Media Illusions Shaping Your World

Once upon a time, there was a wild pig and a sea cow. The two were best friends who enjoyed racing against each other. One day, the sea cow got injured and couldn't race any longer, so the wild pig carried him down to the sea where they could race forever—one on land and the other in the water.

If you were born into the hunter-gatherer ITA community in the Philippines, you would have grown up listening to the story. Indeed, no matter where you grew up in the world, most of us heard stories that echoed sentiments like this. While they may seem like mere fables on the surface, there's a lot to learn from them—things like friendship, cooperation, and equality.

In the past, stories like these permeated our culture from childhood to old age. But the world has changed a lot since our hunter-gatherer days. Stories that teach us about our sense of community are now limited to children's fables and no longer circulate through our culture as we get older. In the past, the job of passing on necessary life skills, history, and information was a collective effort.

Today, all of that power has been given to commercial media. In the words of George Gerbner, commercial media has eclipsed religion, art, oral traditions, and the family as the great storytelling engine of our time. And whoever tells the stories of culture gets to govern human behavior. Therein lies the biggest problem with commercial storytelling.

Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook—all the different news apps and websites. How many times do we check the news on our phones every day? In the past, it took weeks, months, or even years to hear bad news from the other side of the world. But today, we have everything at our fingertips: wars, riots, chaos, scandals. The news feels inescapable. It's like we're trapped in a constant reel of negative information on all platforms and from every news outlet.

If you strip it down to its roots, the message behind it all is always the same—one that plays on our emotions and instills fear in our hearts, warning us against a world filled with people who want to hurt us, ideologies that threaten ours, and unexpected events that are meant to keep us on high alert.

But is the world really as bad as mass media wants us to believe, or are we suffering from mean world syndrome? In the 1970s, Dr. George Gerbner first coined the term "mean world syndrome" while conducting research on the effects of violent related content on our view of the world. His findings showed that a heavy diet of violence, whether through entertainment or the news, can lead to a sort of cognitive bias that makes us perceive the world as more dangerous than it actually is.

What is most interesting about Gerbner's research is that it doesn't matter whether we know the content we're consuming is factual, like a news report, or fictional, like a movie. The effect is the same. When we're constantly bombarded with negative information, we begin to develop a worldview that is highly skeptical, suspicious, and pessimistic.

As part of this study, Gerbner estimated that the average American child will have watched over 8,000 murders on television before the age of 12. Consider the fact that Gerbner conducted his research in the 1970s, when the media's influence and its reach were substantially smaller, and you can imagine just how bad it must have gotten. How many murders, both real and fictional, do you think a child would have read, seen, or heard about in the media before the age of 12—8,000 or 8 million?

If that was the only problem with the media, then perhaps it wouldn't be that horrible after all. If bad things are happening, they need to be reported, right? Well, yes. But Gerbner said something while testifying before a US Congressional subcommittee in 1981 that will send chills down your spine: "Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, and more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough, and hardline measures."

Could it be that the media is designed to serve people the worst news to instill fear in us so we can be more easily controlled by the powers that be? This point becomes even more plausible when you consider the fact that 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just a few corporations. This means that roughly 232 media executives are calling the shots on the vast majority of the news being presented to Americans, which has then passed on across the globe.

Let's say the situation isn't as sinister as that, and we aren't being subversively controlled by some criminal masterminds. At the very least, CNN, Fox, and all the other outlets want one thing: our attention. Some of them will do anything to get it. People are more likely to pay attention to and remember negative news. Media outlets know this, which is why you'll find more negative news than positive news in your feeds. It's polarizing, engaging, and keeps us glued to our screens, which in turn results in more revenue for advertisers who are literally paying for our attention.

And once we start paying attention, the algorithms of social media take over. All of a sudden, we're constantly being fed news that confirms our beliefs and further solidifies our already skewed worldviews. It's no secret that controversial content, the content that triggers an emotional response, is the content that performs best, gets shared most, and circulates longest.

So whether we like it or not, we become bombarded with an endless scroll of polarizing content that only makes us even more skeptical about the world around us and suspicious of anyone who does not happen to share the same exact beliefs. This kind of reporting and these stories that we propagate throughout our society divide us instead of bringing us together like the stories of old did.

The sad reality is that whether the world is getting worse or not, the media will almost always make us think that it is—simply because it's good for business. Wow, oh yeah, so we've got our deadly disease. Now we just have to blame it on something that's in every household—something that people are a little bit afraid of already.

The truth, which should be an unbiased representation of facts, is no longer at the core of news reporting. The story has become much more important, and stories that elicit negative emotions often get more eyeballs, reactions, and ad revenue as a result. The problems that are constantly depicted in movies, news outlets, and on social media are relentlessly overstated to the point where we might feel it's even hopeless to do anything about them.

What's worse is that this constant exposure to negative information that is relentlessly pushed on us by these obsessive algorithms can confuse the brain, such that it becomes almost impossible to differentiate between exciting fact and thrilling fiction. A study conducted by three MIT scholars in 2018 found that false news spreads on Twitter substantially faster, farther, and deeper than the truth. The research also found that this misinformation wasn't spread through bots but by actual human users like you and I, retweeting.

Just like these algorithms, our brains recognize that the most polarizing information—whether true or not—is the information that will go viral and elicit the most emotional response from the public. And so we hit share or quote in hopes of getting that viral tweet, without first verifying if the information we're spreading is accurate.

Another reason why it seems like the world is substantially worse than what we see in front of us is that the news talks about things that did happen and not things that didn't. We don't hear about wars that never started due to successful peace talks or shootings that were prevented through proper policing. We barely hear when unemployment rates go down and when the economy is experiencing a turn for the better because, again, it's just not as exciting as bad news.

Sadly, as long as terrible things keep happening on the face of this planet, there will always be enough negative reports to fill the news, especially with smartphones now allowing people to become amateur reporters and crime investigators. The mean world syndrome speaks directly to our most innate fears, which then trigger our fight-or-flight instinct.

When we watch a reporter covering a war zone, a shooting in a residential area, or a terrorist threat, our body naturally becomes flooded with hormones and chemicals designed to keep us on full alert in order to save us from the mean and bad world. While these survival characteristics were essential in our hunter-gatherer days, today all they manage to do is lead to anxiety, stress, and even trauma.

But the world isn't as bad as we think it is; only the stories are. This is why, to combat mean world syndrome, we have to take back control of how we're thinking, feeling, and reacting to the constant stream of negative or violent news being depicted all around us. The truth is that the world today is much better than it has ever been.

Don't get me wrong; humanity is far from perfect. There are still conflicts in many places around the world, human rights issues we need to tackle, climate change problems we need to fix. But the world has never been as good as it currently is—at least for most of us. Advancements in healthcare technology have increased our lifespans, decreased mortality rates, and improved our living standards.

We haven't witnessed any world wars for decades; we've grown more tolerant of each other and more accepting of our differences. Violence has steadily been on the decline since 1946. There have been fewer famine deaths in the past decade than any other time in human history, and extreme poverty has been declining literally by the second.

