Digital Instant Gratification and its Concequences among other things in the Great Enshitting: A List of Uninsightful Murmurs
My mind is not in the best place to compose paragraphs right now. Instead, I'll just list out some points, and see how far I could go.
(0) Not long before present, before info tar-pits trapping souls en-mass with the false promise of improvement, before disruption masked themselves as multitasking and optimization, echoing and serving secondary thoughts/emotions disguised as connecting and networking...
There was a certain slow pace, rhythm, stillness, quietness, in which we feel, digest, think, respond, operate, work, plan, formulate, grow, reflect, become, rest as a person. To not be lost, to be present and maintain identity. There's a sacred boundary between the public and the private, between cooking stoves and dining plates. This is how things were built, how communities and cultures were formed.
(1) To detox is to fight a battle of attrition against instant gratification and the tendencies of reduction, to view every summarized result and simplified meaning not concluded on their own with a judgemental eye and in your own voice. (including this one, if you may)
(2) Online contents are little shots of emotional cocktails presented in the form of visual/audio/emotional/intellectual stimulation. Some are enriching and soul touching. As years went by, most come in shiny wrappings and overstimulating coatings with a hollow aftertaste; just like the ones who consume them too much, taking up space and flexing, performing loudness for the sake of it. But they could never convince anyone if they don't mean it.
(3) Gratifying content, even short form ones, aren't necessarily bad. But the ones that try to impose more emotional/intellectual depth and weight than what they were are effectively "cognitive scams". They are misplaced cultural tokens that violate social contracts and trust, compensating lacklusterness by applying over-saturated filters and all sorts of symbols and references to stimulate and provoke, leaving holes between promoted expectations and realities, and in peoples heads after their output been consumed.
They utilize the mind's weakness to take shortcuts, whether it's outsourcing cognitive abilities or to feel the excitement one could not have had in their lives through a digital portal - to feel alive through a third person's view. They once succeeded to provide what the users needed in the past few decades, they continue to promise us some sort of satisfaction through colorful hallways that monetizes our senses and curiosity. Instead, inside this virtual maze that disguised as a passage of exploration and endless possibilities, the fulfillment was never met, destination never arrived. This is the ultimate grave of personhoods, in which customized graves were dug in unquestioned spoon-fed sessions of the collective noises.
(4) Whenever we click or swipe or share without putting thoughts into the content itself, we're reducing our feelings and opinions into reactions instead of formulated responses. Whenever we post something superficial and not true to itself for clout or references, we're surrendering our genuine feelings, the potential of thoughts and creativity feedback loops into expectations of reactions.
To react without the time to digest, is to be cognitively passive and let the flow/trend/"quasi-tools"/algorithm dictate the way we behave, think or feel according to the contents we consume. Whether it is a push of a button, a swipe or multiple scrolls, at long as we linger enough for our senses to taste it but don't have time to digest it before moving on to the next piece, that's what doom-scrollers are doing: judging whether content(s) are spicy enough to taste before understanding it, and ending up rejecting everything after sorting trash in rapid succession. As mentioned before: there was a pace, a limit that the human mind can comprehend to be familiar and feel safe enough to operate; to disrupt that pace is to sabotage the peace of soul.
(5) The most far-reaching content with the most interactions rewarded by the Algorithmic Gods does not have to be rich in informational, narrative or artistic value, it can get there by simply having clickbait-ish properties to have the consumer's attention. These are deliberately made/generated to be eye catching or rather scamy instead of being insightful. A misleading news title that triggers, a thumbnail with overtly dramatic expressions, a 15 second "reel" with quick paced editing, a funny looking gen AI image captioned with simplified claims, a reading piece with too much spaces between sentences for visibility, you name it.
And this kind of trend is infiltrating the physical domain and collective consciousness as well, where every aspect of our lives were interwoven. People's mind-states were affected, entering a state of perpetual limbo between mildly annoyed, deeply unsatisfied and total mass psychosis. They fail to be still, and are always existing in their own absence. They care less, they put in less effort. Things were done just enough to be presentable and generate profit, it is efficient after all.
