The Long Bright Dark

Pisces Full Moon Deep Dive

“Old George Orwell got it backward. Big brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.” -Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

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There is a war for your mind.

Globally, companies spent $773 billion USD on advertising in 2023. In America, political advocacy spend—what some may call propaganda—hit roughly $16 Billion USD. There are more than 11,000 known “think tanks”: organizations that study collective human data to anticipate—and influence— shifts in our perspective.

And, with 5.4 billion active internet users in the world interfacing with an anticipated global social media market size of $413.16 Billion U.S., those think tanks sure are going to stay busy mining and analyzing the available mountain of “human data” in the “internet of things” (IoT), predicting and possibly influencing the trends that impact our culture— and our thinking.

When looking at this picture from a 20,000 foot view, it’s blatantly obvious that all of these companies, entities and organizations spend incredible amounts of time, energy and money to influence (if not control) your mind for one simple reason: it works.

Trust me: if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t be investing so heavily in it.

Said another way? Your consciousness is the most coveted resource on the planet.

Hell, for all we know, it might just be the most coveted resource off of this planet, too!

And, like countries rich in oil, we are suffering from a human-scaled version of The Resource Curse: a paradoxical situation in which a country underperforms economically and socially despite being home to a valuable natural resource.

As humans, we’re inherently rich with imagination and creativity. But, because other entities and interests want to control and exploit our consciousness to their own ends for their own short-term benefit, we humans are absolutely suffering as a result of the metaphorical strip-mining of our minds.

Take, for instance, what came along with the sudden emergence and adoption of ChatGPT, the AI-enabled language model that writes stuff for us and that currently boasts more than 200 million active users. To start, millions of people lost their jobs and entire professions and industries were evaporated for the “sake of progress”.

But ChatGPT’s effects on humanity are even more subtle and insidious than that.

Case in point: when ChatGPT first hit the scene, I noticed a measurable drop in the quality of written and verbal communication from former coworkers, all of whom have had writing-intensive jobs. Some of my these individuals even took to LinkedIn, asking if anyone else was experiencing atrophied writing and thinking skills as a result of their new reliance on this AI-powered tool.

I remember reading one post on LinkedIn and thinking, “Well, of course. If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

For every invention designed to make us more efficient and more productive, it’s apparent that we lose something crucial and notably human in the process, ultimately becoming a weaker, more regressed and dependent version of ourselves, both individually and collectively.

Remember the days before spellcheck, when you had to reference a dictionary and actually learn— and remember— how to spell words? Or maybe you did fractions by hand on paper, not relying on a calculator or app to do the work for you?

Remember what it was like to read books and “create” the images of the story in your own mind’s eye, relying on your imagination to world-build instead of relying on someone else’s CGI-heavy vision to supplant it with images and special effects?

How’s all of this going for you now? Do you think these widgets and tools and technologies and enhancements have increased your free time or quality of life or cognitive capacity?

Yah. I didn’t think so.

After all, it was William S. Borroughs who put it best:

“What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.”

This got me thinking about what other perishable skills we humans have surrendered as we have outsourced our thinking and writing and reading and researching and analyzing and imagining to external authorities, tools, and apps.

So, I did some research, starting with creative professionals that I admire.