Yes, we face harsh realities on our personal and global scale every single day. But when tragedy, crime, and war are presented as the norm and not the outliers, it's only natural for us to feel angry and afraid. We have to choose our information sources carefully and not let the obsessive algorithms of social media dominate our perception of the world.

We have to be conscious of our approach to news and entertainment and challenge the way we think. The next time you're scrolling through your feed and find a disturbing news report, ask yourself: Is this fact or fiction? What real evidence is there of this occurrence? What's the context, or am I just being manipulated so that I'll develop certain feelings of fear and suspicion?

If you find your social media platform serving you the same kind of content, be conscious of this and make sure you diversify your news feed to include positivity to balance out the negativity. At the end of the day, we're a storytelling species, and if we've learned anything from our history, it's that the narrative we share with one another is the most important thing.

Just like in our hunter-gatherer days, the tales we're telling now will have a great influence on shaping our culture and our people. It might be time that we go back to telling stories like the wild pig and the sea cow. Maybe if we do, we can cultivate the values that truly make us human, like caring for one another, being compassionate, and giving people the benefit of the doubt.

The world is not as mean as the media wants you to believe. It's time we stopped letting them lie to us that it is. Ah, here we go again.

On the 1st of September, 1939, Germany invaded Poland from the east, starting World War II. As you would expect, there was fear and panic throughout Europe. So to calm the British population down and to prevent widespread panic, the war ministry released a poster encouraging citizens to “keep calm and carry on.”

In the year 2000, more than 60 years after the poster was released, one of the original versions was discovered. Thanks to its simple design and now satirical-sounding message, it was memeified and spread all across the internet as a message of irony: to keep calm and carry on even in the face of a life-threatening situation. The Nazis are about to blow up London—keep calm and carry on. World War III is about to break out on top of dealing with Corona—keep calm and carry on.

The message was simple, funny, and a light-hearted way to express deep-seated concern for the situation we collectively found ourselves in. This is a meme. It has the power to express the collective emotions, feelings, and thoughts of people and often serves as a coping mechanism for something that would have otherwise been rather sad.

Memes—we all know them. They make us laugh, cry, think, and smile. But we just can't quite explain exactly what they are. Are they just funny pictures with text, or perhaps jokes that we turned into running gags? What exactly are memes, and how have they taken the world by storm?

The word meme is a term that was originally coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, derived from the Greek word mimina, which means imitated. Dawkins described a meme as a unit of cultural information that's spread by imitation—the cultural equivalent of a gene. Tunes, catchphrases, ideas, ways of building arches and making pots, clothes, and fashion were all described by Dawkins as memes, propagating themselves in the meme pool by moving from brain to brain through a process that can lucidly be described as imitation.

Today, the word meme might mean something else in the dictionary, but its use still closely resembles the idea that Dawkins expressed in his work. A meme is considered good when the message in it is concise and relatable—easy to catch on and pass from person to person. When it talks about a shared experience within a group of people, when it says a lot without saying too much, or when you just take a JPEG and throw it in a deep fryer—those are also good memes.

Memes are so powerful because, as humans, we understand pictures more than words. Before we could write, we could draw. This is why it's no surprise that a relatable image will pass a message across much faster than, say, a long Twitter thread. Memes are powerful because they are seemingly harmless, humorous, and fun. Because of this, they allow us to express our views about the world and the things that are happening around us without starting some serious debate.

The year 2021 was rather difficult for a lot of people—not for the same reasons as 2020, but because of hope killed in 2020. We were told that the pandemic would only last for a few weeks. If we all stayed inside and social distanced, we did. And yet, a year later, we were still inside.

So at the beginning of 2021, the meme "when COVID is over" was created. In it, people describe the experience of waiting for something that might never happen using metaphors of everyday experiences, like "when COVID is over" is starting to sound like "when I'm all caught up on laundry," or pop culture references like "when COVID is over" is starting to sound like "when One Direction comes back," all of which are never happening.

On the surface of it, these memes are funny, relatable, and interesting expressions of the situation we're going through. But these memes carry a sense of hopelessness underneath them, and that's another thing that makes memes so powerful. They're baked with emotion—from Keanu Reeves sitting on a bench to a horse standing on the beach. Memes can be used to express every form of emotion, from surprise to disappointment, excitement, skepticism, disgust, and anger.

Memes help us express things that we might not be able to find the right words to explain. They convey our expressions, desires, our deepest, darkest pain, and light-hearted and humorous ways that many have turned into a coping mechanism. A simple Google search and you'll find a meme for every bad situation you're going through—from memes that only old people use, like Disaster Girl or Grumpy Cat, to stuff like "whatever this is." There is always an appropriate meme that describes your feelings and whatever situation you're going through at that point.

Now, I'll let you finish on how memes are the best thing in the world since sliced bread. But first, there are some things that are not so great about memes and the way we've pretty much turned everything into a meme. Memes are fast food media. Just like fast food, they're disgustingly delicious when you take a bite. They're funny and witty and give you bite-sized information of everything that's going on around you.

However, they lack any real nourishment. All you're seeing are headlines and witty remarks about what's going on without fully understanding the depth of the issues. On the 3rd of January, January 2020, Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian Major General, was assassinated by the United States on the order of President Donald Trump. Iran's leader, President Hassan Rouhani, made a statement afterward saying, "Iran and the other free nations of the region will take revenge for this gruesome crime from criminal America," to which Trump then replied, "Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation."

Immediately, the internet erupted with memes about World War III. For almost a week, there was an endless supply of witty remarks and bite-sized nuggets about what our lives would look like if there was another world war. Here we are in February 2022, and yet again the World War III memes are returning.

However, a lot of people who joined in the memes did not understand why they were being created in the first place and what purpose they served. People looked at those memes and felt that they knew enough about the issue without bothering to find out what had just happened and the true repercussions of the actions of the US government, if any. They binged on the fast food without taking the time to eat a proper meal in the form of a full news article on the subject, which even then are rarely full of all the true information.

Memes can also be a tool of misinformation. It's easiest to tell a person a lie when they're feeling good and vulnerable, which is why it's so easy to propagate lies and misinformation through memes. Memes are more powerful than we give them credit for. Laugh through one, two, three memes on a subject, and before you know it, you've unconsciously accepted some of the ideas that the memes present.

"Netflix and chill" first started out as a meme, but today it's a cultural phenomenon that describes unironically something completely different than it did before the meme existed. This is one of the many times when a meme transcends the internet and becomes a truly cultural phenomenon. "Netflix and chill" is well, chill, but there are some other memes that have become stereotypical tools used offensively to describe an activity or a person but aren't seen as negative as regular stereotypes because they're memes.

Take the Nigerian prince meme, for example. It labels an entire country as a bunch of fraudsters. If the memes have taught us anything, it's that labels like this can completely transform how people view and relate to the people of a particular nationality. When Trump called it the "Chinese virus," people of East Asian descent began getting attacked for something they really knew nothing about. Chinese restaurants all over the country were affected, with many having to close down, even the beer Corona was abandoned on shelves for a long time at the beginning of the pandemic just because of its name.

