You're surrounded by manipulative, amoral, "cant's"

Wanna know how I know? Because you're on social media, and in 2025 it is nigh on impossible to partake in this particular online landscape without being surrounded by an abundance of these people.

Now ill soften here and say not all of them are "cants" in fact this degradation of our online spaces has been ongoing for so long now that a number of them were simply born in to it. They're told and observe this is the path to success in this space, to approval. The morality, the ethics of manipulation are so far removed from the discussion of these practical steps to success, that I think some are naively unaware of them. They've been delivered this world by an ever more heavy handed algorithm and the crabs in their bucket.

But a number of you are my age, meaning you should damn well know better.

You grew up in an age where we talked about the potential dangers of sharing information online, an age of education on the manipulation of images, of media literacy, house hippos, and asking for an actual source. You know full well its not just "a way to trend" when you tell people to cut context, when you imply lying's fine so long as you create the appearance of a source. Worse still you do so by leaning in to the degraded attention spans of the youth. Rather than finding new ways to deliver context, or encouraging attention in minutes not seconds, you use this weakness to your advantage, you perpetuate it.

It's why all your posts sound the same,

And you structure information like this.

Because the bar has been lowered,

And you continue to limbo under it...

1.5 seconds of dopamine at a time.

"bbut but maybe people just dont want to read all that"

Yeah and how's that working out for us hey? how is our current world feeling, with people reducing everything to a single quote and the most liked joke about it (that someone never said but hey you linked a video with it that no one will watch, so theyll take it as gospel)

How is the continual, financially incentivised, rage bait making ya'll feel, good right? How does it feel giving a handful of billionaires the power to dictate what we see, what angers us, what brings us joy? How proud are you to be making them money by degrading yourself, lowering your intellect to play a game of manipulation in which the ultimate victims are the next generation.

"everyone's doing it though" Ya know for a bunch of people who consider themselves well read, who pay lip service to the big social theories, you sure are bad at recognising them. Go ahead be a bystander, part of the mob, if that's all the effect you want on the world. Personally I'm not going to throw my cigarette butt on the ground in fire season, no matter how many others I see do so, nor will I water down my wine to make more profit, or join in the mobs uproar just to feel like my voice is loud.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of all of this is that im almost certain the majority of you dont want to be doing this. You've built walls around your actions, told yourself its okay cause the games rigged so you may as well do what you can to tip the scales in your favour. You've insulated yourself from the harm in which you partake, yet if presented with it from an outside perspective you agree its terrible. You have doen all you can to sever that truth from your actions, because you're a good person who doesn't want to admit to themselves that they're profiting form harm. So you spend more, more holidays, more watches, more cars.. but none of it will ever fill the hole you dig deeper each day with your actions.

You are the staff writer on an early 2000s womens magazine that writes about the damage of diet culture one week, whilst writing about the Kate moss thighs the next, so lost in the machine, so dependant on it, the thought of hypocrisy is practically banished form your mind.

Who am I kidding, you aren't reading this. That third paragraph was too long for half of you, and if i dont add the right image to this, or if it the algorithm sees no profit in it, itll reach about three people.

That's the world we've helped shape.

The content of an article is irrelevant, the content is dead, long live the "content"...