What do you LIKE?
Do you LIKE your uniqueness? Do you LIKE your individuality? Do you LIKE your uncanny ability to think differently about subjects that other people seem oh-so-generic about?
Ever since homo sapiens started living long enough to advertise themselves, anthropocentrism has been a pivot around which society and its laws, habits, and behaviors revolve.
At the heart of anthropocentrism lives the idea that sans the holistic value of its key practitioner (i.e., YOU), the existing system cannot function as well (or, in extreme cases, at all) without YOU.
With that in mind (and without embarking on an evolutionary psychology-based digression to locate WHY we are biologically attuned to act this way; perhaps good old survival will suffice), a question arises:
Do humans really think themselves as smart, witty, cogent, interesting, and novel as they profess to be?
Some obviously do. But whether Ego is psychological rabies or mental disease is so commonplace that it’s now normal to live your whole life in willful denial, people probably shouldn’t take themselves so seriously.
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Jokes aside, working in tandem with this mass state of existential hypnosis is the slimy, semiotic-molded golem that is modern capitalism. Our cozy little economic system, armed with dual vials of Psychopathy and Advertising which exist only to sow divisions and profiteer off them, is rigged to feed off its own scum while laying waste to all that doesn’t comply.
Acting as the ever-multiplying nefarious mouthpiece of our digitally-enshrined, money-worshipping economy is social media, which anthropocentrism can, at will, commandeer. Social media platforms – designed for people to shout as long and loud (and with as many cat videos and political memes and general hypocritical agony about the state of the world) as possible – allows users to feed off others’ distraction long enough to rectify their own unspoken sense of ‘What the f%^* is actually happening in the world?’ while simultaneously allowing them to profit (either financially, chemistrally, or emotionally) off the world’s general insecurity-laden malaise.
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By the way, are you LIKING this article? Probably not, because it isn’t (and doesn’t pretend to be) happy, there isn’t a cute fluffy animal in sight, and I haven’t hit the LIKE button yet.
Did you say… LIKE?
Yes, the LIKE button. Even its Silicon Valley software engineer creator Justin Rosenstein has sworn himself off it, citing both told and untold dangers regarding his unintentionally-crafted weapon of mass destruction as to why he no longer pops LIKES in every direction.
Now listen. Take a deep breath and consider what follows:
How many times do you check your phone each day?
Why do you check your phone?
Does it upset you if people don’t LIKE your posts?
Do your impressions about people suffer if they don’t LIKE what you consider likable?
While comments at minimum offer direction-oriented feedback, the LIKE button is the most hollow, insidious, terrifying invention of the 21st century. It transfigures requests for social validity into profit-aiming algorithms that keep people addicted to the platforms doling it (and variations) out. It’s the cheapest, trashiest, most throw-away version of self-fulfillment in history, and yet it drives the advertising infrastructures of Big Tech to earn exponential sums while simultaneously mining/hijacking the thought processes of humankind so that cross-sections of humanity kowtow to whatever the nerds’ next-quarter profit projections look like.
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Good, bad, or ugly, human beings are, to a greater or lesser degree, anthropocentric. And by commodifying our anthropocentric selves in terms of how many (paid and unpaid) LIKES we receive for what little we can contribute to our ever-increasingly uneven world simply to become confused, wrath-raging digital slaves doped up on feedback-looped convenience… well, can you LIKE that?