So we see and understand the dangers of a single story, but yet with the Nigerian prince, we let it slide because it's a funny meme. It looks relatively harmless, but yet there were millions of people who will never work with Nigerians because they believe they're inherently fraudsters. The truth is that memes, just like every other joke, are embedded in cultural context. It's derived from our views and thoughts about the world, some of which might be problematic.

However, unlike with a joke that's tied to the comedian, memes spread so quickly and have such a far-reaching impact that it's often difficult to know who to hold accountable or whether it's possible to even do so in the first place. The YouTube channel BuzzFeed has an entire section of videos of people who have accidentally become memes, and while many of the people in these videos claim to be happy with their memeification, there are many other people out there whose pictures have been turned into memes that they're not happy about.

But sadly, there's nothing they can do about it. Memes often capture you when you're least flattering—whether it's Keanu Reeves sitting on a bench sad, or the kindergarten boy who couldn't get his words together, or the thousands of people whose pictures or videos of emotional breakdowns have been turned into memes. How would you feel if your least flattering picture was turned into a meme, immortalized forever on the internet?

It's a sad reality that if the internet deems your photo memeworthy, you have no say on how far the picture travels and whether or not it ever stops traveling. Think about people with body dysmorphia issues, fear of judgment, and a lack of self-esteem. Think about the pictures we'll never see and the emotions that will never be expressed for the fear of being turned into a meme.

If you don't agree with anything I've said so far, a simple meme like "ratioed" or "OK Boomer" can be used to end the argument, which I guess is good for damage control but is yet another problem with memes. In a bid to be the funniest person in the discussion, we often don't listen to the other party and instead just try to get the last laugh. Once someone says something we don't agree with, or we don't feel like arguing, we quickly hit them with a meme and just move on without acknowledging their point or even trying to understand it.

So we don't learn anything new, and we just keep holding on to our ideas and beliefs—at least until another meme rolls around that we can use to start or end another argument. The truth is, memes are both good and bad, and understanding the two sides of the coin is important in making progress.

There have been some incredible achievements and great examples of community building through memes. This is just one of the many beautiful things that memes have given us. In 2010, a Japanese kindergarten teacher uploaded a picture of her 2-year-old Shiba Inu with a peculiarly round, emotionless face. Twelve years later, that one picture has given us many memes, created an entirely new genre of entertainment with pets speaking broken English, and even created two cryptocurrencies—Dogecoin and Shiba Inu—that at their peak were worth a total of nearly $100 billion—all from a meme.

When you sit back and really look at it, the power of a single meme is so incredible and far-reaching. It has the ability to make you feel part of a collective yet still uniquely individual.

But, uh, all right, I'm going to head out. The M stock trading trend, with its Wall Street Bets form reaching a $10 billion valuation, and its latest funding round, the company says it has already raised more than $400 million from Fidelity and plans to raise up to $700 million in total in 2021. Reddit was at its peak valued at around $10 billion. Today, just two years later, its valuation has dropped to around $5.5 billion.

How did a Silicon Valley unicorn slice its value in half in just two years? This is the story of the dramatic rise and fall of Reddit. Often called "the front page of the internet," Reddit is one of the most visited websites and consists solely of user-generated content.

The site is made up of over 138,000 communities called subreddits that are dedicated to all sorts of topics. Users of the platform, called redditors, use these communities to post ideas, ask opinions, and share common interests. Have you ever been in a group of people and brought out what you think is the most exciting thing you've ever heard, only to be met with blank stares? What you might consider incredibly fascinating, they couldn't care less about.

I'm sure most of us have had this happen to us multiple times. It can be hard to find people we have things in common with. Even our best friends and family will find certain topics we love strange or boring. And that's the beauty of it—no matter how niche, weird, or dull the topic, there's an active community of people having endless discussions about it.

At its best, the site emulates casual conversation between friends, which makes sense because it was founded by two friends, University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. They founded Reddit in 2005, and like many successful entrepreneurs, the idea came after the failure of a previous company. Huffman and Ohanian launched a startup called My Mobile Menu, allowing users to order food via text—this was long before the days of GrubHub and Postmates.

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After My Mobile Menu failed, they applied the same concept of direct communication to a new idea, one that eventually became Reddit. In just 2006, one year after its launch, Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast, one of the largest media companies in the world. Reddit's rise to being the front page of the internet was electric. People who wanted that wide variety of discussions and commentary quickly found a home on Reddit.

It became a hub for memes, viral videos, and political activism. Influential bloggers and programmers began using the site to share interesting nuggets and ideas, and soon Reddit became the go-to site for tech-related news. In 2009, Reddit developed its first on-site advertising strategy to generate revenue.

The promise of anonymity on the site has always attracted an incredibly diverse community, bringing a diverse set of advertisers—in the sense that anyone can find something interesting on Reddit, most companies can find a reason to advertise on it. Reddit has always had a unique approach to marketing for brands. Ad options included sponsor posts, targeted displays, or video ads. Brands could also create their own subreddits for advertising and marketing.

If Wonder Bread wanted to talk about how amazing sliced white bread is, they could start a subreddit for bread aficionados, and there probably already is one. Reddit's strategy paid off. In 2014, the company raised $50 million on a $500 million valuation. Over the years, and several more rounds of funding, Reddit eventually reached that $10 billion valuation in 2021. It was as they say in Silicon Valley—a unicorn, rare to find but precious to behold.

But as Reddit grew, its users and advertising revenue also grew. One of the first controversies the site was involved in came on the heels of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Users created a subreddit to find the Boston bombers. The moderators of the subreddit—unpaid users to enforce the community's rules—tried to ensure that no one's personal information was posted, but things quickly spiraled out of control.

Users wrongly identified suspects in the bombing and never correctly named the people who turned out to be responsible. Notably, they spread information about a college student named Sunil Tripathi, who went missing right before the bombings. After the actual bombers were arrested, Sunil's body was found in the Providence River, having died by suicide. Not only did Sunil's family have to bear the harassment of their missing son from these redditors, but both BuzzFeed and NBC News reporters spread unsourced information from the subreddit, giving it legitimate journalistic credibility.

Reddit's controversies didn't end there. The platform always had sexually explicit material, but things went way too far in 2014 when naked photos of celebrities began circulating on different subreddits, and even worse, some of those celebrities were underage at the time. In Reddit's defense, it swooped into action, swiftly identified the photos of minors, and removed them from the platform.

Then, a year later, the site banned nude images posted without the subject's consent. This move was a win for everyone; it stopped non-consensual explicit material from being easily accessible on the platform but allowed adult performers the freedom of expression. Not safe for work, or NSFW, content—as it's now tagged on the platform—wasn't the only thing Reddit had to stop spreading through its communities.

Today, Sony canceled the Christmas Day release of The Interview. The hackers won. "I don't know how else to frame it," said the announcement. Now then, Sony has canceled the release of The Interview, that spoof about North Korea starring James Franco and Seth Rogen.