(6) Attention is a finite and the single most valuable resource in the digital era for human individuals. Attention is of which we prioritize in noticing. To pay attention to contents of instant gratification without regurgitation nor reflection, is to not only throw away attention capital of the present but also robbing oneself of their own ability to process or feel, to recall or remember, to imagine and plan beyond the moment and formulate self-sufficient responses for future scenarios.
The scenario in question could be virtual ones or physical situations, including emergencies. That's why people hesitate and feel less uncomfortable to help in public. They are confusing their present intentions with the hive's mentality they perceived in the physical realm and amplified in the digital. They freeze, stuck, fail to act when time has come, choosing safety behind the blob of tameness, until someone responds in the present. Therefore, giving up attentions and intentions to content shopping equals giving up autonomy, agency and resilience as a person. Modern society, of which consists of interconnected but weakened individuals that refers their self-worth to the herd that misidentified as safe anonymity, is more fragile and vulnerable than ever.
(7) The shortening attention spans across people from all educational backgrounds marks the beginning of the end of expertise. When people latch onto instant reward mechanisms, they feel less and care less about tasks while being overly conscious in the most stressful ways. Projects are getting harder to lock onto due to the increasingly disruptive nature of tools and the false need of connecting to the larger reality. Craftsmanship honed over the years would gone unnoticed. Carefully built and functioning services and tools, delicately articulated narratives and ideas that fail to impress on first glance, either artistic or scientific, practical or spiritual, all fade away under the echoes of commodified content - the popular, the quantifiable, the bite-sized piece of dogshit that oozes out absolute sensationalism and nothing more.
(8) The shortening life expectancies of goods, the food getting bland over the years, the increasing rate at which streaming platforms pump out their seasons, the constant application updates that serve not the users but only to deliberately clutter the interface workspace and hijack workflows. In cyberspace and mediaspace it's a race to the bottom. In everywhere else, it's a slow grinding and decay that's accelerating enough to be alarming, but not drastic enough for people to resist.
And the bar of resistance is both lowered and elevated; so low that someone having a hot-take can be seen as a prophet as long as they feel seen, that morals and ideologies can be worn and discarded like hats for clout and social currency; so high are the stakes, that stating ugly truths and risking real-change means to suffocate in loneliness, punished by the system, have their voices and identities stripped away. But mass surveillance and rhetoric control can only work so well on the ones that seek validation and gratification outwardly.
(9) The act of seeking instant gratification weakens and diminishes the sense of self. For consumers not mindful enough, they simply become spectators of other people's lives/lies through suggested feed. For creators, once wary of the masses and algorithm's ever-presenting gaze, their works become tame, their inner raw thoughts silenced for maximum reach. They no longer create to express or explore, but to serve content on schedule and please the audience.
The pent-up frustration inside creators that confuse passion with performance experience burn out. They live to feel, they create to express, but have their souls cuffed within the conditions of appeasing otherness, therefore becoming alienated with their souls and their works. Art is, ultimately, the process of self-expression manifestation, no matter how messy, ugly, out of place that manifestation might be. A method for individuals to explore and navigate realities, to put one's attention through intentions, letting it take form through certain mediums to share, to be felt and connect; value, ratings, product and productivity comes after, and of course the monetization of artworks. Being pretty and palatable can only appease people so much, but both machines and performers can imitate that now. They can hallucinate regurgitations of fun-facts, eye candies, and play pretend to try winning the system. They serve on time competively and get rewarded because they have confidence to gaslight through everyone and themselves (if they are sentient and conscious): they appear to mean it even when they were lying, and maybe that's the secret to survival and achieve excellence. But did they live?
In the world there are takers and givers, consumers and builders. People objectify their work and in extension, themselves to survive in favor of the former, but know this: trying to meet the demands of takers through superficial means could never be enough for them, and for the ones who only live to be an object to serve. Draw a boundary that is self, define and maintain it actively.
Be this way. Though not guaranteed, someday one might connect with someone as equal souls under the stage unmasked, and it'll be the most beautiful thing.