High school never ends
and why the world is tailored to idiots
The whole idea for this essay came after a short YouTube Shorts doomscrolling session one late night, shortly after I got in bed.
My feed is, at first, a mix of history, football, warhammer 40k, gardening, and general memes, and it has suffered much in the last year due to the influx of slop. The pinnacle of this came a few days ago, when a new trailer for 40k dropped (which was absolutely phenomenal) called “No peace among the stars”. It was so excellent that it immediately caused me to have existential dread, which is awesome because I’ve been feeling a bit numb recently, so feeling terror and panic was actually kind of a relief. I smoked a nervous cigarette in my garden, happy that I could literally smell the roses again, before I went back inside, got some actual work done, then went to bed, where I usually either read something until I fall asleep, or just instantly drift into sleep (Melatonin is an abstract concept for me).
This time, I opened my phone and decided to watch some short-form content, because I was feeling quite sleepy and knew I wouldn’t need much. The first video was about pruning tomatoes, which was nice, but useless, since I already knew that specific technique.
The second video was about some 40k lore and featured footage from the trailer that had only been released 2 hours earlier!!! I literally stood up in my bed, all the day’s fatigue now gone. I watched the video again, and realised that it was completely unrelated to the trailer, but that it did featured footage from the trailer as stock media!!! Already!!! and – (and this is the problem!) – It was so boring…
Let me explain why that’s important:
What that means is that someone, or something, had seen the trailer, added the footage as cached stock media and had used it to generate a new video as new content. In other words, this was the work of an AI bot.
Yeah, but, again, why is this important? you might ask…
First of all, it’s important to me because, for some reason, I felt betrayed, as if I had just caught my girlfriend cheating on me. I got angry and out of bed and I made a beeline for my desk, which is where I do my most vigorous investigative work. I then spent hours cataloguing dozens of reels my YouTube algorithm was feeding me.
Topic. Length. Human vs. AI voice. Graphic Quality. Information Transmitted. Quality of English. I even had a “Special Notes” column because I use excel to document my bouts of autism, like a real spastic…
My conclusion was quite troubling:
Most of my feed is slop, like everyone else’s, but there are levels built into the doomscrolling.
Level I: Eye Candy
This is the literal thumbnail that drags me in, followed by a reel which actually delivers. By “delivers”, I mean I learn new information from it. I like this level. It’s a good level. The problem with this level is that it is really short, only about 5-6 shorts.
Level II: Slot machine Slop
This is a level you spend time going through, hoping you’ll get something good. It last about 10-12 shorts and about 2 of them are interesting, funny or informational.
Level III: Bullshit
And this is the reason why I’m writing this essay, because the bullshit is endless... and it is not engaging! That last part fucks with me, because this short-form content feed algorithm is designed by a mix of socio-tech geniuses aided by artificial intelligence. It is literally the bread and butter of what they’re supposed to do, and it’s become so utterly boring!
It’s boring because it’s recycled. There is no new information, just repackaged information combined with new media formats that appear in its database, like the 40k trailer. The algorithm (I know it’s not popular to call it that anymore, but… fuck it… an “oil tanker” is still a “boat”) seems to know what content is truly engaging, but the list it draws from is just so shallow now… Most of what gets shoved forward is a reshuffle, as new information is transitory, thin and quickly diluted by absolute garbage.
It’s not just the YouTube algorithm (I ran the same study with Instagram) and it’s not just short-form content...
I’m seeing this with long-form YouTube videos, product recommendations, ads (yeah, the ads have become even more boring and incessant than before), news feeds, book recommendations, and, yes, I’ve particularly noticed that most of the stuff that gets shared on social media is now aggressive garbage, reposts and just plain horseshit (more so than it used to be).
… How the fuck is that even possible?
Shouldn’t the algorithms be getting better? Shouldn’t content creation be getting better? Shouldn’t the bots be making stuff that is so engaging we forget our actual lives? There are trillions of dollars at stake at this point. The largest companies in the world are competing for my attention, right? How the fuck am I opening a dozen apps specifically tailored to engage with me with an intensity that should make my eyes weld to the screen… and concluding that there’s nothing to watch/read/learn after 5 minutes!?
As the early hours of the morning came upon me, I literally picked up my phone in annoyance one last time and literally flicked through the reels on warp-speed, as I mumbled to myself about what the fuck was going to happen to all those data centers if everyone begins to experience what I had just realized I was experiencing.
And then I saw him…
You see, I used to play WoW, so I still get Asmongold in my feed, just that now he’s not explaining how to get a solo achievement on a legacy WotLK raid; now he’s talking politics… and that’s ok because I love me a new perspective.