In 2014, redditors shared hacked files from Sony Pictures that included copyrighted material. Leaked documents from the Mormon Church have also been shared. Although the company prides itself on anonymity and free speech, in situations like these, it’s had to step in and exert control over some subreddits.

In 2015, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman made a policy banning several offensive and sexual communities. This included subreddits like "loli-con," which posted sexually explicit animated material featuring children. More bans followed—a subreddit that expressed support for the shooter in the 2015 Charleston Church mass shooting was removed.

During the 2016 election, a subreddit that pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, alleging that Democratic leaders were running a child sex ring, was also banned. As American politics grew more divisive, more bans took place in response to user demand. After the protests over George Floyd's murder in 2020, Reddit updated its content policies and introduced rules around hate speech.

It then banned around 2,000 subreddits across the political spectrum in violation of these regulations. Some media outlets and political commentators said banning the subreddits violated the freedom of political expression. In 2021, a subreddit called "Donald Trump" was banned for policy violations and the influence its posts had on those who stormed the Capitol. Moves like this followed on Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok but were criticized by those who believed it was censorship.

It hasn't been all negative for Reddit these past few years. In 2021, redditors proved how powerful online communities can be with the infamous GameStop short squeeze. Users in a subreddit agreed to buy stock in the suffering company. When they started, shares were selling for $3. And as the price increased because of the Reddit users purchasing the stock, Wall Street traders shorted it, betting it would drop until the company went out of business.

But Reddit users shouldn't be underestimated. Within 16 days, they drove the stock up to $347.51 and many of those Wall Street short-sellers lost a whole bunch of cash—$6 billion, to be exact. This highlighted the power of the Reddit community. Reddit users aren't afraid to wield this power when they feel it necessary—even against the platform they call home.

Over the years, a battle between Reddit, the company, and its users has been brewing, and recently it hit a flashpoint. Some of the most critical users on Reddit are the subreddit moderators. These volunteers manage the community, set and enforce specific rules, and remove posts and comments that violate those rules. Collectively, Reddit moderators do a total of 466 hours of work daily—that's about $3.4 million in unpaid labor every year.

This accounts for nearly 3% of the company's annual revenue. Basically, Reddit needs this unpaid labor to survive. So when the moderators fight back on a decision, the company usually listens. But not this time—at least not yet. Reddit announced in April 2023 that it would start charging developers for its API access.

In the simplest of terms, an API or application programming interface is software that allows two different applications to talk to each other. It's what allows you to log on to different websites using your Apple or Google account. The API allows Google to talk directly to the website and share your personal information with them, so you don't have to create new usernames and input all your information for every single account you use.

Some companies allow developers to access their API for free, while others charge for it. Reddit switched from the former to the latter. Reddit's API launched seven years ago and has always been free. Anyone building an app could request data from Reddit and use that data to develop their app. But since July 1, 2023, developers have had to pay to use Reddit's API.

The affected developers and many Reddit moderators haven't been pleased. In June of 2023, moderators organized a damaging blackout to protest this policy change. The 48-hour blackout, called "Red Dark," included 8,500 subreddits that were set to private, meaning no visiting, no posting, no commenting.

Six of the most popular subreddits participated, including Gaming, Food, and Funny, which have over 30 million subscribers each. Total Red Dark accounted for over 2.5 billion users. And it’s happened before. On July 2, 2015, a group of moderators participated in a Reddit blackout and temporarily shut down their subreddits. They were protesting the firing of Reddit employee Victoria Taylor, an administrator who helped organize famous "Ask Me Anything" interviews.

This act, known as an AMA Get In, highlighted Reddit moderators' power. But the more recent blackout and protest of Reddit's decision to start charging third-party developers for access to the site's data is even worse. CEO Steve Huffman said that charging for API access was meant to keep artificial intelligence from learning Reddit's data for free.

But is it really Reddit's data if all the content on the platform is user-generated? There's no definitive answer, but I'd like to hear your thoughts. Although Reddit has said that tiny apps with fewer than 100 requests per minute will still be able to use the free API, other exceptions, like accessibility-focused apps, will not have to pay.

Unfortunately, it's not just big AI companies like OpenAI and Google that are suffering. Apollo was a popular app that enhanced the Reddit browsing experience for iOS users, and because of its popularity, it made over 7 billion data requests a month through Reddit's API. Under the new rules, Apollo would have to pay $20 million a year to use the Reddit API—an impossible number for its developer, Christian Ci, to pay.

As a result, Apollo went dark. The blackout was supposed to end on June 14th, but almost half of the subreddits involved have stayed down indefinitely. Even the moderators who are reopening are making a joke of it to prove a point. The Steam subreddit, originally created for the Steam gaming platform, is now all about steam engines. The pck subreddit is comprised solely of photos of comedian and HBO host John Oliver.

Some moderators are marking their subreddit NSFW—as not safe for work—because Reddit can't run ads on NSFW content while moderators of the famous AMA subreddit say they won't coordinate any more celebrity interviews. Some communities are taking the protest to the extreme and leaving the site entirely for platforms like Cin and Lemmy. Could this be the end of Reddit as we know it?

The blackout has received a ton of media attention, and at one point Reddit crashed because it couldn't handle so many subreddits going dark at once. Despite the damage, Reddit refuses to change its course on its API policy. Users have claimed that the company is forcing moderators out of their subreddits, which Reddit corporate denies.

Reddit announced the API policy change because its current model wasn't sustainable and it claims it wants to be fairly paid for API access since it costs Reddit money to provide API services. The problem is that this is happening with little to no warning, sending moderators into their collective rampage against the company.

Also, in the words of tech creator MKBHD, the number one rule on the internet that's never been successfully broken is to charge for something that was previously free. And it's not just Reddit. Elon Musk has started charging a subscription fee for the verification badge on Twitter, and he also charges for API access, which shut down dozens of third-party apps. Meta, too, has introduced a paid verification plan—a monthly fee for better customer service, increased visibility, and the coveted blue check mark.

But aren't they successfully breaking that rule? Because all of these companies still have billions of users. And sure, a small vocal selection will leave, but most people just return to the platforms after a few days or weeks as if nothing happened. Whether it's Reddit, Twitter, or even the new Threads from Meta, we're quick to return to something comfortable, even if we don't particularly like it—especially when there's no viable alternative.

So is this the fall of Reddit? Well, I doubt it. But who knows, it might be the start of something else. Because while it may be idealistic to think that we as everyday people have the power to change things, maybe that's the idealism we need.

After almost two years of this mess, I decided I needed a break and wanted to do some traveling. I booked all the tickets, got the paperwork done, and was all set to go. And then I noticed on the corner of the screen the plane I was about to fly—not once but twice—was the 737 Max 8.

I'm no aviation expert, but I do read the news from time to time, and I think the Max 8 crashed twice. The route I was flying had no alternatives, and so I kind of had to fly that plane. Of course, I made it to the other side, and here I am talking to you, but up until the moment the plane came to a halt on the tarmac for the second and final time, my heart rate was elevated, and all I could think of was whether I would become the next headline on the news websites for all the wrong reasons.

