Social media is a fucking dumpster fire at its finest, and you and I stay glued to the bullshit. The dopamine high is 80s crack-era strong, and the brain rot smells like piss and shit — folks talking out the side of their neck with missing-teeth energy.

The jump-off was cool though, right? MySpace with Tom. Top 8. Embedded media players. Flipping HTML like we were coding at UCI, thinking we were computer science majors.

Then enter Mark Zuckerberg and his pale face and suddenly we graduate to Facebook — which, in hindsight, is really just an FBI file. If they ever decide to use it against me in some future social credit world, I’m cooked.

Embarrassingly enough, I’m trending 16k posts deep and should probably just nuke my account, but the memories and pictures keep me there.

And lately I’ve noticed a growing trend — the kind that reliably sparks emotional outrage if you’re not aware of what the game actually is. Even when you are aware, sometimes you still get sucked into the bullshit. That’s the part that lets you know it’s not an accident.

The model is simple: keep the user on as long as possible, track what the user engages with, then feed them more of that. All together now, we call that the algorithm — and at the moment mine is skid-row-level trash.

I made the mistake of ridiculing too many MAGA clowns, and they got the last laugh, because now the Republican Party greets me every time I open the app.

What I do know for a fact is this: we’re part of the world’s largest social experiment, and the centerpiece is United States politics — whether we signed up for it or not.

Why though? Why the fuck do we seek the very thing most of us openly loathe? It’s a rhetorical question for the thinking class, but it’s the ill loop, really.

My career lets me work from home 100% of the time, and one of the trade-offs is a lack of social connection, which leads to boredom, which leads to doom scrolling. And like blowing trees with 31% THC, I never know what I’m going to get. The homie might be talking about a really fresh concept album he just discovered, or I might drop into a DHS thread and roast a clown from South Carolina who thinks ‘Merica needs to rid the impure first to make this country Godly again.

It’s simple neuroscience. The brain anticipates what’s next. It seeks that little barrage of energy that hits when you read some Neanderthal’s comment about how Mexicans are eating the cats while trafficking fentanyl hidden inside guitarrónes, and that it’s because of them that Peggy Sue from Jacksonville, Florida is broke — and definitely not because of her lack of education or mental ineptitude.

I’m not certain the machine was built to divide, but at the moment it’s the sharpest knife in the drawer, and it’s absolutely amplifying the division. We’re dealing with bots, state-sponsored mental warfare, and lowbrow crackpots who, if they could, would waltz through Disneyland in full Grand Wizard regalia chanting “white power” while ICE leads the detail.

And behind all of it, a few people are profiting billions, because at the end of the day social media is a business — and the number one rule in business is simple: design a product that keeps your customers coming back, by any means necessary.

The cost? Looking like an asshole for responding to the uncultured who fear everything that doesn’t look like them. Time wasted trying to change the minds of people who can’t use their, they’re, and there to save their own life.

Ultimately, the machine, in my opinion, wasn’t built to elevate you. It was built to keep your vibration low and keep you distracted. Look around. If you’re reading this in public, 90% of the people around you are probably staring into the black mirror — anxiety spiking, thoughts racing, getting hit with a steady drip of rage bait.

There was a time when social media was cool. That time is over.

I don’t think this gets fixed. I think it needs to die. I think we need to unplug and return to real life.

And yeah — fuck Mark, fuck Elon, fuck TikTok, and everything in between.