Just that this time I actually looked a bit at him…
At his face, his beard, his eyes, his bedroom and… it hit me… softly, like an afterthought, like something my mind whispered to itself out of bored surprise…
“I know five motherfuckers from high school who are just like this guy…”
My eyes widened as I suddenly realised the implications.
Because they’re all from my high school!
I knew dudes like the Paul brothers.
I knew dudes like those two guys who do a finance podcast.
I knew guys who cracked jokes like Andrew Santino and Bobby Lee.
I knew a guy who was basically KSI.
I knew several Zendaya and Tom Holland couples…
I knew all of them!
My revelation, which I am hopefully imparting upon you now, is that the people you see on “the internet” are, essentially, archetypes of people you meet in real life, particularly the ones you used to meet in high school, before everyone got shepherded away into their own little cults1 There are exceptions, of course, but they’re pretty rare and everyone else is just a cast member in this virtual high school we’re all somehow enrolled in by virtue of being online.
We hear drama and all sorts of nonsense we just can’t block out anymore, as we now have to listen to essentially just regular people take in global crisis (plural) and spew out opinions that align with their own specific stereotype all day….
Now, you might think I’m going to go down the “loneliness” rabbit hole (and I might later on), but I’m actually concerned about something completely different.
There were a lot of idiots in high school. They were the ones who kept the rumour mill running. They were the ones you tried to get away from in college. They were the ones who created an environment so… bland, that you wondered if there was a mix-up in the mail and your Hogwarts letter got lost or something…
Not everyone was like that, don’t get me wrong! I knew a lot of awesome, interesting and insightful people in high school. But, admittedly, most weren’t like that. They were a minority. A very small minority.
I realise now that we, the ones who enjoyed the internet for the amazing information, art and experiences it delivered… we are no longer a key demographic… (We’re definitely not the majority anymore, that’s for sure…)
Hear me out! I know that there’s so much content out there that there’s bound to be something interesting or enjoyable somewhere, but… what if… what if there isn’t?
Do you ever browse short-form content until you get that bug, where you can’t flip up anymore? Do you ever get that fleeting thought that “I must have reached the end?” Only to then realise that it is literally impossible to reach the end anymore? Just that, now, in that moment, as the screen just refuses to scroll to the next doom, it kind of feels like it is the end.
In more ways than one…
Not because there aren’t interesting people or interesting topics left… but because we are not the target audience anymore! What if the entire internet, as we know it now, is designed to cater to idiots? The very same idiots that flooded through the corridors of a million high schools just like mine?
Think about it, and bear in mind that I’m in my early 30s. Hence, I am part of that generation that remembers life before the internet. I remember how, at first, the internet was literally something made by and for smart people.
This was that period of time when the internet was “the reservoir of all human knowledge” you could just tap into and basically get superpowers. You could also get shit for free, like movies and music, which was nice… and clearly unsustainable, in retrospect…
The first crack was social media and even that wasn’t bad at first! Strangely enough, I think that the period of time in which social media was alright coincided with those few years during which people were wary of social media. I remember a time when it was weird to post pictures weekly. It felt a bit like it was “too much” and I distinctly remember commenting with my friends about how it was a strange thing that strange people did. After all (and a lot of you might have forgotten this) Facebook was initially marketed as “a way to reconnect with people from the past you had lost contact with”. Yes, some people did overshare, but it was a far cry from what eventually ended up taking over the whole world…
And, fuck…
The writer inside of me wants to list off a bloated enumeration of all the garbage and the nonsense out there right now, but the truth is that I don’t want to contribute…
But, what my problem is today is that – For the love of God! – I do not understand why it’s shit for me!
It honestly doesn’t make sense. The algorithms were supposed to be infinitely engaging, to an absolutely troubling degree. Every now and then, the slop congeals into something of quality, but most of the time it’s just a sea of nonsense. Nothing really goes “viral” anymore, because everything is just kinda shit, and what few diamonds there are out there just waft away into nonsense.
In a world of near-infinite content generation, how so much content has become garbage is not surprising. What is surprising is how the algorithms meant to figure out what we, the consumer, want to consume, have gotten so bad. Are they just bad now or is everything being generated just nonsense?
A thought crossed my mind that maybe some AI superintelligence has already emerged and silently conquered the internet and that it is benevolent. Perhaps the way to fix what has gone wrong in the world is to push us all back into the real world. (I am, as you can tell, an optimist.)
