Digital Colonization: Why I’m Taking a Pause from YouTube

In this episode, I discuss how and why we, as content producers, colonize your mind to mine your attention. I also explain why I've stopped making videos regularly and why I won't continue participating in this absurd game of exploitation. I challenge every CZcamsr to be transparent with their audience and decrease their contribution to the online noise. Furthermore, I urge every content producer to conclude each episode they create with the following:
“I do not urge anyone to subscribe; I rather ask everyone at least to think twice before he does it.”
-Kierkegaard, The Moment

[@diabl0r]

I appreciate you making this video and taking a principled stance.
Over time I've noticed these compulsions and modes of interaction with my environment as a result of being jacked into the hyper-attention economy. This feeling of urgency and speed, fear and anxiety of being left out and not keeping up with totally imaginary social spheres that arise and disappear without any roots. I've already wiped my social media several times and I have to consciously work on my compulsion to build endless watchlists/bookmarks/folders that I'll most likely never revisit. It's as if curating depositories of content has displaced my enjoyment of them (while my enjoyment of said content has displaced my attention/time for 'introspection').
What Mark Fisher explores in "Time Wars" and elsewhere, the idea that we are required to live in a condition of “continuos partial attention” (attention habitually distributed across multiple communication platforms) and "hyperkinetic boredom".
We are always-busy-always-bored pathological cyborgs produced by accelerating information exchange (Franco Berardi).
Boredom has effectively been eliminated from social life and yet we have never been more bored.
When the pessimist in me turns I think I understand Pascal, and perhaps Zapffe even more. What if there was time to self-reflect? Pre-industrialised people also suffered from melancholy and boredom. Are we assuming that there even is a self/ego that could and should grow and become unique? Perhaps our cognitive surplus and our uncanny being in the world won't let us rest. Given even the 'best' circumstances we cannot "sit quietly in a room alone."
I would prefer growing a community rather than expanding my own subjectivity, but we live under neoliberal constraints that promote individualist profile-building and atomization. There is a conflict, like your video is content and my comment is a reaction, it feels as if these exist in a space that will always reduce them to attention/engagement. Your decision to dis-engage and touch grass is a good one and I respect it.

[@iltitano]

But this channel was so good! Don't stop, please! Why is it always the case that the good ones walk away from social media?

[@keox1405]

I will reflect on the thoughts you put forward in this video and atleast try to reduce the noise I am subjecting myself too. I hope it will help me I think this maybe be a video that is truly only self help and the best closure I could imagine. I will not unsubscribe but I will take a hard look at al the other chanels I am subscribed too truly reevaluate them but yours will allways be there as a reminder to value my attention when I need it.

[@jerrydepp279]

New subscriber 😉

[@JohnEpto-ng6ml]

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