversive acts back on ourselves. We are rewarded for taking pretend action which is no action at all. Our job as consumers continues unabated.

Noam Chomsky wrote "we are a society dominated by business interests. There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment. Consumption distracts people. You can not control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption."

Engineers define an elegant solution as one which solves the problem in the simplest most effective manner possible. That solution is within the grasp of every single one of us in the modern world, it costs nothing, and has the power to make us truly free. The catch is, we must all take this step together.