09-19-2024, 11:05 AM
March 2021
“Heed my warnings! The digital age as we know it is on the verge of destroying us all! As technology advances further and further, the minds of each and every human being on this planet are losing themselves to the harmful practices of doomscrolling! You leave your minds wide open to harmful ideologies and enticing misinformation from those who know as much about what they preach as you do! I ask of you, don’t become victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, take notice of the way the tech giants have intentionally manufactured their social media machine to be as addictive as possible, lining their pockets off of your naivete! How else could they have barely been affected by this global pandemic that grips us all?”
Maybe it sounded like the misguided ramblings of a madman, but Dexter Grant wasn’t just any old nutjob who grabbed a soapbox to stand upon so he could preach a sermon to any passerby who would give him the time of day. First off, he wasn’t doing this just to get attention, this was a cause he actually honest-to-god believed in. That was evident in the raw passion laced into every word he spoke, and it was clearly working since he’d amassed a fairly large crowd today. Perhaps it seemed weird to see a disheveled man decked out in anti-tech and social media patches from head to toe, a mask protecting him as COVID-19 was still very much a thing, standing on a soapbox in San Francisco’s Union Square as he preached about the virus of social media and the tech companies who knowingly infected the public with it. Then again, it would be just as bizarre to see Dexter as that disheveled man, because this was a far cry from the man many around this city knew just a few short years ago before he seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.
“Take a good look around us,” Dexter told the crowd, motioning to the many buildings around him, plenty of which had been closed down and abandoned. “Union Square has been the beating heart of this city’s retail and tourism for many years. It’s a goddamned historical landmark of the state of California! But look at it now. In the wake of this pandemic, many retailers have up and abandoned this square, reducing it to a shell of its former glory. It would be easy to blame COVID for this tragic fate, but the official story they all paint for you on their social media feeds is that this square has become rife with crime and homelessness, a problem this city has had for many years and has only just now become an issue to them! They cite open-air drug use when not once have I ever walked these streets and seen a single crack pipe or syringe full of heroin. They hope that if they can plaster it all over Twitter and Facebook then you’ll just have to believe it as fact, knowing full well they were just looking for an excuse to go mine for gold somewhere else! They have abandoned you and the social media moguls are all too happy to perpetuate their lies because they can fill each other’s bank vaults through sponsorships that hide the truth and make you believe whatever they tell you to, like common sheep!”
He could see the disbelief in their eyes, and he just knew it was because they were already brainwashed. Dexter wasn’t a man who made baseless claims…yes, they certainly sound the part, but he was always a man who did his homework and gathered his facts before presenting them. It was the reason why he’d been top of his class once upon a time, even throughout college, why he’d had such a promising future in the eyes of so many. But that felt like an entire lifetime ago now, back when he was just another sheep in the flock mindlessly wandering through life being fed whatever garbage he was told to consume. He was smart enough to pick up on it rather quickly: the algorithms and design of these social media sites and apps, presenting themselves as the next logical step in the innovation of technology pushing humanity towards that future we all dream of with robots and flying cars and the like. Every cog in the machine was intentional, the purpose being to create a platform where it was so easy to get lost in the fog that your brain would turn to mush and you’d be a mindless zombie, ripe for the picking to spread whatever news was trending that day and your ‘beliefs’ in that subject to spread the sickness, infecting others with your bullshit so they would verify your claims and make it seem like you actually knew what you were talking about.
Researching the facts he was after felt like hell considering the internet was the go-to for everything these days, especially as social media began to dominate the digital stream of information, but Dexter would not subject himself to that hell ever again if he could help it. He would not lose himself to that cancer after he’d fought so hard to overcome it once before…a relapse would be fatal in his mind, and if he was going to die, then it was going to be a proper death where the empty void of the afterlife greeted him and his body was lowered into the ground to be consumed by the worms, not becoming a mindless husk that further spread the sickness because it was all he would know.
“You can see it in the world around us, woven into the politics of the United States! Who you want to be your President is irrelevant because at the end of the day, both sides are using social media to propagate their lies about one another, organizing the masses into armies that threaten to destroy the very democracy that has defined this country for generations! They’re just as much slaves to the system as they are abusers of it, buying into every little lie someone tweets out or posts online and building a political attack around it, creating the schism that defines our government today. Why work together for you when they can brainwash you all into getting your vote to keep them in power despite refusing to do absolutely anything! Is that the kind of country you want to live in? One where the government itself is merely a puppet to the whims of social media deceit?”
