Flow State

I’m only partway through the episode, but the story had already gone in a direction that made my head hurt.

Before he even got to the Spotify part, he was explaining how his company used to “hack” social media platforms for clients. Their job wasn’t security hacking—it was attention hacking. They figured out ways to manipulate the systems that decide what goes viral, what gets likes, and what gets pushed into people’s feeds.

One example stuck with me. They would hide “like” or “follow” buttons inside image carousels. You’d click on a picture, thinking you were just flipping to the next photo. Instead, the click secretly followed some random page they were promoting on Facebook, or triggered a YouTube video playing in the background to inflate the view count. Then, when you clicked again, the image would finally change as you expected.

You never even knew you’d been used.

And that’s just one trick.

On top of that, there are the algorithms that decide who goes viral on YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok—systems that can be manipulated by companies, influencers, or even the platforms themselves.

Then layer in the bots.

Bots generating engagement.

Bots amplifying outrage.

Bots pushing political agendas.

Bots pretending to be real people arguing with each other.

Add in PR firms, marketing agencies, and even governments that deliberately stir controversy because outrage spreads faster than truth. At some point you start wondering: how much of what I’m seeing online is even real?

I see it happening to blogs I used to enjoy. Sites that used to be thoughtful have slowly turned into clickbait factories. Rage bait. Headlines designed to make you angry enough to click. They don’t care if they leave the internet a little worse than they found it. They just want the traffic.

And honestly, I’m tired of playing in that ecosystem.

So I’m opting out. No bots. No shady tricks designed to make me follow something I didn’t choose. No manipulated “viral” moments. No algorithm pushing outrage into my day.

There’s a line from the movie WarGames where the computer finally realizes something about nuclear war strategy.

“The only winning move is not to play.”

That’s kind of where I am with most social media. I’m just not playing anymore.

One of the nice things about running my own blog is that there’s no algorithm deciding what you see. No bots trying to game the system. No engagement tricks.

It’s just words on a page.

If you happen to stop by and read them, great.

If not, that’s fine too.

At least it’s real.

(While some might claim this is novel and we live in some particularly shitty information era, I could’ve used “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” from the movie Network back from 1976.  I think this is just a continued slide, but not fundamentally different)