It didn't matter to me that the Max 8 was only cleared to fly after thorough revisions and independent authorizations from the United States, European Union, and each airline that subsequently chose to fly it—all of which are institutions we would have trusted if we got on another plane. It didn't matter that after being grounded for nearly two years, the plane had actually been in the sky for nearly a year before I boarded one. It also didn't occur to me that after landing to go to the hotel, I casually got onto a taxi—an act that is nearly 100 times more likely to result in my death.

This is just one of the ways in which the things we believe completely violate the rules of rational scientific ways of thinking. You and I hold many such beliefs. We all know this to some extent. And yet, when someone sitting across the table displays this very tendency for just the right topics, we can't help but be enraged about how clearly we see the facts, and they don't.

Whether it be vaccination, climate change, gun ownership, or any heavily debated topics of today, we have all experienced being on one side of the debate or the other where we desperately try changing someone else's opinion—almost always, regardless of the nature of the debate, neither party changes their stance.

In fact, most people feel a defensive need to double down and be even firmer about the position they already held. The result of all of this is ever-increasing polarization of the overall social and political climate. Take climate change, for example. One could theorize that the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to believe climate change is happening and humans are largely responsible for it. Here, "educated" refers to institutional education, so people that have bachelor's and master's degrees should, in theory, find climate change a no-brainer.

But studies do not reflect that level of education is, in fact, a very poor predictor of whether or not you believe in climate change or any other issue, really. What is a better predictor is how you politically identify. Unfortunately, as a matter of fact, generally more educated people tend to have even more polarized views on this issue and others than less educated people. Contrary to what you and I may think, people that don't believe in climate change don't necessarily do so because they're stupid—far from it.

The refusal to believe scientific evidence relies on how bias-driven the human thought process is. Once an initial bias has been developed, it is extremely difficult to change our minds. This has been demonstrated by numerous experiments where scientists presented participants with a made-up study about climate change. Neither party was aware whether the study was made up or not. The participants who already believed in climate change used it as a reinforcement of their beliefs, and those that did not simply dismissed the study as bogus.

Fake studies that argue against climate change have the same effect. People who already believe in climate change dismiss it with ease, and those who don't embrace it. Presented with a new fact, both groups essentially become more polarized than they initially were. The more you feed into it, the worse it gets.

Another experiment conducted in 2005 revealed what is known as "choice blindness." Participants were shown two photos, one of which they had to pick as the more attractive one. They were then asked to argue what about the photo led them to their decision. After their choices, the researchers went on to secretly switch the photo with the option they had not chosen.

Some participants recognized the switch, of course, but most did not. They remarkably went ahead and actually justified the choice they didn't even make. This just goes to show that once the initial choice was made through gut feeling, emotion, or some other impulse, all the participants really cared about was convincing themselves that they had made the most rational decision. It reiterates that our positions often have very little to do with evidence.

Then what do they have to do with, and why do we end up defending them? Well, it has to do with our evolutionary desire to belong. Straying away from the herd does not do your chances of survival in the wild any good. Sure, you want to discover which new fruit you can eat or what new place you can find food in, but this curiosity must not overwhelm the need for survival. And even if we don't run the risk of being eaten in modern times, that tendency has very much remained in place.

While curiosity in the search for truth often excites us, the need to belong to whatever group we find ourselves in seems to overwhelm all else. Today, when you see relatives arguing about politics over Thanksgiving dinner, what they are really doing is just signaling to everyone else what group or political ideology they belong to and how proud they are about it.

Another reason why people tend to defend these often ill-informed opinions is because of how much they think they know about these topics, known as the "illusion of explanatory depth." It's a mistake we are all guilty of having made. It's so easy to start a discussion with a friend and veer off into some deep uncharted territory but carry on and make up things as you go along so as not to seem uninformed. Despite better access to information, it's especially prevalent in today's age where tweets are cheap but thoughts are not.

In an interesting 2014 experiment to illustrate this tendency, participants were asked about their recommendations for military intervention by the United States in Crimea. They were also asked to point out Ukraine on a map. The median guess as to where Ukraine was was off by nearly 1,800 miles. And the farther off a participant was, the more likely they were to recommend military intervention.

The researchers, Sloman and Fernbach, essentially summed up this result by the following quote: "As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding." These examples should make it clear that the conspiracy theorists that people love to bash on may actually not be that far ideologically from the rest of us, as we may think.

Their reflexive need to belong is just as strong, if not stronger, than the rest of us. The only difference, perhaps, is the initial set of assumptions. In fact, conspiracy theories are often initiated on factual grounds; it's only later that they tend to diverge into unrealistic and unfounded realms.

Case in point: A few months ago, there were reports of people licking handrails and doorbells because they thought it would strengthen their immune system. Before I say anything else, I just want to say: please don't lick handrails or doorbells. Now, the idea that these people have in mind is that your body reacts to some stress by building itself back better and stronger. This is a totally scientifically sound idea, and it's called hormesis.

In fact, a hormetic response takes place in your body every time you eat broccoli. Where these people are wrong, however, is that hormesis doesn't just respond to any stress; it has to be very mild. While exposure to germs in small doses does induce a hormetic response, the surface of a doorbell has far too much bacteria to be even remotely safe. For reference, the surface of a mobile phone is more contaminated than that of a toilet seat, and your phone is only used by you! Imagine a surface that is touched all day, every day by multiple people.

Then there are caveats to how information is created in our world that doesn't lend itself to confidence for everyone. For example, the scientific method often relies on the idea of uncertainty, and that is something human beings are not confident with. All uncertainties are not equal, of course, but even the slightest shred of doubt is sufficient in convincing critics of a piece of evidence why they were wrong all along.

Why pay attention to these unsure scientists when you can just listen to confident Uncle Tom? This is unfortunately an aspect that was taken advantage of by the lobbyists of smoking companies when the public wasn't sure about its harms and now by people that don't believe climate change is either happening or being caused by humans.

Anything less than total absolute consensus in their minds is just not insufficient but incriminating evidence that they have been lied to this whole time. The insistence on the need to have uncertainty is perhaps the greatest gift from the scientific method. After all, it quantifies as best we can how far we are from the actual truth and what we might need to get there.

So how do we try to change someone's mind when we think they are wrong? Well, we can first start by assessing our proposition. We should only propose changes that are relatively minor in comparison to the position the person already holds. It can help to think of ideological scales. For example, on a scale of 1 to 10, if a person believes an idea that is a 7, and our ultimate goal is to convince the person of a position that is a 2, we are better off by proposing a 5 first. Of course, over time, we can expose them to other ideas, but we should start gently.

This is because a drastic ideological shift is not very realistic and is more likely to encourage polarization. Before you tell them that they're wrong, tell them they're right. People usually come at an argument from a certain angle. If we are able to recognize that angle instead of arbitrarily laying out facts, and we allow others to discover as opposed to being embarrassed by our argument from their own point of view, we stand a better chance of changing their minds.

