False sharing and the suppression of creativity
Tech companies have distorted the word "share" to destroy your creativity
If you are a creative person who likes to make art, chances are, you like to share what you make. Unfortunately, sharing can be the trickiest part of art these days. To understand this, we have to examine the essence of sharing from a technological perspective.
Why is sharing difficult? Ultimately, sharing truly means expressing yourself to others, and one way we do this is through art. But when we define sharing this way, we see that sharing as it is often defined today is very far away from self-expression.
This is a problem with language: one word can be overloaded so that in some contexts, a word like sharing can mean something quite different. The pertinent example is "sharing" on social media and the internet: sharing here is no longer about expressing yourself but about generating content in order to appeal to the basal instincts of the masses in order to power consumerism.
Of course, as human beings, we still share in this context to express ourselves, but the design of modern, large technology platforms suppresses this motivation. Moreover, the designs of large platforms and social media train us not to fully express ourselves, but to distort our own expression into something subservient to the platform. In other words, instead of creating what we want, or what is truly motivated by our emotions and thoughts, we modify what we want to optimize for the tech platform.
For example, instead of just writing freely, people now optimize their articles for search engines, which degrades writing and makes such articles sound very similar to each other and mechanical. The essence of the writer is lost and the intention of the person is distorted until the beginner's essence of true expression is destroyed. Over time, a writer will want search engine-optimized articles and the capability for self-expression will die.
Naturally, people have always had their true natures distorted by various means; even before the internet, journalists may have been tempted by sensationalism. Indeed, once any technology amplifies and adds anonymity to the interaction between people, the human spirit is suppressed. However, one must pay attention to magnitude: with the increasing power of technology, so does our own power decrease to resist and understand, and never before has technology been so powerful and destructive.
This is one reason why I vehemently oppose artificial intelligence and hope it dies: it is an incredible performance enhancer, but what does it enhance? It enhances our productivity to produce more irrelevant, machine-like content that obscures and poisons our true nature.
New directions
What can we conclude from this? If you want to keep your ability to creatively express yourself and nurture the health of your soul, you must avoid the temptation to spend too much of your time distorting your content for tech platforms. You must be content with not gaining quick recognition or hundreds of followers, and you must distance yourself from the abominations such as social media created by soulless tech companies.
Instead, you must devote much of your creative effort to producing what you want, instead of what tech companies want. You must follow your heart, rather than likes and social media attention. You must be satisfied with the imperfection of creations unaided by artificial intelligence, because it is better to have imperfection than soullessness. Yes, you may still get likes and attention by doing what you want; but do not succumb to optimizing for likes, because by chasing likes, you are abusing the basal instincts of people to be hypnotized by sensationalism rather than expressing who you are.
Understandably, sometimes you will have to create something soulless, especially if you work for some enterprise (most large enterprises like Google are soulless). However, as long as you understand the distinction between the mechanical creation of pseudo-art that only greases the wheels of consumerism and true expression of the self, you will be okay and you will always have yourself as a strong guide towards true creativity.