It isn’t a guess. When a major tech company ambitiously names a division Reality Labs, it’s telling you exactly where the industry is headed.
Reality, as if it were a boring factory widget, is being manufactured, industrialized, and installed over the air directly to our brains.
The Metaverse is not a headset or a Ready Player One fantasy. It’s the fact that your feed is different from your dad’s feed, which is different from your little cousin’s feed, which is different from your neighbor’s feed.
Although it’s the same platform, we receive completely different reality cues.
This is made possible by the massive infrastucture facilitating user profiling and hyperpersonalization. The richness and stimulation of pixels, videos, sounds, and psychological hooks are designed to be so immersive, hypnotic, addictive, and engaging that we start to bore of the “real” reality around us. Real reality just cannot compete.
Chatbots only accelerate this by giving users a sounding board to echo their divergent realities back to them.
If psychosis means losing touch with Reality (with a capital “R” to denote a shared, collective, consensus reality), what we have now is lowercase “r” reality.
This “reality” is custom-built exactly for us by an algorithm to capitalize on our psychosis. This psychosis isn’t an abnormal psychiatric designation that requires admission to a hospital ward, it’s a normalized industrial product designed to influence and manufacture consent at the most intimate level one can imagine, their sense of reality.
Software-as-a-Service is old news.
The new business is Psychosis-as-a-Service.
As fake and outrageous as the news feels lately, it’s the one thing that still anchors us to a shared reality. A major spectacle or event happens and suddenly everyone’s timeline converges on the same thing.
Unfortunately that’s the only thread that keeps us tied together, and it’s thin.
We navigate the world based on the maps we carry in our heads. If someone else is drawing your map, they get to decide where you end up.
When we surrender our map-making abilities, we surrender something much more important: the ability to decide where we’re going.
A question to reflect on: how much of your map did you draw yourself?
Group chats are underrated. A friends group chat, a family group chat — these are essentially a curated news feed from people you trust, about things that actually matter to your life. No algorithm or engagement optimization as a middleman.
Every feed you join is a map you’re borrowing, so be choosy. Audit what you’re reading and ask: does this reflect my values and curiosity, and do I trust the algorithm here to value me over advertisers and other stakeholders?
Not everything that reaches you is true. Not everything true is important. Not everything important is urgent. The feed will try to make everything feel all three at once.
Slow down, notice, and filter.
If you have the technical know-how, take back control of your feeds at the infrastructure level.
We didn’t sign up to have our reality manufactured for us. Most of us also didn’t read the terms of service.
The first step is just noticing it’s happening.
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