People say to me… Michael, when are you going to go on one of your patented rants? (Smile… here we go.) Some of you who just started liking me will probably stop after this one.

Almost all of you will read this little column on some form of device. I mean, I don’t reckon any of you will print this off for your grandma or that it will ever end up in a physical book made of paper. It’s an interesting time in the history of the world. And here I am writing original content for a people who hardly read anymore.

This one will sound like I’m complaining but I’m not. Just explaining.

My little articles… well, with literally tens of likes I have to keep myself motivated to keep doing them. Just like with the Logic and Reason lessons I posted on Facebook and on my website for years. Frankly, I’m not very motivated to do much on social media at all since every day that world morphs more and more into a bottomless pit. And now every social media platform bombards every user with TikTok-like videos within the first three to five posts on their feed. These little video interruptions are a mind-suck even worse than the meme-pit you usually experience.

I’ve already lost about 80% of the people who read the first paragraph. So, for the rest of you, here is a social media lesson…

Memes are programming chips for stupid people. But these new insta-video streams are the quicksand we were afraid of in the 70s and 80s. This might seem complicated but that’s because your brain has been muddled by social media. Stick with me.

For someone who actually creates and provides original content and who isn’t a meme-mill or meme-bot, “likes” are not about personal validation or satisfaction. They do not provide my self-worth. They are actually a very technical and integral part of the social media algorithm involving how many people see content and what content you see. If you want to see more of someone’s content or more of a particular kind of content, then the LIKE button indicates to the system what you want. In a community sense, when more people hit the “like” button because they want to see more of a particular type of content, then the algorithm actually shows that content to more people. If you have thousands of friends and follows, but very few of them ever interact with your content, very few of those people actually see the content when it is posted. But say… 100 people read it and hit “like,” then hundreds and hundreds more will see it. So, here’s the rub…

You are what you “like.”

When you read original content and don’t interact with it, you are effectively killing it AND you are indicating to the content creator that you don’t want them to continue to spend the hours/minutes/seconds of their life producing that content.

Social media algorithms are designed to disincentivize original thinking. Or any thinking.

Ironically, (or I guess in a meta sort of way,) lots of “likes” and “shares” generally (not always, but almost always) indicate that the content is unoriginal or banal, requires very little thinking, and produces no resistance or challenge to the narrative. (This column is the exception. Bless you for reading this far. Keep up the good work.)

This occurred to me the other day when altogether maybe fifty people interacted with me LIVE and in person about one of my Brownwood columns… PMs, emails, real people walking up to me in person and talking to me about reading them and appreciating them. I was stoked! But on the actual social media post, the content itself got a handful of “likes.” What this means:

People read it and liked it but didn’t interact with it and therefore killed it.

This column will be submitted to BrownwoodNews dot com and to share it I’ll need to link to it on social media. Or you can just hit the share button here on the column. But, here is what happens. Liking and sharing real, original content is great (you should totally do it,) but the social media giants HATE long-form prose articles. They hate it.

Check this out for an ironical crap-storm… A series I wrote recently and distributed on social media is about how the system is (and has been) intentionally destroying thinking for decades. That program has been massively accelerated since the pandemic started.

Now, if I were to provide a link to those articles, then the social media algorithm will detect the link and kill its distribution. Sites like Facebook do not want people going off-world to actually read something. Instead they want me to upload some mindless short content they can “own”, or to just pass along a meme that feeds the ego or attacks a straw man or anesthetizes the conscience. If I upload a picture of me and my wife, or a cute puppy, or a cactus with a hat on it, it will get hundreds of ‘likes’. I’ve tested it and proved it. If I post this mass-man rant, no one will read it. Those rare people that do will think about it but not hit ‘like’ or ‘share.’ It will die the death.

My biggest personal conflict is that I have a massive disincentive to write or produce any content at precisely the same time in the history of the world when the platforms for disseminating content are turning the dumbing down of the populace up to 11.

By now, fewer than 10% of the people who started reading this, are still reading. Probably closer to 5%. Most have scrolled on to more easily digestible things like memes produced professionally by meme-mills laden with uber-narcissism, logic fallacies, straw men arguments pretending to be jokes, perennial wound licking, justification engines, or… they have slipped on the TikTok-like banana peel into an endless loop of short videos designed to stupefy the brain and make it more easily manipulable. Memes and videos are a stream of dopamine hits we dare not call crack.

My guess is that there are fewer than ten people in your entire orbit that ever produce any original content that exhibits complicated and interesting thinking. Passive-aggressive slams at someone who cut you off in traffic, or your mother-in-law, or your ex, or a guy who ghosted you is not the kind of original content I’m talking about. This is the NPC reality today. In just a few years, maybe fewer, social media will have devolved into human chickens pecking at dots for street taco tablets and wine capsules dispensed below. If an image with a few words on it pleases you, peck here. If it displeases you, peck here. A smorgasbord of instant feedback loops for dummies. Somehow this will all be monetized, or the pecking can be hooked up to a treadmill to provide energy to the borg. Adderall for the windmills of your mind.

I don’t know. I rant therefore I am.

Anyway, the takeaway from all of this is that if you were one of the 1% or fewer who actually liked the content you just read, the reason it all dies is that the system requires interaction in order to perpetuate this type of content, and thinking does not elicit interaction on social media. You have to “like” the right stuff.

Clown shoes are the new literature.

Thank you! I’ll be here all week. Make sure to tip your wait staff.

*looks around the empty room*

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.