That lost him quite a few members of the crowd that had gathered before him, and he knew it would. It was obvious how much of a hot button issue politics as a whole was right now, but those who could be truly devoted to helping him spread his counter-message and fight back would be the ones who would power through, knowing he was right regardless of whether they were Democrat or Republican because they saw what he saw: a system that had been tainted by powers who had no business being involved that stoked the flames of hatred because it got people using their product to pour more gasoline on it.
“I urge each and every one of you to take a stand. Put down your phones, step away from your computer screens and take a good, hard look at the world around us as it truly is, not what someone else sensationalizes for you to believe it is. We can stop this virus before it spreads too far and spells the end of humanity as we know it! Free yourselves from the chains of this digital cult, embrace the real world again and everything that empowers you to be who you want to be and not what some ‘influencer’ tells you to be! Believe in my truth! Believe that you have the power to disconnect to reconnect, and your digital detoxing can begin!”
Perhaps throwing his arms out in welcome was a bit too much dramatic flourish, but Dexter knew he had to punctuate this little soapbox sermon somehow to open his arms for anyone who believed in his cause. His hopefully smile turns upside-down, however, when he begins to realize that he probably came off as nothing more than a novelty act to these people. After all, some crazy man who they believed was probably homeless literally standing on his soapbox and spouting off about how evil technology and social media is? To them, probably a worthwhile way to kill a few minutes if they had nothing better to do. He even sees some of them almost immediately pull out their phones, no doubt taking to Twitter to share their experience with the lunatic who thinks such apps are literal cancer to their hundreds of followers for a good laugh. Dexter can only hop off his soapbox and retrieve it before stomping away, fuming at how easy it is to draw a crowd but impossible to break the hold social media has gained over them. Perhaps if he could get just one person to pierce the veil and understand the reality of what’s going on, he could have a better chance of breaking the spell and making progress.
“Idiots…all of them…” Dexter grumbles to himself as he storms off. “I’m trying to save them and they think this is all a joke. Not a single word out of my mouth is funny! I’m not going to just stand here and wait for the world to fall to ruin just so they can finally realize I was right all along. This isn’t an ‘I told you so’ situation, this is their goddamned lives I’m trying to save!”
“...I believe you...”
Dexter quickly whipped around, surprised that someone had actually addressed him. The person who had done so certainly wasn’t what he expected. Shorter than he was and lanky as all hell, the guy looked like he was one of those nerds people probably loved to shove into lockers in high school. Even at what he wanted to presume was an age where this guy was probably in college now, Dexter’s mind flickered with thoughts about just how punchable this kid’s face was. He was clearly trembling, withering under Dexter’s gaze, but he tried to stand firm now that he had the man’s attention.
“What did you say?”
“I…” The kid cleared his throat before trying again, definitely intimidated by Dexter. “I said I believe you. What you’re doing, trying to save humanity from digitally drowning…it’s a cause I want to believe in.”
Dexter raised an eyebrow at this. The kid certainly wasn’t his first choice whenever he thought of someone finally believing in his cause and not treating it like a joke, but the fact that he did manage to get through to someone caused him to pull back on how menacing he probably looked right now.
“You seriously believe in what I said?” Dexter asked firmly. “You’re not just joking so your buddies can record it and post it on TikTok for some asinine viral challenge garbage or whatever?”
“I don’t have any friends.”
Dexter couldn’t help but be even a little skeptical of that claim, glancing around expecting to catch the slightest glimpse of someone trying to hide and record everything. He felt like he was one of those hidden camera prank shows, and the last thing he wanted was a night in a jail cell for caving someone’s face in because he refused to be subjected to that kind of ridicule when he was dead serious about trying to save humanity from itself.
“You’ll forgive me if I find that hard to believe.”
“It’s true!” the kid cried. “No one ever seems to like me, all those do is bully me and- and push me around because it’s so easy! They share it online and no one says anything against the bullying, they all just point and laugh about how much of a loser I am. I hate it! I want it to stop!”
