"Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it.
You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors." - Andrew Boyd
Silicon Valley: A Teenage Perspective
I have observed the rising tides of Silicon Valley's culture for over 10 years. As a native of San Mateo, I grew up with a dream of walking down the sunny promenade of downtown Stanford or passing the tree-lined square at Berkeley's Sather Gate with my textbooks in hand. Being a kid, making sense of the world in the hub of fast-paced tech culture, I kept up with Apple products, like the iPod and became an early consumer of social media trends.
At the awkward age of 13, I created my own Myspace page. Prior to creating a "profile" of myself on the web, I was a quirky and imaginative kid preferring to peruse the bookshelves of the library for hours on end. I remember the first time I discovered my first CD. The Beatles Yellow Submarine. From then on, I was a hooked Beatles fan.
I found every book, picture, movie, documentary on them I could find. Then social media happened and I slowly began to change my Beatles songs to more hip and accepted music. I began to change my funny photos of myself in Beatles shirts to ones
that were appreciated by my peers more. And so, social media had a deafening effect on my true inspiration and instead replaced it with group behavioral construct.
Who is the product?
I was one of the first guinea pigs of social media. There is a marketing saying that goes, "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product," and the hard fact is that big tech companies are using US - human beings as their product.
There is a lack of compassion and a propensity of manipulation. I see that the people who work at these tech companies believe they are building a better future. The issue is that, when we are the product of social media platforms, then third parties are profiting off our behavioral patterns.
Facebook, Instagram and Google - all unpaid services that everyone uses. We keep up with the latest post, watch the news and stay connected with friends. But what is the connection? Is it connection or just consuming a product much like cigarettes and junk food?
What is really going on is that we are addicted to the manipulation of the algorithms that exploit the psychological vulnerability of the human psyche against us.
Emphasize your Uniqueness. Get off social media.
“”Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.” Jaron Lanier, father of Virtual Reality and tech founder explains.
And so, with Silicon Valley in a deep slumber of the troubles of the ills reaped upon the global economy, we must find take a seat at the table of the horrors and be empty enough to come up out of the darkness of the night and into the nourishing light of day and awareness.
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