Dopamine driven Feedback loops that we’ve created are destroying how society works.

The Tycoons of Social Media have to stop pretending that they are friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they are just tobacco farmers in T-shirts, Selling addictive products to the children.

Because let’s face it: Checking your likes is the new smoking. Marlboro just wants your lungs, the app store wants your soul. There are more than 2 billion people on facebook. It’s about the number of national followers of Christianity.

The Millennial sort of audience check their phones 150 times a day and so, if you think about it from the moment you wake up, it’s like you’re jacked into this environment and thoughts start streaming into your head, designed by a few technology companies.

"Sunday Times : Digital Intelligence Editorial" by Keith Vlahakis is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 

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What we find is the typical person checks their phone every 15 minutes or less and half of the time they check their phone, there’s no alert, no notification. It’s coming from inside of their head, telling them: “I haven’t checked my facebook feed for a while, I wonder if somebody has commented on my Instagram post.” That then generates cortisol and it starts to make you anxious. Eventually, your goal is to get rid of that anxiety, so you check in.

Apparently, we feel stressed when we can’t get our phone or when our battery is about to die. We all know this feeling and, a research done in Australia among 3000 people, under the age of 30, found that 9 out of every 10 admits to feeling this anxiety while having this battery dying.

Steve Jobs revolutionized the entire world with the iPhone and he never let his children use it. Because he didn’t want them dependent on technology. Right now, a child is being born online and being ‘Liked’ and Re-tweeted.

The Hyper Generational Segregation of our time is bizarre, unhealthy and historically unprecedented. In the House, We don’t even talk to each other properly and the pressure that’s on us is to be like everybody else is so great that everybody tries to live like they’re in a reality show.

There’s a culture we don’t have enough in common anymore and that’s because of the internet, which was supposed to unite the world, has become to adapt at the Serving us personalized content. Do you know what I saw on Yahoo’s Frontpage this morning? No, You don’t because mine isn’t the same as yours. People get News feeds now that just spit back customized stories based on what we’ve clicked on in the past.

We are great consumers, but poor producers. We will buy what we can’t afford with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t even know, trying to be like everybody else.

Right now, teenagers are photoshopping their selfies. Because, as a society, we’re telling them that they’re not good enough. Right now, influencers encourage narcissism without knowing the breadth and depth of their impact on their audiences. Today, 40 thousand spectators sit in an Olympic football arena to watch a competitive esports competition. Because this is this generation’s football match.

There’s always this narrative that technology’s Neutrality is up to choose how we use it. That is just not TRUE!  They want us to use it in a particular way and for a long period of time. Because that’s how they make their money. We don’t realize it, but we are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you got to decide how you’re willing to give up, how much of your intellectual Independence. If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you. If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it and reign it in and it a point in time where people need to hard break from some of these tools and the things we rely on.

The short term Dopamine driven Feedback loops that we’ve created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, No cooperation, misinformation, mistruth and it’s not only one country’s problem, but this is also a global problem and it is killing humanity just as the global warming killing the nature.

Can you stop using Social Media for a week? If not then maybe it’s time to get off of facebook and put your face in a book!

If you agree that your phone is making you an addict, Here's how you can Stop it