The kid kept rambling, but Dexter tuned it out, having heard enough to confirm his initial perception of the guy was spot-on, and it actually broke his heart at hearing how much he’d become a victim of the social media machine, not because of being obsessed with it himself, but because it was being weaponized to bury and destroy him. That itself had become one of the driving forces behind Dexter’s decision to take himself off the grid and begin this selfless crusade, seeing how the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on had groups that preached anti-bullying and yet did nothing against trolls and senseless hateful vitriol until it drove sweet, innocent souls to take their own lives. It was the darkest punchline to the cruelest joke, and no matter how many times it happened, nothing was done because no one would dare blame the vehicle that allowed for it in the first place and that vehicle certainly wouldn’t do the right thing and rat out whoever had used them for ill intentions.
“What’s your name kid?”
“And I- huh?” The guy stumbled as his frustrated ranting was cut off by a simple question, Dexter’s tone being far from anything he’d heard or expected from the man at this point. “It’s, um…Wendell.”
“Just Wendell?” The kid nodded. “Well, good on you for not sharing your full name with me. That’s a dangerous thing to do with a stranger in this day and age, especially since you’ve got to be, what, in college?”
“I’m studying IT here in California, something not even this pandemic has been able to stop thankfully.”
“Is that so?” Dexter’s curiosity was piqued now. This kid, Wendell, didn’t seem that much different from him in a few regards, and he seemed to have a good head on his shoulders. That made the bullying stories he’d shared all the more tragic, and Dexter was having none of it. “Well, nice to meet you Wendell. The name’s Dexter, and if you’re willing to help me fight, then perhaps my cause stands a better chance of succeeding than I was starting to believe.”
“It has to succeed!” Wendell exclaimed as he took Dexter’s offered hand, shaking it enthusiastically. “This world needs to change for the better, people need to get off social media! It’s killing us, in some cases literally!”
“And that’s what we’re going to put an end to,” Dexter confirmed. “You seem like a good kid Wendell, far better than becoming just another statistic that doesn’t get through people’s thick skulls because they’re already drowning in the digital sea of misinformation and sensationalist influence. Together, I think this is the start of some real progress.”
Wendell eagerly nodded as he began to follow Dexter, hopeful that being part of a cause bigger than himself that would truly change the world would be a sign of positive things to come.
Dexter, on the other hand, saw this as his opportunity to solidify his facts through someone else doing all the digital dirty work for him, finally having a way of using the evolution of the digital age against all those who vouched for its rapid expansion into more and more dangerous levels of social sickness.
“Heed my warnings! The digital age as we know it is on the verge of destroying us all! As technology advances further and further, the minds of each and every human being on this planet are losing themselves to the harmful practices of doomscrolling! You leave your minds wide open to harmful ideologies and enticing misinformation from those who know as much about what they preach as you do! I ask of you, don’t become victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, take notice of the way the tech giants have intentionally manufactured their social media machine to be as addictive as possible, lining their pockets off of your naivete! How else could they have barely been affected by this global pandemic that grips us all?”
Maybe it sounded like the misguided ramblings of a madman, but Dexter Grant wasn’t just any old nutjob who grabbed a soapbox to stand upon so he could preach a sermon to any passerby who would give him the time of day. First off, he wasn’t doing this just to get attention, this was a cause he actually honest-to-god believed in. That was evident in the raw passion laced into every word he spoke, and it was clearly working since he’d amassed a fairly large crowd today. Perhaps it seemed weird to see a disheveled man decked out in anti-tech and social media patches from head to toe, a mask protecting him as COVID-19 was still very much a thing, standing on a soapbox in San Francisco’s Union Square as he preached about the virus of social media and the tech companies who knowingly infected the public with it. Then again, it would be just as bizarre to see Dexter as that disheveled man, because this was a far cry from the man many around this city knew just a few short years ago before he seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.
“Take a good look around us,” Dexter told the crowd, motioning to the many buildings around him, plenty of which had been closed down and abandoned. “Union Square has been the beating heart of this city’s retail and tourism for many years. It’s a goddamned historical landmark of the state of California! But look at it now. In the wake of this pandemic, many retailers have up and abandoned this square, reducing it to a shell of its former glory. It would be easy to blame COVID for this tragic fate, but the official story they all paint for you on their social media feeds is that this square has become rife with crime and homelessness, a problem this city has had for many years and has only just now become an issue to them! They cite open-air drug use when not once have I ever walked these streets and seen a single crack pipe or syringe full of heroin. They hope that if they can plaster it all over Twitter and Facebook then you’ll just have to believe it as fact, knowing full well they were just looking for an excuse to go mine for gold somewhere else! They have abandoned you and the social media moguls are all too happy to perpetuate their lies because they can fill each other’s bank vaults through sponsorships that hide the truth and make you believe whatever they tell you to, like common sheep!”