Another method to have a fruitful and informative discussion is to have an aggressive moderator. Now, of course, having a moderator in any kind of unofficial debate is not very routine, but it might as well keep your family together. Hear me out: generally, the antagonism between two debaters who are arguing on a hot topic is because they feel as though they belong to different groups, as we've said earlier.

Now, if you introduce a moderator—and an aggressive one at that—the focus quickly shifts from needing to defend each other from themselves to defending each other from the moderator. This can have a unifying effect that forces the debaters to see more reason in their opponents' arguments.

Another mistake people make when arguing for or against a government position is to forget that the person who is arguing is not the government or even a representative of it. If, say, you are debating the policies of Brazilian foreign policy with a citizen of Brazil, chances are the person you are talking to had no hand in formulating the policy.

Whether or not they voted for the government that did all that, likely, they actually know very little about the policy and are defending it for the same old reason: to feel like they belong. In this instance, it is far too easy to attribute bad faith to the person in front of you, but it is important to remind yourself that they are probably as clueless as you are. In reality, you're arguing for no point.

As much as we would like to believe facts don't change minds, we have more access to information than ever before. And yet we are also more polarized than ever in this seemingly irreparable climate. It's important to recognize why people believe the things they do and how we are never too far from having believed them too.

We can always be kinder in our effort to understand the people across the table. Only then do we stand a chance to bridge our ideological gaps. After all, facts don't change minds; people do.

Have you ever donated money to a charity or taken your clothes to the Goodwill store? How did it make you feel? Amazing, right? Most of us, at some point in our lives, have either donated or will donate money, clothes, food, shelter, and our time to others, and we do these things not because there's an immediate reward for it. More often than not, we feel best when we give to people who cannot reciprocate, or at least not in the same capacity.

This altruistic feeling that makes us give to one another, even when there's nothing to receive, was described by ancient Greeks as philanthropia—the love of humanity—coined around 2,500 years ago. This term was first used in the myth of Prometheus. In the story, the Titan god Prometheus saved humanity from Zeus's destruction and earned the title of philanthropist, the loving character of humanity.

Although that’s the term we now mostly use to describe this phenomenon, the love for humanity isn't an exclusively Greek concept. The idea of benevolence towards one another has its roots deeply planted in ancient civilizations throughout the world—from the Middle East, to Egypt, to the city of Rome. It was also propagated by Babylonian communities as early as the third millennium and is at the core of all Abrahamic religions and many others across the world.

In Egyptian sacred writings, such as the Book of the Dead, it was made clear to the people of the ancient world that a successful passage into the afterlife depended on a lifetime record of benevolent acts towards people who were suffering. While many of us today do not follow any of these ancient teachings or believe in an afterlife anymore, the messages they taught have stayed with us through millennia.

So when capitalism and the accumulation of wealth began rising in the West in the 1700s, it wasn't surprising to start seeing rich philanthropists pop up whose lives became characterized by the voluntary act of giving a large sum of their wealth to promote the common good. This type of lavish giving—the one we most associate with philanthropy today—was rather popularized by rich bankers like George Peabody, who is now considered the father of modern philanthropy.

Peabody was an American merchant banker who came from poverty. After amassing his fortune in the early 19th century, he never forgot his humble beginnings and dedicated the later years of his life to charitable work. It's believed that he gave away around $8 million of his $16 million fortune to charities. His incredible benevolence paved the way for later generations of rich philanthropists.

Sadly, what we have today isn't what Peabody envisioned when he gave away half of his net worth. What started with the notion of lending a helping hand, charitable work is no longer at the core of philanthropy in today's world. Tax evasion and personal gains have tainted the hands of the world's wealthiest givers and have caused a huge wealth gap that only seems to be growing, creating an ever-expanding rift between the social classes.

How did we turn that amazing feeling you get giving money away to charity into a corrupt scheme for billionaires and large corporations? To understand this, we have to go back to the end of the 19th century. Andrew Carnegie, an American industrialist, paved the trail for philanthropic work to be used as a tax evasion strategy. Carnegie opposed federal income taxes and argued that he was better off allocating those funds to charities rather than the government.

At that time, philanthropy by the ultra-rich funded social services the government couldn't afford. As a result, senators worried that taxing the wealthy on these charitable amounts would reduce their contributions and increase the burden on the government—a logic that still prevails to this day. The government's solution to this problem was a tax exemption on income for money donated to charity.

This legislative move allowed for new wealth management strategies pioneered by Carnegie, who founded a charitable trust that took advantage of the tax exemptions. Before long, wealthy industrialists and bankers started following Carnegie's footsteps, protecting their fortunes from substantial taxes under the cover of charitable trusts. In 2014, Nicholas Woodman, the founder and CEO of GoPro, took his company public and was suddenly worth $3 billion.

To celebrate his newly acquired fortune, Woodman announced that he would be donating a whopping $500 million worth of GoPro stock to a foundation bearing his name. The truth is not as generous as Woodman would want you to believe. You see, the GoPro CEO took advantage of a loophole that would allow him to donate his money without actually donating it.

This is done through something called a donor-advised fund. Donor-advised funds are essentially charitable investment accounts in which owners can claim tax deductions up front without legally being required to distribute the money to charities right away. As long as the money is transferred into the DAFs under the roofs of charitable work, owners can avoid paying higher taxes without donating any of it to charities or foundations.

The point of these funds was originally to encourage more resources to get to communities where they’re most needed. Sadly, the way the laws are structured allows tax deductions without any requirement for that money to ever reach those intended communities. It's no surprise then that since 2007, the number of DAFs in the US has tripled. And while the amount of money donated every year keeps increasing, the actual amount going to communities barely is from the $466 billion in the United States in 2020—only around $35 billion made its way to qualified charities.

A huge sum of money, yes, but not nearly as much as the rich would want you to believe that they give away. The reality is that these billionaires are entitled to spend their money however they wish. We can argue the ethics of becoming a billionaire another day, but let's say they got there on their own merit. They aren't required to give anything.

The main problem isn't that they don't give, but that they claim to give more than they actually do. It's the need to be seen as a hero without doing anything heroic. Last year, Elon Musk announced that he would be donating $5.7 billion worth of Tesla shares to an undisclosed charity. However, to this day, no single charity has reported receiving the funds from Musk's donation, with many experts hypothesizing that he suddenly dumped the cash in a DAF.

Financially speaking, offloading $5.7 billion worth of Tesla stock allowed him to claim a tax deduction of 30% on his income—that's about $570 million saved on taxes. So it seems that the only beneficiary from Musk's charity is Musk himself—first on the tax deductions and second on the public praise he received because he theoretically donated so much money.

Just months before that, Elon tweeted that he would donate $6 billion to end world hunger if the UN could show him a plan on how they would spend the money. The UN responded by saying that $6 billion won't solve world hunger but could potentially save 42 million people on the brink of starvation. From pooled income funds to private foundations to DAFs, philanthropy today is only magnifying the issue of income inequality and adding to the already substantial gap in wealth.

