Picking up from our last topic about phones basically shaping your thoughts over time, the natural next question was – ok so how do you actually fight that. If you dont want to be engineered by an algorithm, what do you actually DO about it?
Step one that came up was just genuinely trying to make sure your thoughts are actually your own, and not just something you absorbed from somebody charismatic that you subconsciously want to be like. One of the guys said his whole process for that is basically just looking inward constantly, checking whether an opinion he has is genuinely his or if hes just parroting something he picked up somewhere without realizing it. Which is honestly harder to actually do than it sounds, because by definition you dont always notice when youre parroting something.
Somebody made the point that being self aware about it is basically step one if you want any shot at resisting it. One of the guys mentioned switching to a privacy focused browser and said he genuinely hasnt seen an ad in months because of it, which he considers his personal step one for not being advertised to constantly.
Step two according to the conversation is trying to build a life where as little as possible is being actively pushed at you – where what you consume online is stuff youre specifically searching for, not stuff being fed to you passively through a feed. Thats basically the opposite of engineering, by design.
Then it went into a really interesting tangent about a sales job one of the guys took right after quitting his CNA position, just to get away from that world. It was a rough call center gig selling overpriced cable and internet packages, and there was a four week training course teaching all these sales scripts and psychological techniques, with stats like “one out of every three calls will show interest, and one out of every three of those will actually convert.” Going through that training, he realized how genuinely effective those techniques were, purely as a repetition and numbers game. But the real value of that experience wasnt the sales job itself, it was that it taught him how to spot sales tactics from a mile away afterward, in literally any context. Once you know the script, you start noticing it everywhere – ads, conversations, social media posts, everything. It made him hyper aware of when somebody (or something) is trying to pitch him on an idea, and that awareness is exactly what helps him filter out whether a thought or opinion is genuinely his own or something he absorbed from someone else’s pitch.
We also got into practical feed management stuff – things like clearing your watch history periodically so platforms cant build as detailed a profile on you, or using accounts that dont track history at all. But even then, youll still get some kind of recommended feed, theres no fully escaping that on most platforms.
This turned into a bigger conversation about the actual history of social media and how it got worse over time. Someone brought up that Instagram used to just be pictures, one at a time, chronological order, no algorithm, you only saw posts from people you followed, no saving posts, nothing fancy. Then Instagram killed the chronological feed in favor of algorithmic ordering, and thats really when things started shifting toward engineered engagement over organic connection. Then came short form video, first Vine, then TikTok. And interestingly, Vine actually shut down specifically because they never figured out monetization, while basically everything else that DID figure out monetization ended up getting worse for users as a direct result. Which says a lot honestly – the second money enters the picture, the actual user experience seems to take a back seat.
Someone brought up going even further back to the MySpace era, before monetization, when people were literally coding their own profile pages with basic HTML just to make their page look cool, and your feed was just… whatever your friends posted, no algorithm involved at all. Ironically though, even that era wasnt some innocent utopia – it was still a popularity contest, especially for teenagers, with a lot of genuinely toxic body image and social status pressure baked in from day one. So maybe theres never really been a “good” era of social media, just different flavors of the same underlying problem.
So I guess the real answer to “how do you fight being engineered” is some combination of radical self awareness, actively limiting passive consumption, and understanding sales and persuasion tactics well enough that you can spot them the second they show up in your feed. Not a perfect solution, but probably the most realistic one.