He could see the disbelief in their eyes, and he just knew it was because they were already brainwashed. Dexter wasn’t a man who made baseless claims…yes, they certainly sound the part, but he was always a man who did his homework and gathered his facts before presenting them. It was the reason why he’d been top of his class once upon a time, even throughout college, why he’d had such a promising future in the eyes of so many. But that felt like an entire lifetime ago now, back when he was just another sheep in the flock mindlessly wandering through life being fed whatever garbage he was told to consume. He was smart enough to pick up on it rather quickly: the algorithms and design of these social media sites and apps, presenting themselves as the next logical step in the innovation of technology pushing humanity towards that future we all dream of with robots and flying cars and the like. Every cog in the machine was intentional, the purpose being to create a platform where it was so easy to get lost in the fog that your brain would turn to mush and you’d be a mindless zombie, ripe for the picking to spread whatever news was trending that day and your ‘beliefs’ in that subject to spread the sickness, infecting others with your bullshit so they would verify your claims and make it seem like you actually knew what you were talking about.
Researching the facts he was after felt like hell considering the internet was the go-to for everything these days, especially as social media began to dominate the digital stream of information, but Dexter would not subject himself to that hell ever again if he could help it. He would not lose himself to that cancer after he’d fought so hard to overcome it once before…a relapse would be fatal in his mind, and if he was going to die, then it was going to be a proper death where the empty void of the afterlife greeted him and his body was lowered into the ground to be consumed by the worms, not becoming a mindless husk that further spread the sickness because it was all he would know.
“You can see it in the world around us, woven into the politics of the United States! Who you want to be your President is irrelevant because at the end of the day, both sides are using social media to propagate their lies about one another, organizing the masses into armies that threaten to destroy the very democracy that has defined this country for generations! They’re just as much slaves to the system as they are abusers of it, buying into every little lie someone tweets out or posts online and building a political attack around it, creating the schism that defines our government today. Why work together for you when they can brainwash you all into getting your vote to keep them in power despite refusing to do absolutely anything! Is that the kind of country you want to live in? One where the government itself is merely a puppet to the whims of social media deceit?”
That lost him quite a few members of the crowd that had gathered before him, and he knew it would. It was obvious how much of a hot button issue politics as a whole was right now, but those who could be truly devoted to helping him spread his counter-message and fight back would be the ones who would power through, knowing he was right regardless of whether they were Democrat or Republican because they saw what he saw: a system that had been tainted by powers who had no business being involved that stoked the flames of hatred because it got people using their product to pour more gasoline on it.
“I urge each and every one of you to take a stand. Put down your phones, step away from your computer screens and take a good, hard look at the world around us as it truly is, not what someone else sensationalizes for you to believe it is. We can stop this virus before it spreads too far and spells the end of humanity as we know it! Free yourselves from the chains of this digital cult, embrace the real world again and everything that empowers you to be who you want to be and not what some ‘influencer’ tells you to be! Believe in my truth! Believe that you have the power to disconnect to reconnect, and your digital detoxing can begin!”
Perhaps throwing his arms out in welcome was a bit too much dramatic flourish, but Dexter knew he had to punctuate this little soapbox sermon somehow to open his arms for anyone who believed in his cause. His hopefully smile turns upside-down, however, when he begins to realize that he probably came off as nothing more than a novelty act to these people. After all, some crazy man who they believed was probably homeless literally standing on his soapbox and spouting off about how evil technology and social media is? To them, probably a worthwhile way to kill a few minutes if they had nothing better to do. He even sees some of them almost immediately pull out their phones, no doubt taking to Twitter to share their experience with the lunatic who thinks such apps are literal cancer to their hundreds of followers for a good laugh. Dexter can only hop off his soapbox and retrieve it before stomping away, fuming at how easy it is to draw a crowd but impossible to break the hold social media has gained over them. Perhaps if he could get just one person to pierce the veil and understand the reality of what’s going on, he could have a better chance of breaking the spell and making progress.
“Idiots…all of them…” Dexter grumbles to himself as he storms off. “I’m trying to save them and they think this is all a joke. Not a single word out of my mouth is funny! I’m not going to just stand here and wait for the world to fall to ruin just so they can finally realize I was right all along. This isn’t an ‘I told you so’ situation, this is their goddamned lives I’m trying to save!”
