A video is going viral, that was actually recorded several years ago, where comedian Bo Burnham pinpoints a fundamental problem with our modern society. Social media and capitalism are working hand in hand to dominate every second of your attention, so they can make more money off of you. But this has the knock-on effect of increasing your anxiety and lowering your self-esteem.
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Recently on Twitter, this old video of I believe when Bo Burnham was promoting the movie eighth grade that he directed which I'd highly recommend anyone see. He was asked about capitalism more broadly or I guess he brought it up. And how social media companies play into the next stage of how capitalism is trying to conquer Parts of every part of the world. and it won't stop and it's already as he makes this point in the video colonizing as much land as they possibly can. And their new frontier is your mind and your attention. they're coming for every second of your life. That's what these companies are coming to. This company is as well. And it's not because anyone is bad. It's not because anyone in this company has evil plans. Or is trying to do this. Or are they doing it consciously? It's because these companies, like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, have gone public. And they went to shareholders so they have to grow. Their entire models are based on growth. They cannot stay stagnant. YouTube and Twitter grossed four or five billion dollars last year. It is in red. It is unprofitable. It has to get more of you. No matter how nice it's trying to be it is all that they're trying to get more engagement from you. We used to colonize the land. That was the thing you could expand into. And that's where money was to be made. We colonized the entire Earth. There was no other place for businesses and capitalism to expand into. And then they realized human attention. That we can now try to colonize every minute of our life. That is what these people are trying to do. Every single free moment you have is a moment you could be looking at your phone and they could be gathering information to Target ads at you. That's what's happening. so I like as much as we can, you know, to have really good conversations. And try to humanize the conversations. The like mechanism of the business is rolling towards that. Just because of the market. So like it's coming.
