lds up
Many years ago, I was able to help the Weekly World News create a book.
Their periodical was not news, even though it was published weekly. They were four people working in a small Florida office. Each week, they made up new stuff. They kept a few stock photos in filing cabinets and created stories about UFOs, aliens, scientists (in quotation marks) as well as other distractions for people trapped at the supermarket checkout.
We are all now trapped in this trap. The algorithms are now pushing us to bombard our emails with junk. This junk shows up on our search engine home pages, our social media feeds, and our email.
Adblockers have been one of the most beloved innovations in the past few years. I want a junkblocker. Imagine a big button in my browser that says “shields Up.”
There is no celebrity gossip. No conspiracy theories. There are no weight loss breakthroughs. It would block trolling, fist fights and urgent but not important breaking news. Discussions about the royal family, aliens UFOs, MLMs and the latest pump-and dump schemes. Stories designed to degrade, inflict pain or deliberately degrade people with limited recourse.
If you look at it this way, who wouldn’t want a button such as that?
We survived as a culture for hundreds of years without being exposed to profit-driven manipulations every day on our living rooms carpet.
It’s no wonder that we feel exhausted after spending a day online.
