Everybody Wants You To Know They Have An Opinion
Being online is just for curating your brand now, thanks to your favorite celebrity
The internet has always been a place to scream out opinions, in social town squares (Twitter), in noisy echo chambers (Facebook), in secret gatherings (Reddit), in curated photobooks (Instagram), and now in even more public broadcasts (TikTok). Now, more than ever, it seems obvious that everyone wants everyone else to know their take on current events. Regardless of expectation, interest, or knowledge, every chronically online Gen-Z kid wants to jump on the trendiest opinion train just as much as every 45-year-old Twitter Blue subscriber (X Pro or whatever he calls it now).
You are a brand now
Keep up the PR
Everyday consumption of celebrity culture has permeated online behaviors to the point that getting recommended the newest Hot Ones challenge when you open YouTube or being bombarded with Instagram stories of thirst-trap-influencer-#4574 is virtually inescapable. The current state of recommendation algorithms tries to fill an unwanted need to find something ‘relevant’ to you no matter if it is actually what you are interested in, and a broader discussion on the technical and business decisions that lead to why recommendations seem to descend into weird chaos warrants a separate post altogether.
The recipe for influence is made with the right amounts of addictive technological ingredients. If every attention-addicted celebrity feels the need to get a PR firm ghost ghostwrite long Instagram stories that say nothing of nuance or post a photo of the destruction in Gaza with “Praying for Israel” overlaid on top, you inadvertently will feel that you should too. After all, if you don’t propagate your take to your followers, how will they know you have morals (or are relevant)?
And this makes everyday people start being one of two things: either more and more bland, to appease the lowest common denominator of their followers so as to not get canceled, or completely polarized, catering only to ‘their side’, being vitriolic toward the other. It probably makes sense now why you clearly remember that one friend who posted that Instagram story about hating ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ just to be a contrarian. Thorough research is not valuable; the appeal of getting quick attention is currency enough. It also makes sense why a homeschooled Netflix (former) child actor’s recent comments about the Israel-Hamas conflict are garnering so much attention.
So long as we know our digital footprint is public, neatly curating uncooked personal opinions on social media will be the trend.
Source: I made it up
Misinformation in a time of social desperationGeorge Santos when asked about his lies
You could plausibly cast doubt on whether some new LLM wrote this for me, but would it have been able to quickly concoct a wildly unreal fact, like how the classic horror movie The Exorcist was based on the real experience of a teenage boy in the late 40s? Wait, most LLMs can do that. Also, that fact is actually true - the guy ended up working on the Apollo missions for NASA and admitted that he just made it all up because he thought it was funny.
The average schmoe can be as confidently full of shit as ChatGPT can be making lies spread like wildfire online. That means more ways for you to be effectively propagandized by abject lies about your favorite food being bad for you or that by simply walking 10,000 steps a day you will be guaranteed to not be fat anymore.
Maybe we can collectively shut up about things we are not informed about. Maybe not having an opinion is okay. Maybe it is not shameful to admit your knowledge about the world is limited. We could all benefit from a class on critical thinking and think twice before engaging with reactionary content online. And if that means we post less and sink into digital social irrelevance, so be it, that’s probably for the best.