Infinite Scrolling, Artificial Vibes, and the New Meta
one day while I had been scrolling on social media for a while, I began to get this creeping sense of unease and melancholy that I couldn’t really explain, so I dismissed it and just kept scrolling. eventually, I hit a point where I just couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to throw my phone across the room. I finally closed the app and put my phone down. freed from distractions for the moment, I paused to try and figure out what had happened for me to get to that place—I felt crummy and didn’t feel like doing anything besides veg out and wallow in that crummy feeling.
this wasn’t the first time I had been down this road, and in the past I had tried setting app time limits and even went so far as to delete the app, account and all. but even on those days when I would end up feeling like crap, there was always something in the back of my mind saying, “it’s not all bad.” I’d ignore the time limit. redownload the app. recover my account before the 30-day deletion. I would think about the ways I would use the app for constructive things like brushing up on my Spanish or discovering underground music. I’ve even had days where I felt like I was on top of the world and nothing could stop me, after my feed had spewed motivational/ affirmation content at me.
it was really starting to sink in how much the content I was consuming was impacting me, able to manipulate my emotions. I was repulsed by the fact that I was being manipulated in this way, by an algorithm, by computer code. add to that the fact that ai generated content was beginning to permeate the content being consumed, and the idea of being manipulated by synthetic creations left an especially bad taste in my mouth.
“the technology itself is not bad, it’s a matter of how it’s used,” was the mindset that led me to think that there’s gotta be some way to get to the things that are additive, and avoid the stuff that’s subtractive. a way to resist and to manipulate the algorithm to my advantage. this put me at a crossroad: as a futurist — as someone who looks forward to how technology will advance — I see a tool, but as a person — someone that values their sovereignty — I’m disgusted and want to do away with all of it.
so, as is increasingly becoming the norm, I threw this idea into an LLM (to me, a brainstorming tool, to some, the cause of cognitive atrophy) to explore if this could become a sort of meta skill — an essential ability that helps us navigate fast-changing digital spaces — that we develop to adapt in this day and age of technology: what I’d call algorithmic resistance/ influence. building on that idea, there is also another layer — AI is increasingly becoming an influential actor in our online interactions. so how do we adapt to this? this led me to a second meta skill — authentic emotional resonance (aka the vibe check) — a way to discern real human interactions from synthetic mimicry of human interactions. case in point: during my back-and-forth with the LLM, at one point it hit me with a “LMAO nah,” and I was so put off by it that I closed the app for the rest of the day. it was an attempt to be more relatable, like we were having a laugh together.
that right there is the real risk — what happens when we attach ourselves to synthetic relationships that simulate our humanity, while our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are manipulated at the whim of some lines of code? it’s easy to imagine ending up with something that looks dystopian: performance-optimized identities, cultural hegemony and flattening, curated versions of the truth. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we’re approaching fast. how do we navigate this kind of world — not just resigning ourselves to an ill fate, or just hoping it’ll magically go away?
we are being called to reclaim our digital sovereignty.