Social Media Sinister: Rebel, Orphaned Adolescents

Surf to https://www.instagram.com/p/CKEFsCwjRtK/ and swipe left: YouTube used to recommend each of my videos to MILLIONS of users.

Then I made the mistake of criticizing the way government mishandled COVID, Black Lives Matter, MeToo, fake “gurus”, “coaches”, and self-styled “experts” online, and the pernicious movement of the covert narcissists who call themselves “empaths”.

Thuggish psychopathic Facebook reacted by simply denying me access to my erstwhile Instagram account @vakninsamnarcissist and cutting off the dissemination of my posts on Facebook: no one sees them anymore.

YouTube is more like a passive-aggressive covert narcissist.

YouTube now no longer shows my videos in search results (search for “narcissism” to see what I mean).

YouTube is now not recommending my videos anymore except to users who have spent months watching other channels on narcissism.

As you can see, my latest video had been recommended to fewer than 93,000 users (compared to an average of 2 million historically).

Ironically, the number of subscribers to my channel has shot up from 85,000 to 135,000 and my CTR (Click Through Rate) has DOUBLED (in other words: twice as many users click on my videos on the rare occasions that they are recommended).

These platform are monopolies. They have severely undermined free speech and should be regulated, penalized, broken up. Their current egregious misconduct is a dictatorship (technocracy): the unelected and unqualified few, armed with dumb AI softwares, are muzzling, silencing, and throttling anyone who dares to call the truth as they see it or to not toe the party line to maximum profits. These enterprises are evil and a menace, end of story: they should be confronted and reformed or taken down.

They are treating all of us as adolescents – and we react to their mistreatment as though we were

One of the main functions of the shared fantasy is to project to the world a façade of normalcy and equally, to self-delude the narcissist that he is all but normal. The disintegration of the shared fantasy exposes the narcissist and others to the harsh reality: he is mentally ill and his family or firm are precariously balanced houses of cards.

As humanity is becoming increasingly more grandiose and entitled, puberty is extended well into one’s 20s (Twenge and Campbell). Boomerang kids live with their parents and continue their interminable “education” well into their 30s. Marriage, sex, and childbearing are distant memories. Even computers and the Internet reflect these trends: they nanny and discipline us (see my post about “nanny computing”). Not only do we all refuse to grow up and assume adult chores and responsibilities (Peter Pan Syndrome or Puer Aeternus), but we elect puerile leaders who cater to our pathological needs. Postmodern, post-industrial civilization is one gigantic shared fantasy and the pandemic has, therefore, led to global mortification.

We are reacting to this mortification as all adolescents do: we look for our missing parents. Some deny reality and try to continue with the old normal (“hoover” the various partners – individual and institutional - in our shattered shared fantasy). Others rebel against parental figures and become antisocial: defiant, impulsive, callous, and reckless. But the majority are cowed into unthinking submission, a type of conformity common to adolescents faced with a threat or with the unsavory outcomes of their misconduct.

Ubiquitous computing is becoming not only intrusive but also more condescending and patronizing by the version. I call it: “nanny computing”.

Underlying nanny softwares are the twin assumptions that people are way too stupid to be entrusted with their own welfare and so irrational that they never get things right, having compromised the decision-making process.

Nanny apps and programs override and overwrite the user’s explicit choices, preferences, and commands. This is reminiscent of HAL, the starship’s onboard computer in Odyssey 2001.

Nanny computing is only one manifestation of a societal trend at least 150 years old, when the first welfare nanny state was established by Bismarck.

People are infantilized and regressed to an earlier, dependent phase of personal development. One’s agency is usurped by authorities: religious, secular, or technological.

Social media are the latest examples of such “it is for your own good” coercion but they were preceded by numerous other instances, including prohibition and the criminalization of psychoactive substances. The COVID-19 pandemic cast this pernicious paternalism into sharp relief.

Uniformity, conformity, and predictability are crucial to the functioning of modern mass economies. Individualism is a threat to be constrained. Grandiose defiant narcissism is the revolt of the masses as they recoil from the deadening embrace of those who “know best what’s good for you, sonny!”