But that's not even all. The word philanthropy does not only mean giving to charities anymore; now it is also used to describe giving to groups that promote social or civic causes. These groups can keep their donors completely anonymous, which basically gives billionaires the power to weaponize their philanthropy for political gain.

In her book Dark Money, Jane Mayer documents how the uber-rich have used their charitable foundations to invest in ideology, like venture capitalists leveraging their fortunes for maximum strategic impact. Mayer argues that these foundations only support causes that benefit their financers by campaigning against regulations and sowing misinformation in the hearts of the masses.

The Odland Foundation, for example, led numerous anti-environmentalism campaigns. The Bradley Foundation, funded by $1.6 billion, waged aggressive campaigns against teachers' unions and traditional public schools. Since the donations to these foundations are tax-deductible, donors aren't accountable for the public use of their money, which only adds to their power and influence.

And because these donations can be completely anonymous, it also rids the billionaires of any iota of responsibility for their actions. The sad reality of our society is that this isn't something new. Rich people have always depended on favorable political conditions to build and preserve their wealth. Mega-philanthropists know that their money can influence governments far more than they'd ever be able to, even if they were to run for office themselves.

This is why when Bill Gates was asked whether he'd run for president, he said, "I could have as much impact in my role as a philanthropist as I could in any political role. I don't have to raise political campaigns. I don't have to try to get elected. I'm not term-limited to eight years."

To be fair, Bill Gates and his foundation have dedicated immense amounts of money to battle health crises such as malaria and the reduction of child mortality. While most of his work remains true to the original definition of the word—the love of humanity—there are still some shady things he's done in the past. A few years ago, Gates was able to heavily influence the passing of a bill for charter schools, despite voters voting against it three different times.

After millions of dollars spent on campaigns that influenced the community into changing their decision, the bill passed the fourth time almost immediately. Gates began subsidizing charter schools until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. But with that bill stopped, Gates said, “No," he simply used his influence with lawmakers to fund a new bill to allow him to circumvent the Supreme Court's decision so he could keep funding these charter schools.

This is a great example of how wealth can influence public policy. The plot thickens as placing the power of society in the hands of the wealthy can undermine our laws and leave us vulnerable to the whims of the rich—whether they have good intentions or not. The lives of the populace should not be in the hands of a few, no matter how wealthy they are. We should all have a say in matters concerning our lives, regardless of our socioeconomic impact.

The giving pledge, which was launched by Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010, has more than 200 ultra-rich signatories who have pledged to donate at least half of their wealth towards the betterment of humankind. This is an excellent achievement, and one that must be praised. Giving such large amounts of money can never be easy, and so the effort must be acknowledged.

At the same time, we must also look on the other side of the coin and the power that these billionaires ever so greedily hoard in the process. In his book Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas argues that rich people who have loved for an economy of injustice have at the same time marketed themselves as our saviors and the solution to all of our problems. However, in doing so, they hide the fact that they cause most of these problems themselves.

CEO of Wayne Enterprises by day, hero of Gotham by night. The sinister truth is this: as long as there are so few people with so much money and power, the rest of us will have no say. We need to go back to the original meaning of philanthropy, where the love of humanity was the only driving force—not money, power, or control.

We need to close the loopholes in the system that give people an advantage by donating money without having to donate anything at all. Until then, we'll have to settle for the supposed heroes with agendas to come and save us from the very problems they brought upon us.

In 1951, students at Swarthmore College were the subject of a curious experiment. Solomon Asch designed an experiment in which a few students would have to complete a seemingly easy task. Students would be shown a card with a line drawn on it, then they would be shown another card—this time with three lines, all of different lengths. The task was to simply pick the line that matched the length with the one they were shown earlier.

The cards themselves always had lines that were longer or shorter than the correct line, including, of course, the correct line itself, and the instructions on how to respond were clearly laid out. However, the interesting thing was that only one of the eight or so participants in each trial was the actual subject of the study. Everyone else was in on the study and was simply an actor meant to sway the participant to choose the wrong line, even though they knew 100% which was the correct answer.

They purposely chose the wrong answer numerous times to try and get the subject to do the same. Upon completion of multiple trials with a variety of constraints and a similar setup, it was seen that in the control group, where there was no persuasion towards an incorrect answer, participants chose the wrong lines less than 1% of the time, which is what you would expect.

It's a rather simple experiment. When participants were put in a group where their peers chose the wrong answer, despite clear evidence suggesting otherwise, a remarkable 36.8% of them conformed and chose the wrong answer as well. These are students of a very well-ranked college, mind you, who are certainly cognitively capable enough to distinguish between lines of different lengths.

Asch himself interpreted the results by saying, "The fact that intelligent, well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern." It just goes to show one of the many ways in which our peers can influence the decisions we make. It also puts forward an almost desperate desire in us humans to conform, one which I am sure you felt at one time or another.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I do sort of talk about a social issue—an issue that is suffering from a lack of reason, empathy, and measured judgment. I'm talking about cancel culture. It's essentially getting expelled from society in which a person deemed to have committed a social crime—past or present—is dealt with punishment in the form of terminated employment, public humiliation, or a complete boycott altogether.

There's a disagreement about when the phenomenon was actually created, with some saying it has been with us in different forms for centuries. But what makes cancel culture unique, in a sense, to our time is the fact that its effect is now much larger than just a crowd or a locality. It's the entire social media audience. Any news spreads rather quickly on social media, but bad news spreads really quickly—especially when it's about the career-ending tweet of a very famous author, actor, scientist, or what have you.

People from pretty much all fields have been forced to embrace cancelhood to some extent. And so it's fair to say that it is no longer a punishment only for the elites. Take Amélie Zhao's story, for example. She's a young adult fiction author who was about to debut a three-book trilogy in 2019. That was until readers of a small private online group discovered that the fictional characters in her fiction novel offended their notion of race relations in the real world.

And on came a slew of furious tweets accusing her of being blind to reality, lacking education, as well as many other far worse things. Zhao subsequently posted an apology, as often happens to be the case, and said that she, out of embarrassment, had asked the publisher not to publish her books at the time. What about her initial book was so offensive? You and I will never really know.

Why not let the book be released as it was and let it play out in the wider marketplace of ideas? The book was eventually corrected—whatever that means—and then released. No harm done, right? Well, let's take a step back. Zhao, who had immigrated to the United States from China, was simply drawing on her perspective on indentured labor and human trafficking—albeit in a fictional setting.

Hers certainly had the potential to be a valuable insight into these things, considering they happen in her home country. A Twitter mob had almost rid a female immigrant author of her chance to share her experience. You see, the second version, which she eventually published, was not edited from a creative passion; it was done so out of fear—the fear of being doxxed, the fear of being badmouthed by people who knew nothing about her, the fear of having her career stifled before it even took off, the fear of being canceled.

Well, you could argue that Zhao was never truly canceled. Her predicament is a prime example of what happens on a daily basis to people who feel pressured not to speak their minds on certain issues. The creative field is perhaps just as impacted as the political one, with TV shows getting canceled or amended on a regular basis these days, books being pulled from shelves, and even so much more.