“...I believe you...”
Dexter quickly whipped around, surprised that someone had actually addressed him. The person who had done so certainly wasn’t what he expected. Shorter than he was and lanky as all hell, the guy looked like he was one of those nerds people probably loved to shove into lockers in high school. Even at what he wanted to presume was an age where this guy was probably in college now, Dexter’s mind flickered with thoughts about just how punchable this kid’s face was. He was clearly trembling, withering under Dexter’s gaze, but he tried to stand firm now that he had the man’s attention.
“What did you say?”
“I…” The kid cleared his throat before trying again, definitely intimidated by Dexter. “I said I believe you. What you’re doing, trying to save humanity from digitally drowning…it’s a cause I want to believe in.”
Dexter raised an eyebrow at this. The kid certainly wasn’t his first choice whenever he thought of someone finally believing in his cause and not treating it like a joke, but the fact that he did manage to get through to someone caused him to pull back on how menacing he probably looked right now.
“You seriously believe in what I said?” Dexter asked firmly. “You’re not just joking so your buddies can record it and post it on TikTok for some asinine viral challenge garbage or whatever?”
“I don’t have any friends.”
Dexter couldn’t help but be even a little skeptical of that claim, glancing around expecting to catch the slightest glimpse of someone trying to hide and record everything. He felt like he was one of those hidden camera prank shows, and the last thing he wanted was a night in a jail cell for caving someone’s face in because he refused to be subjected to that kind of ridicule when he was dead serious about trying to save humanity from itself.
“You’ll forgive me if I find that hard to believe.”
“It’s true!” the kid cried. “No one ever seems to like me, all those do is bully me and- and push me around because it’s so easy! They share it online and no one says anything against the bullying, they all just point and laugh about how much of a loser I am. I hate it! I want it to stop!”
The kid kept rambling, but Dexter tuned it out, having heard enough to confirm his initial perception of the guy was spot-on, and it actually broke his heart at hearing how much he’d become a victim of the social media machine, not because of being obsessed with it himself, but because it was being weaponized to bury and destroy him. That itself had become one of the driving forces behind Dexter’s decision to take himself off the grid and begin this selfless crusade, seeing how the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on had groups that preached anti-bullying and yet did nothing against trolls and senseless hateful vitriol until it drove sweet, innocent souls to take their own lives. It was the darkest punchline to the cruelest joke, and no matter how many times it happened, nothing was done because no one would dare blame the vehicle that allowed for it in the first place and that vehicle certainly wouldn’t do the right thing and rat out whoever had used them for ill intentions.
“What’s your name kid?”
“And I- huh?” The guy stumbled as his frustrated ranting was cut off by a simple question, Dexter’s tone being far from anything he’d heard or expected from the man at this point. “It’s, um…Wendell.”
“Just Wendell?” The kid nodded. “Well, good on you for not sharing your full name with me. That’s a dangerous thing to do with a stranger in this day and age, especially since you’ve got to be, what, in college?”
“I’m studying IT here in California, something not even this pandemic has been able to stop thankfully.”
“Is that so?” Dexter’s curiosity was piqued now. This kid, Wendell, didn’t seem that much different from him in a few regards, and he seemed to have a good head on his shoulders. That made the bullying stories he’d shared all the more tragic, and Dexter was having none of it. “Well, nice to meet you Wendell. The name’s Dexter, and if you’re willing to help me fight, then perhaps my cause stands a better chance of succeeding than I was starting to believe.”
“It has to succeed!” Wendell exclaimed as he took Dexter’s offered hand, shaking it enthusiastically. “This world needs to change for the better, people need to get off social media! It’s killing us, in some cases literally!”
“And that’s what we’re going to put an end to,” Dexter confirmed. “You seem like a good kid Wendell, far better than becoming just another statistic that doesn’t get through people’s thick skulls because they’re already drowning in the digital sea of misinformation and sensationalist influence. Together, I think this is the start of some real progress.”
Wendell eagerly nodded as he began to follow Dexter, hopeful that being part of a cause bigger than himself that would truly change the world would be a sign of positive things to come.
Dexter, on the other hand, saw this as his opportunity to solidify his facts through someone else doing all the digital dirty work for him, finally having a way of using the evolution of the digital age against all those who vouched for its rapid expansion into more and more dangerous levels of social sickness.