The issue that’s stuck in my head has to do with those people who “peaked in high school” or “miss high school”. I sure as hell didn’t – but, if you talk to ten people over the age of thirty, I promise you that at least seven will tell you that it was the happiest time in their life. Those people aren’t the problem; that’s just nostalgia!
The “problem” are the ones that have transformed spaces in the real world into their own artificial high schools, including workplaces and the internet. We have become unable to escape them in this new, interconnected world of ours, and it’s starting to break down the very fabric of reality… but this is the topic of other essays… ones already written by people way more upset by them than me…
I think the issue is attention-seeking.
Specifically, I think those of us who aren’t attention seekers (1) do not understand how to fit into this hyper-attention-seeking world, where even your revenue is often linked to your visibility, and (2) we’re not capable of comprehending how obsessed with attention a lot of people are.
Let’s go back to the high school parallel: everyone remembers kids who loved being the centre of attention, even though no one remembers exactly what they would do… most of the time… Every now and then they’d do something so spectacularly bombastic or plain that you couldn’t help but remember. A few of them sought out attention by more legitimate means: high grades, athletics, jokes, you know the types.
On social media, we like to pretend that this latter category is still the defining one, but that illusion shatters the moment you check out any national Top Trending ranking. You’ll see there really quickly that shock value still rules and wholesome memes are a distant second. And by shock value, I’m not talking about “risky jokes”. I’m talking about prank videos, extreme politics, violence, debauchery (not the good kind), and everything else you might imagine or (hopefully, for the sake of your sanity) not imagine.
It’s how we got numb as a society.
It’s weird, but I would argue that most people of my generation are incredibly numb to extreme imagery, but also concepts.
Most people have watched beheading videos, incredibly extreme porn, read the most cretinous political opinions enunciable in (broken) human speech, read incredibly unrealistic erotic literature (yes, ladies, it’s not just us boys who’ve been gooning and we know about it…), to not even mention the host of distasteful pranks, violent accidents and (this one is often overlooked) the most mundane people confessing/bragging about the most insane things they’ve done or believed (this one is oddly one of the most damaging, since it breeds a feeling in mistrust in people you meet in real life).
Most anxiety people experience is attributable to the fact that people are now aware of horrible things that could happen, which they could not have imagined by themselves. In the modern world, you don’t need to imagine.
You see!
Censorship (pardon me, I believe it’s called “content moderation” nowadays) can get rid of some of the surface value violence and pornography, but it doesn’t remove what has come to be called brain rot.
“Brainrot” is an umbrella term, but I want to focus on the fact that most brain rot is targeted towards the feebleminded, of which there are now many on the internet. The algorithms can’t discern what is and what is not brain rot, or at least they don’t seem to, so we all just get pumped brain rot until we’re left wondering if there’s anything other than brain rot out there anymore (hence, the theme of this essay).
However, I’d like to point out that, before the algorithms, there was television and, before that… we don’t really know what brainrot used to look like back in the day, because brain rot is, by definition, passing and vapid, and thus forgettable. Furthermore, it was always consumed by those who just wanted to drift away their days into ignorant oblivion. I imagine a lot of brainrot used to be just plain gossip, which is now basically 50% of all modern brainrot.
That’s what “Love Island” basically is, once you really brush away the veneer of entertainment. You’re watching things your ancestors used to gossip about at the water well or after church.
So, here we are, in a world taken over by those most gifted and invested in grabbing our attention… and some of us are getting bored… As bored as we were in high school, when Suzie couldn’t shut the fuck up about what her “boyfriend” said about another girl…
… and there behold new horrors!
Because, you must remember, Suzie was into astrology too! Her “friend” Clara was into crystal and vibes and shit… and then there was… let’s call him “Archie”…
Archie was a “schizophrenic”, or at least a “schizoid” (it’s like “coke” and “diet coke”; look it up; let’s move on).
Archie believed all sorts of wild shit. Jews run the world and drink the blood of children. The moon landing was fake. The elites are engaging in Slaaneshi orgies. Earth is a soul farm.
You know… wacky shit...
But, he was kinda funny, so you gave him a pass.
And then Archie got on the internet and started encountering “other Archies”. And, now, some of the Archies are AIs competing for his attention (without him knowing it… actually… he probably knows it… since Archie’s a schizophrenic and, thus, naturally paranoid). And then a couple of things happen:
COVID…
Epstein…
The Iraq War before that and now the Iran and Ukraine wars…
Now the US government is telling us they’ve encountered Ophanim…
One by one, the world got weird and Archie and his mates always had an explanation. And Archie and his friends are on the internet. And Archie and his friends do not have an “off” button. Archie and his friends will now take something that was revealed as being fucked-up and then run with it into the woods!!!
