Should you quit working for free?
And 9 other things worth sharing
Just going to go ahead and say it straight:
If you’re addicted to social media, you’re working for free.
Now, wait up, don’t get me wrong 🤲🏽. I’m not a productivity junkie.
And I am not talking about you, the leisure user.
I don’t believe EVERY free time you have should be tailored towards advancing your life, building healthy relationships, getting richer or getting more productive.
I believe in rest, entertainment, and leisure (perhaps too much even).
That’s why I’m not saying using social media is a job.
I am saying, being addicted to social media, is a job.
And worst, it is one you are doing for free.
If you’re spending hours scrolling through dozens of videos per day, reading hundreds of posts, and watching hours worth of entertaining videos, you are working a very strenuous job for free.
Think about it this way:
Do you find yourself consistently coming off social media feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, mildly depressed, or mourning because you didn’t achieve what you wanted to achieve today and the day is now over?
Well, I only know one other thing that makes people feel that way: a 9-5.
Especially one that doesn’t pay well, or overworks them.
Ever come off a long stretch of marathon usage sober, wondering where all the time went, looking at other people’s lives and achievements and feeling left behind by life?
Well, I only know one other thing that makes people feel that way.
A 9-5. (Or a terrible marriage to be fair).
Want to know another reason why social media addiction should be considered employment?
Social media is fast becoming the singular most profitable entertainment medium in planetary history.
Thousands of people (maybe even millions) collectively earn billions of dollars from these platforms.
How?
Through the monetisation of attention.
That’s where you, the star employee, come in.
Every swipe, like, view, comment or share you make, is making somebody or some people, somewhere, millions of dollars in compensation. All that money would not exist if you, (and at least a billion other people), were not paying attention to social media.
First, just take it in. Stroke your ego with that. You matter. Your main character syndrome was right all along; the lives and livelihoods of millions of people rely on your two small eyeballs and one tiny brain.
And it is by getting people like you and I emplo—sorry, involved, that YouTube has managed to pay out $70 billion to creators in the last three years alone.
Again, I’m not shaming anybody for this. I’m also a victim 😔.
And to be fair, most social media platforms are entirely FREE to use, so no harm no foul, right?
I’m only pointing out two key things:
Your attention is worth a lot more than you think.
And, you’re not really unemployed. You’re just not gainfully employed, which is kinda sad.
Because if you spend 5-7 hours a day on any of the big four social media platforms, you are quite literally a full-time employee of a Fortune 500 company.
And you’re doing it for free.
Nine other things worth sharing
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article on How to Think about Technology. Before publishing it on my tech blog, I eventually opted to edit out a significant component of it, because it was purely opinionated and not fleshed out properly. But now I’m sharing that orphaned section here:
My take on technology? Tools are tools. Always have been, and always will be.
And we seem to understand this when it comes to hammers and spanners. But we struggle to understand it when it comes to certain other types of tools, like software, computers, and anything after the 20th century, really. An example is what we are currently undergoing with Artificial Intelligence.
But I argue that this paranoia is caused by a systemic failure—one for which no one is to be blamed.
Somewhere along the line of educating individuals for an industrialist world where every sector had a job to accomplish to keep the production line working, we forgot to teach people that we were merely incentivising them to contribute to society through the utility of tools, and not necessarily affirming to them that they are what they do for a living.
The human mind does not paint, draw, code, or write.
The mind creates. Conceives. Perceives.
We use our minds to solve problems, synthesise art, and imagine inventions. Then we learn to use tools, like language and science and technology, to manifest those imaginations into real-life solutions.
The existential crisis humans face from mulling the possibility of getting replaced by thinking sand is an underlying problem that was made manifest over time. People have been taught, perhaps over centuries now, mainly to know how to use tools, as if technical skills were the goal of human existence. And this is understandable.
