Take Your Time Back

Managed to get Mistral to summarise the video transcript for now (although I'd highly recommend that you install Unhook and watch the video, it's under 15 minutes and worth your time).

1. The Problem with the "Cigarette" Metaphor

The idea that the social internet is like cigarettes—purely addictive and harmful—is tempting, but it’s too simplistic. Cigarettes offer no benefit; they’re just a delivery system for nicotine, an addictive chemical with no upside. The social internet, however, isn’t just about addiction. At its core, it’s about information, which can be valuable, meaningful, and even life-changing (like books, art, or educational content). So while the social internet can be harmful, it’s not inherently so. The metaphor obscures that nuance.

2. A Better Comparison: Food

For most of human history, food scarcity was the norm. People starved. Malnutrition was a leading cause of death. Only recently—within the last century—have we entered an era of food abundance, where the problem isn’t too little food but too much, especially the kind that’s cheap, hyper-palatable, and engineered to be irresistible (think Doritos, fast food, or sugary drinks).

The social internet is like this shift from scarcity to abundance, but with information instead of calories. Just as junk food can be tasty but unhealthy, much of the social internet is designed to be engaging but empty—full of "empty calories" (mindless scrolling, outrage bait, or misinformation) that don’t nourish us. And just like with food, the stuff that’s worst for us is often the most addictive and accessible.

3. The Danger of Hyper-Palatable Information

The real issue isn’t information itself—it’s how it’s packaged and delivered. Companies compete to make content as engaging as possible, often at the expense of quality or truth. This creates a few big problems:

• Algorithmic personalization: Platforms don’t just serve you content; they learn what keeps you hooked and tailor your feed to maximize engagement. This can lead you down rabbit holes of misinformation, polarization, or just wasted time.
• Outrage and division sell: Just like how junk food is packed with sugar and fat, the social internet often prioritizes controversy, fear, and anger because those emotions drive engagement.
• It’s hard to resist: We’re biologically wired to seek out stimulating information, and the social internet exploits that. It’s like trying to eat just one Dorito—you’re fighting against design.

4. Why Education Alone Isn’t Enough

You might think the solution is to teach people to be better consumers of information—like putting nutrition labels on food. But this doesn’t work for two big reasons:

• Fact-checking is exhausting: The average person encounters hundreds of pieces of information per hour. You can’t fact-check all of it, and you’re unlikely to question things that feel true or align with your beliefs.
• We overestimate our self-control: Just like with food, we often know what’s bad for us but do it anyway. The social internet preys on this weakness, making it easy to lose track of time, fall for misinformation, or get sucked into drama.

The real solution isn’t just better information literacy—it’s cultural change. We need to develop a collective understanding that some information is junk food: it’s fine in small doses, but a steady diet will make us sick.

5. How Do We Fix This?

The transcript suggests a few key steps:

• Expose the manipulators: Just as anti-smoking campaigns showed how tobacco companies profited from addiction, we need to highlight how social media platforms profit from keeping us hooked, angry, and divided. This could shift the culture toward seeing excessive use as not just unhealthy, but cringe—something to be avoided, not bragged about.
• Build better cultural tools: Over time, societies develop norms and structures to handle new challenges. For example, we’ve started to see junk food as less desirable (even if we still eat it sometimes). The same could happen with the social internet—we might start to see mindless scrolling or outrage bait as something shameful or embarrassing.
• Focus on simple, powerful stories: Instead of complex lessons about media literacy, the message should be clear and emotional: "They’re using you. They don’t care about you. They just want your attention." This is easier to remember and act on.

6. The Big Picture

The social internet isn’t inherently bad—it’s a tool, like food. The problem is that we’re early in the era of information abundance, and we haven’t yet figured out how to use it healthily. But just as we’ve started to reject ultra-processed foods in favor of healthier options, we can learn to consume information more mindfully.

The goal isn’t to abandon the social internet entirely—it’s to recognize the junk, enjoy it in moderation, and prioritize the stuff that actually nourishes us.

Final Thought: We’re not powerless. We’re just learning how to live in a world where information is abundant—and that’s a challenge we can meet, even if it takes time.