Propaganda is no longer imposed from above. You tailor it yourself. Your habits, your pauses, your tiny flinches.

I try to use the platforms as little as I can, but a kind of morbid curiosity (and perhaps a desire to understand people for my research, I tell myself) has me take a peek at Facebook or X some days. 

Seemingly normal friends hawk fury on these platforms like street preachers. Not truth or entertainment, but outrage. 

They act like they’re informed. Like they’re standing up for something bigger, fighting the good fight against the morons, the fascists, the wokists, the conservatives, the liberals. But what they’re really doing is circling the drain, sharing another clip dunking on a college-age liberal, another headline of some conservative’s quote taken out of context, another caricature of “the other side”. 

It flatters you with the illusion of clarity, as reality itself starts to feel like a team sport with every headline confirming your side’s sanity and their side’s madness. 

The algorithm feeding this information doesn’t care about left or right, red or blue. It just knows your pulse spikes when you see something infuriating, so it hands you more and more of it. And like any good dealer, it studies your tolerance, raises the dose, and keeps you hooked.

We’re basically handing the few good waking hours we all get each day to billion-dollar corporations with a PhD in our dopamine. Not your choosing; it choosing. You scroll, it decides. You pause, it studies. You react, it refines. A conveyor belt of provocations designed to keep you obediently aroused. 

The algorithm’s job is not to inform you or make you better. Its job is to keep you. And it’s very good at its job. 

And every smug “look how crazy they are” post widens the divisive trench a little deeper, builds the polarizing wall a little higher. 

The tragedy is that attention is the only currency we actually own. Spend it, and it becomes your life. Let someone else spend it, and it becomes theirs. That’s the exchange every time you open the feed.

If you want the test, it’s simple: close the app and see if your pulse settles and your day expands. If it does, you’ve been rented out. If your patience returns and the clock slows down, that’s your answer.