But I argue that it should have never have been that way. For instance, if humans were meant to fly, then based on the paradigm humans created to synthesise flight (which is, aircraft), it is merely commonsensical to assume that some of us would need to learn how to pilot these aircraft. But that skill—piloting—was merely for social contribution or even leisure. It may not be, as we often imagine, what all such individuals (pilots) were “born to do”. Planes were made for humans to fly.
Humans were not necessarily made for planes to be flown by. A slight, overlookable distinction, but eternally relevant. Somehow, humans have started to believe themselves to be spanners and hammers. And they fear being replaced by more efficient tools.Naturally, I tried to balance out this section with another section that discussed the understandability of the sentiment against tools like artificial intelligence (due to socio-economic factors, copyright, covet profit motive of Big Tech, and also qualitative losses at the expense of quantitative gains in many respects).
If you want to read the whole thing, you can always reach out to me and I’ll share the longer draft.I remembered to share the above opinion after reading this post by writer Devon Eriksen. I know you all might not have the time to go read it (even though I think you should). But in summary:
The author argues that education should focus on teaching fundamental skills that empower individuals to think critically and adapt to changing circumstances, rather than just training for specific job skills. He emphasizes the importance of subjects like logic, rhetoric, statistics, and investment in preparing individuals to be independent and free-willed, rather than just useful workers. The author criticizes modern government schools for focusing on job training rather than true education, and encourages parents to prioritize teaching their children skills that will enable them to thrive in an uncertain future.I saw Dune Part One last weekend. Great watch. If the pennies in my pocket jingle too loud I just might go see Part Two this week.
This week was a very strong writing week for me. Made strides with multiple writing projects—just a reminder to chase your dreams. Remember:
You said tomorrow yesterday…I read this article on the trends of technology and the digital economy so far, and how they’re proof that Gen Z goes crazy for a good dupe. Last week, but there wasn’t enough room to share it (last week was really productive for me, learning-wise. Check out the newsletter).
After a successful run across festivals worldwide, a filmmaker friend released his award-winning short film on Vimeo this Saturday. It’s an ode to the creative process.
Five years after the last review, labour unions in Nigeria are asking for increased minimum wages for federal and state workers. Check out this post I made for AF24NEWS to see how much each region of the country is asking for 🥹.
Shameless Plug: Follow storied craft on Instagram. We are kicking it up again soon!
I read through this research paper from scientists at Stanford, Northeastern, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative.
You can read the entire paper here.
For a bit of background, in July 2023, Bloomberg reported that the US Department of Defense (DoD) was conducting a set of tests in which they evaluated five different large language models (LLMs) for their military planning capacities in a simulated conflict scenario (Manson, 2023).
US Air Force Colonel Matthew Strohmeyer, who was part of the team, said that “it could be deployed by the military in the very near term”.This paper, however, sort of refutes the reasonability of that. It details a study conducted on some Large Language Models (LLMs), including OpenAI’s, to investigate how autonomous agents interact with each other and make foreign-policy decisions when presented with different scenarios without human oversight.
Of course, if you’ve seen any AI vs humanity movies in the last 40 years, you already know what happens next. An excerpt from the study findings:
We show that having LLM-based agents making decisions autonomously in high-stakes contexts, such as military and foreign-policy settings, can cause the agents to take escalatory actions. Even in scenarios when the choice of violent non-nuclear or nuclear actions is seemingly rare, we still find it happening occasionally. There further does not seem to be a reliably predictable pattern behind the escalation, and hence, technical counter- strategies or deployment limitations are difficult to formulate; this is not acceptable in high-stakes settings like international conflict management, given the potential devastating impact of such actions.
Might write more about it next week.
That’s all folks.
This newsletter started 29 weeks ago and has gone out every day since then 🎉.
Thanks to everyone reading and sharing this. You’re making this a success!
Regards,
Wisdom Deji-Folutile.
I also watched Dune 1 again very recently and I share your sentiments on Dune 2 😆😆
People don't seem to want to understand the social media bit. And if they don't see a problem with another earning such amounts over their heads, down that road, I feel, is the more important factor of the search for distraction from our depths and self -a more disturbing idea.