We don’t have to think anymore. Instagram does it for us. I’m sitting on the toilet, swiping through IG stories my friends and acquaintances have posted. Some are benign image boosters: gym selfies, snippets of concerts, or group photos from a rooftop bar. Those are fine I guess, but then there’s “those people.” Nothing makes my blood boil more than someone using this once photo editing app for their personal political soapbox. Don’t even get me started on conspiracy theorists! We like to imagine we’re free thinkers, but most people are just parroting what got packaged into a reel and served up this morning. I’m guilty too, but most of my reels are people crashing on mountain bikes and people eating street food in the slums of India.
The problem isn’t just wasted time. Worse, it’s wasted minds. Like the frog in boiling water metaphor , we’ve slowly outsourced critical thinking to our feed. In the age of image, we follow what we desire to be. Our heroes serve up hot-takes and we devour them at face value. After all, they’re credible, and their 150k followers are enough of a fact check for me!
This is where discourse dies. We aren’t trading thoughts anymore, we’re trading algorithms. Furthermore, with the dopamine hit and the instant gratification hype loop we hamsters are stuck in, discourse takes too long. we’d just rather shout and win a disagreement for cred, with the least amount of effort. I don’t have time for this, I need to watch more reels!
Critical thinking didn’t die on its own. It got outsourced. And the longer we let Instagram’s algorithm do our thinking for us, the less capable we become of doing it ourselves.
[sic] 
Leave a comment