Hey thinkers,
The numbers are getting absurd.
Meta recently revealed that only 7% of the content people consume daily comes from people they actually know.
The rest is algorithmic noise—a finely tuned chaos machine optimized not for connection, but for retention. We were promised community. What we got instead was a dopamine factory that turned friendship into metrics and meaning into impressions.
So where does this infinite scroll lead? And can we still find a way out before the feed consumes everything—including us?
The algorithm that ate intimacy
Social networks once sold us the dream of human connection. But as user growth plateaued, the metrics shifted.
Algorithms learned that outrage and novelty outperform nuance and empathy. By 2025, the average user spends 147 minutes a day on social media—but interacts meaningfully with fewer than five real people.
The system doesn’t want your friendships—it wants your friction. Negative engagement increases dwell time by up to 300%, according to MIT research. Your emotions aren’t byproducts; they’re inputs in an attention economy that monetizes anxiety, envy, and tribal rage. Platforms that began as tools for connection now operate as prediction markets for behavior. The better they can anticipate what will keep you scrolling, the more valuable you become.
Shoshana Zuboff called it surveillance capitalism. By 2025, it has evolved into behavioral capitalism: not just tracking what you do, but shaping what you’ll do next.
Recommendation engines no longer react—they pre-empt. TikTok’s For You Page predicts content preferences with over 80% accuracy after only 90 minutes of use. Instagram’s Reels now tests over 200 micro-variables per user per session. Every scroll is a behavioral bet, a tiny economic transaction disguised as entertainment.
And just like markets, these systems favor volatility.
Calm doesn’t convert. Outrage does.
The cultural side effects
We are entering the era of engineered emotion. Elections, wars, and cultural debates are filtered through virality algorithms that privilege speed over substance.
During the 2024 European elections, researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute found that disinformation posts received 4x more engagement than verified news. The same logic drives every controversy: friction equals fuel.
The result? Context collapse. Political discourse becomes spectacle. Activism becomes branding. Even empathy becomes content.
Influencers aren’t anomalies—they’re archetypes. The influencer economy, now worth $21.5 billion in 2025, teaches ordinary users to monetize their personalities. Authenticity is no longer organic; it’s optimized. The platform rewards parasocial proximity—the illusion of intimacy between strangers—because it scales better than real relationships ever could.
What used to be friendship is now a subscription model. We don’t connect; we consume each other.
The new digital resistance
If 2010-2020 was the era of public feeds, 2025-2030 will be the rise of the private web. Already, time spent on closed ecosystems like Discord, Signal, Geneva, and Substack Notes has grown 62% year-over-year. People are migrating from performative platforms to smaller, semi-anonymous spaces where conversation feels human again.
Even more radical movements are emerging:
- Are.na – a minimalist network built for knowledge-sharing, not scrolling. No ads, no algorithms, just collective intelligence.
- Mastodon & Pixelfed – federated platforms running on open protocols, where users own the servers and the data. A slow, frictionless alternative to Meta’s monopolies.
- Nostr & Bluesky – decentralized microblogging ecosystems that treat identity as portable, not owned.
- Coop Cloud & Discourse communities – where governance is transparent and participation replaces performativity.
The shift is subtle but seismic: people are no longer fleeing the internet—they’re reclaiming it. They want digital spaces with boundaries, where moderation replaces manipulation, and belonging isn’t a metric.
Still, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube will follow. Algorithms are learning to infiltrate these micro-ecosystems with ambient personalization: contextual ads, predictive topic feeds, AI-generated posts that imitate the tone of your circle. The illusion of escape will hold—until monetization catches up.
Toward a post-algorithmic internet
There’s a new design ethos rising: slow media, shared authorship, ethical attention. Platforms that will survive the next decade are those built on three principles:
- Transparency over manipulation. No black-box algorithms. Users must see and shape the logic behind what they consume.
- Community over virality. Platforms like Lighthouse (emerging in 2025) reward contribution and dialogue rather than clicks.
- Curation as resistance. Instead of algorithmic feeds, people are curating collective archives—human recommendation engines that rediscover trust in taste.
The real revolution won’t come from deleting apps. It will come from building better ones: humane, federated, open-source infrastructures that treat our time as sacred, not saleable.
Maybe the only rebellion left is slowness.
Logging off won’t dismantle the machine, but resisting its rhythm might. The algorithm thrives on acceleration; reflection starves it.
Future platforms that endure will be those that design for depth over dopamine. Spaces where time spent isn’t just counted but considered. These include long-form newsletters, cooperative platforms, forums like Are.na, and digital co-ops that reject ad-driven capitalism altogether. They’re small, imperfect, and gloriously inefficient—which might be exactly why they matter.
We built networks to connect us and ended up building mirrors that multiply us. Every scroll feeds the chorus of the machine. The question isn’t whether it will stop singing—but whether we can remember our own sound beneath the noise.
Until next time, stay awake.
Alex