Think of the famous TV shows of our time. Think about your favorite shows—revisit them and consider for one moment how many of them could have been made and released in today's time. Creative decisions are no longer allowed to be as risky, which, as you can imagine, doesn't really help the creative process. The end result is often a product that is dry and one that is compelled to nudge the viewer towards a moral side of its choosing—conveniently moral or morally convenient, you tell me.

There are other forms of cancellation too—for example, the ones where the mob dislikes a particular celebrity or show and goes on to reach out to any and all affiliated companies to try and cancel their affiliation. Otherwise, they risk being canceled themselves. Studies have shown that these boycotts do have economic significance, with as much as one in four of them forcing significant changes.

While that may seem like an example of power that customers hold in a free market setting—which it is—let's think about it for a second. If you dislike the CEO of a company for a political position of theirs, despite you liking the quality of product that the company produces, does a boycott really hit the CEO's pocket as much as it hits the pocket of the employees living paycheck to paycheck below them? More so, does it improve the product? Who is the practical target of your outrage?

Cancel culture is often referred to as a "guilty unless proven innocent" process in which the victim is really only let off the hook when there's overwhelming support of evidence on his or her side. But is that really the case? Forgetting celebrities and big corporations, a much larger victim of this online shaming is the average person.

The reason is these average people have neither the social credit nor the financial capital to come back from a cancellation. These people often find it exceptionally difficult to revive their careers because no employer wants to take on the liability of a canceled person and face the music of the mob. It's essentially a justice system where no amount of punishment is enough. There is no scale, nor proportion; there is no avenue to mount a defense or one to reintegrate into society. No grace, no mercy.

How can we expect reason from such a movement? Social media certainly worsens the problem. The so-called interactions we have online are devoid of any real human qualities—no eye contact, no facial expression, no tones, no scope for humanizing the person you're talking to or empathizing with their position.

There's the aspect of being primed to react a certain way. Think about it: when was the last time you reacted to a Facebook post yourself first and then saw the list of reactions from others? Most of the time, you're primed to react a certain way. Your mind's made up on your behalf before you even think about it. Oftentimes, our outrage is directed not necessarily at what happened in the situation, but rather to someone else's outrage—outrage at outrage.

It's a domino effect; the cycle continues. It becomes such a universal reaction eventually that not being outraged conveys a sense of social ineptitude. This recreational outrage has led to a toxic environment online that is going to need some fixing.

People on the other side of the debate about cancel culture say that it either doesn't exist, or that if it does, the consequences of being canceled are simply not as harsh as we say they are. Just look at J.K. Rowling, who happened to be canceled relatively recently and who also continues to sell book after book.

Well, let's say both of those things are true—still, the concept of cancel culture deserves to be explored at a purely conceptual level because of its consequences in society. What does it say about our collective hubris if we're offended at everything, and that the only way we're able to get our heads around that offense is by preventing the person from speaking altogether, rather than simply choosing to engage with someone else instead?

And well, if the people are not facing serious repercussions, isn't that implying that society actually doesn't take this recreational outrage seriously? In their denial of the existence of cancel culture, people are inadvertently acknowledging its childishness.

The complete lack of reason really shows itself when you consider the lack of reformative justice in this whole ordeal. Now, don't get me wrong; I think quite a lot of the things people have been canceled for are clearly wrong, and in a sense, I can understand. But how is it so that in almost all of those cases, there's really no path to societal reintegration?

And when you’re saying that they still do reintegrate into society, it’s almost never a result of some carefully thought-out mechanism of cancel culture—it’s simply just people not caring at all about it or simply forgetting it happened in the first place. Perhaps it’s not the J.K. Rowlings or the Kevin Harts of the world that are the true victims of cancel culture; maybe it’s you and me—the as yet uncanceled people—who refrain from sharing what they truly think about a policy, a politician, a video game, the burger, or restrain themselves from engaging in a debate about something that truly matters to them in fear of being canceled for it.

The unshared idea is the true victim of cancel culture. Of course, there are always many sides to an argument, and one of them is that cancel culture has at the very least caused us all to pause and reflect—reflect on the injustices in our society that have been going on for far too long and be more mindful of the beliefs of other people.

On a certain level, the debate against cancel culture is about remaining open to the possibility of being wrong—to be able to think that you and I can make some very obvious errors. Obvious errors, like choosing the wrong line, even when it is clearly shorter or longer, as in the conformity experiment.

If more and more people are able to internalize the idea that they too can make a bad joke and be caught off guard, or say something that they don't mean and do something bad, and later in life change to become better people, then I think we have a fighting chance against cancel culture. Because the truth is, cancel culture is not a problem that only affects one part of society. As more and more of our lives happen online, cancel culture can come for you too. It can come for all of us. It just depends on who's convenient for at the time.

At the end of the day, you'll never know when until it's too late.

In 2013, Eric Loomis was pulled over by the police for driving a car that had been used in a shooting—a shooting, mind you, that he wasn't involved in at all. After getting arrested and taken to court, he pleaded guilty to attempting to flee an officer and no contest to operating a vehicle without the owner’s permission. His crimes didn't mandate prison time, yet he was given an 11-year sentence—with six of those years to be served behind bars and the remaining five under extended supervision—not because of the decision of a judge or jury of his peers, but because an algorithm said so.

The judge in charge of Mr. Loomis's case determined that he had a high risk of recidivism through the use of the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions risk assessment algorithm, or COMPAS. Without questioning the decision of the algorithm, Loomis was denied probation and incarcerated for a crime that usually wouldn't carry any time at all.

What has society become if we can leave the fate of a person's life in the hands of an algorithm? When we take the recommendation of a machine as truth, even when it seems so unreasonable and inhumane, even more disturbing is the fact that the general public doesn't know how COMPAS works. The engineers behind it have refused to disclose how it makes recommendations and are not obliged to by any existing law, yet we're all supposed to blindly trust and adhere to everything it says.

Reading about this story, a few important questions come to mind. How much do algorithms control our lives? And ultimately, can we trust them? It's been roughly ten years since Eric Loomis's sentencing, and algorithms now have a far greater penetration into our daily life. From the time you wake up to the time you go to bed, you're constantly interacting with tens, maybe even hundreds, of algorithms.

Let's say you wake up, tap open your screen, and do a quick search for a place near you to eat breakfast. In this one act, you're triggering Google's complex algorithm that matches your keywords to websites and blog posts to show you answers that are most relevant to you. When you click on a website, an algorithm is used to serve you ads on the side of the page. Those ads might be products you've searched for before, stores near your location, or even something you've only spoken to someone about.

You then try to message a friend to join you for your meal. When you open any social media app today, your feed no longer simply displays the most recent post by people you follow. Instead, what you see can be best described by TikTok's "For You" page. Complex mathematical equations behind the scenes decide what posts are most relevant to you based on your view history on the platform.

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and most notoriously, TikTok, all use these recommendation systems to get you to interact with the content that their machines think is right for you. And it's not just social media.

Netflix emails you recommendations of movies to watch based on what you've already seen