Here’s the problem: Archie used to be in your classroom five days a week for about 5-6 hours. He was only allowed to talk during breaks and you had to be in the mood for some wilderness before you sought him out and let him go off!
Now, Archie and his friends are always active. Always online. Always posting and reposting. And their rabbit holes just get deeper and deeper and deeper…
COVID was spectacularly mishandled, a lot of people made money off it, and we were reminded that humans are basically herd animals…
Epstein ran a horrendous kompromat/honeypot operation and it’s still unclear how many such operations are still out there, and what we, as a society, should do as a reaction…
The Iraq War was basically for nothing, Russia invaded Ukraine as an attempted powerplay which backfired spectacularly and, yeah, most people were lowkey rooting for Iran to top their FIFA World Cup group in the USA…
Archie and his friends have a lot of material now… and now you’re beginning to understand why doctors claim that schizophrenia is contagious...
So, those are the people from your high school for whom what the internet has become is most appealing: the loonies, the attention-seekers and the morons.
But, there is another category… Because these are the categories that make up the majority of the audience and some of the actors, but who built the stage?
I’ve been researching AI a lot because I, like most rational people, am somewhat concerned…
There’s two types of people working in tech: Movers and Shapers.
I’ve met both and got to know them really well.
The Shapers are the good ones, though they do have their shortcomings.
The Shapers, formerly known as “nerds” are the ones that write the actual code and keep the machine running. They’re also the ones who invented the core technologies of the digital age. To get back to the high school analogy, these guys (yes, mostly “guys”) where the resident class geniuses, though they were never the ones with the highest grades in the class. They also never really broke their back studying. It was all just effortless for them, and a lot of them hand a tendency to mix their academic pursuits with occasional frivolity (partying, fishing, loitering, assault and battery… that sort of thing).
Shapers finished high school, got accepted to MIT, Caltech, the Imperial College in London or some other elite redoubt of such lunatics that would give us the technical wonders that occupy our lives today.
But, they would never have gotten anything done without the Movers.
Movers, often known as tech bros, are the ones who managed to “herd the nerds” into some semblance of order. Most of the tech “geniuses” you might think you know (Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, or Peter Thiel) are Movers, not Shapers. In other words, they don’t write the code; they are simply able to make the people who write the code to write the code.
This task is rather difficult, since Shapers are fiercely independent-minded and oddly dictatorial in their own right. It’s a byproduct of growing-up surrounded by people generally dumber than them. Moreover, they have a tendency to wander off and pop in and out of reality which makes them very, very different from other types of geniuses, such as finance-math-valuation nerds (which are waaaaaay more docile), artistic geniuses (which can occasionally be very stupid in regards to social or quantitative skills, athletic geniuses (who tend to be very capable of being part of a team) or history-social-political-philosophical geniuses (who usually have a very well-developed bullshit-detector that protects them from most superficial manipulation techniques).
The Movers managed to convince the Shapers to do their bidding by convincing them that “they’re like them, but different”.
I want you to be able to visualize this, since you’ve almost certainly seen this in action (not necessarily in tech) and you might not have been able to put your finger on what was happening!
Have you ever been at a conference about… (let me look around my room…)
Lamps! Let’s say you were at a conference about lighting lamps and you were attending some of the presentations. You’d expect the presentations to be about lamps. How lamps work. What types of lamps there are. How to make a lamp. How to sell a lamp. How to run a lamp factory. What materials are best for making lamps. Who makes the best lamps. Who sells the most lamps…
You know… lamp stuff!
But, instead, a guy or girl gets on stage and starts talking about diversity, self-help, motivation, work ethic, being a leader, being a woman leader, what books on self-help and sales they read, bla bla bla… you get the picture.
You’re standing there in that room, wondering: “What the fuck does this have to do with lamps?”
“I just came here because I wanted to learn about lamps…”
All I can say is: you’re witnessing a lamp mover do his thing!
A lamp mover’s job isn’t to make lamps! It’s to convince other people that they love making lamps!
You can always identify a “mover” as opposed to a “shaper” by asking them technical questions.
A shaper will look at you the way a doctor reacts when you tell them you didn’t take pain medication for your enterocolitis because you didn’t want to get even more nauseous and risk vomiting your way into dehydration! This is because most doctors are shapers! They don’t care if the monkey exhibited a rational though; they don’t like it when monkeys exhibit what they perceive as rational thoughts, because monkeys DO NOT HAVE RATIONAL THOUGHTS, END OF STORY!
They’ll be dismissive. They’ll notice that you didn’t use the right words. They’ll notice that you are not a “shaper”, and they’ll usually insult you as a response.
