Surprised why some decently smart youngsters join an entirely misinformed campaign on social media?

Read on..

And do share your thoughts too!

[Thread]

1/ Abundance of well-packaged inspirational (and, occasionally, dramatic) stories of those who’ve made it big - stories splashed all over social media - threaten to inflict upon youngsters a glaring sense of inadequacy, almost on a daily basis.
2/ Internet has made equally available to everyone not only the ability to share an opinion or the resources to understand a topic (great things), but also the right to feel equally entitled without a corresponding introspection on whether it’s equally deserved (unfortunate)
3/ The sense of identity of a vast majority is now inextricably tied to having a “purpose”. When your identity feels lost because you make yourself believe you don’t have that burning purpose, it induces anxiety and, if left uncontrolled, panic.
4/ Having a purpose is, in my view, largely good. It is an overall net positive driving force in one’s life (although do read @manujosephsan’s compelling contrarian view on this https://t.co/zRUSlbTzPg)
5/ The problem is that youngsters want instant gratification - an immediate dopamine hit - for the purpose(s) they choose. Instant connectivity (WhatsApp), instant content (Netflix etc) and instant feedback loop (FB/IG likes, Twitter RTs) has enslaved our minds.
6/ What is a purpose which is most convenient to latch on to? A trending ’cause’. Try to post/tweet a novel and very compelling idea you had at 4 AM and compare its retweets/likes to your posts on BLM or, recently, farmer protests.
7/ That dopamine hit you get from the RTs/shares after you tweeted on the trending ‘cause’ caters to the reward section of your brain. That chemical reaction makes you truly believe you’ve found a purpose based on the instant recognition it’s giving you.
8/ This is what the originators of these trends understand very well. Indeed, not all ‘causes’ have a sinister design to them, but some causes do. That makes many who mindlessly join the latter the ‘Useful Wokes’ as I call them.
9/ The sinister game behind ostensibly innocent hashtags isn’t in making Useful Wokes feel good about having a purpose. The game is in making them think that they’re thinking for themselves.
10/ Smarter among the Useful Wokes realize that game at some point. By then, however, they’re far too invested in feeding the reward section of the brain. Withdrawing from it leads to serious withdrawal symptoms.

[Social-Media Addicts Anonymous could become mainstream sooner.]
11/ My specific concern is with India’s youth. We are the youngest country with immense intelligence, exposure to all modern tools of education and strong cultural roots. I truly hope they're made aware of the pitfalls of Wokeism in general & Social Media Wokeism in particular.

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The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.