Which is a good outcome!
Because shapers suck at explaining things! They can comprehend complex thoughts and engineer complex solutions to complex problems… but they are very limited in their ability to transfer their knowledge onto others, particularly non-shapers, whom they despise! Shapers usually learn from one another via memorisation or observation and very rarely through acts of education, simply because shapers that can train other shapers are incredibly rare! Most of them, when tryinng to explain something technical, will just be boring, or inarticulate, or nervous, or irritable, or glib, or… you know what I mean!
It’s possible to learn from a shaper, but it’s going to be your job, not the shaper’s, to get him or her to explain shit properly!
Movers will react to technical questions in a very different manner. You have to remember that most movers are busy pretending to be shapers for other shapers! In other words, they have to be very careful to not reveal to their shaper underlings, superiors and colleagues that they are just pretending to know what they are doing.
And, for those of you who have read my “Why it’s hard to succeed in life” essay, you’ll probably notice that Movers have a lot in common with “morons”!
Specifically, many of them are morons that are also crafty!
A mover can respond to a technical question by either (a) being dismissive, like a shaper or, (b) being vague and pivoting back to the points they’re comfortable with.
The issue is that most movers are, like most morons, craven (that’s a fancy word for “coward”) so being combative and dismissive isn’t really in their repertoire. They’ll usually end up having their insecurities leak into their response and a true shaper might see through their façade of contempt and behold their inner ignorance and timidity. A mover on a power trip (or cocaine) might be able to delude themselves into actually believing that they know what they’re talking about, but they will not be able to do such a thing consistently. They know that, eventually, they’ll fuck-up and the mask of wisdom theyțve worked so hard to stitch to their face will just slip away, revealing the wide-eyed idiot underneath!
So, most movers will go for option (b), being vague and pivoting back to known territory.
The way this seemingly primitive deception works against the big-brained shapers is by exploiting a certain mental strength of the latter group.
You see, shapers have a very causal intelligence. Think of their intelligence as a long string of dominoes. If one domino is tipped over, there will exist a chain reaction resulting in one final domino tipping over. Shapers are very good at identifying that streak of fallen dominoes, starting from the first one and ending with the final sprawled little piece.
Movers, on the other hand, have (usually and hopefully) pattern-recognition intelligence (and they just won’t fucking shut up about it when they do…)
So, they’re very dependend on statistics and numbers (that’s another easy way to spot a mover: they quote statistics a lot; think Ben Shapiro). They also don’t really understand causal relationships between different factors. However, they are smart enough to imitate the type of inferences shapers make by saying stuff that uses the right words and sounds smart.
A shaper will hear said words and input them into the causal machine inside their skulls and arrive upon the same conclusion the mover learned from a statistic he read one time on LinkedIn. The shaper will then falsely assume that the mover knows what they’re talking about. The mover will know where the first and last dominoes are and they’ll say it out loud. The shaper will mentally go through the whole string of fallen dominoes and conclude that 100% of the information and judgment presented by the mover is correct and, thus, falsely assume that 100% of what the mover says is correct! This effect is compounded if the shaper observes and interacts with any other shapers already tricked by the mover. In other words, tech nerds think Elon Musk is a genius because a lot of tech nerds already believe that Elon Musk is a genius.
And how do movers use this ability to trick shapers into thinking they’re one of their own?
They put them to work.
And what do they trick the shapers into making?
Well, this is where the high school analogy comes back into play.
Because movers are what became of those sneaky motherfuckers who used to spread gossip and rumours and sow discord. You know the type… Those little fucking agents of Chaos Undivided who just wanted everyone else t each other’s throats for their own ammusement. Those little Petyr Baelish motherfuckers in the front benches, constantly whispering in the teacher’s ear.
Or the class bully’s ear.
Or the athlete’s ear.
Or the popular girl’s ear.
Or the nerd’s ear.
They don’t necessarily understand human nature, but they definetly understand how to manipulate it. They understand the attention economy. Thet understand power and that information is power. They, to their credit, created the modern pre-apocalyptic world…
There’s only one problem…
It’s the problem this essay started with:
The algorithms suck now!
And the reason they suck is because the system is not only designed for idiots…
But it is also designed by idiots…
Or, well, rather, it’s designed by geniuses at the direction of idiots… for idiots…
…
…
May you languish in your existential dread the way I did when I watched that 40k trailer….
P.S. Some movers are also shapers, such as Mark Zuckerberg, who actually knows code.
Also, some movers are brilliant in their own right (Steve Jobs).
This was a really interesting read mate! Thank you!