Look Where You Aren't

I was in Spain and Portugal recently. I sat at cafes, had long conversations, and drank a lot of coffee. We had tapas. We saw Guernica in Madrid. I watched the boats sail past the hills of Lisbon and loved every moment. And yet, I still checked social media. Even standing in places I've dreamt of, with a backpack full of new books, I still scrolled — not the news, but the For You page. I hate this about myself. 

The internet has become a very strange landscape. One minute, some kid is whacking himself in the face with a brand new Home Depot hammer to prove how chiseled his chin is. Next, an influencer is rubbing pee on their skin because it keeps their aura glowing. 

It's not the Wild West — it's something more exhausting than that. It's an outrage machine engineered to make us cringe, swipe, or share, and every single one of those responses feeds the same digital beast: content, baby. 

Sitting in Madrid, I had to tell myself: do not pick up your phone. Soak this in. Like I was retraining myself to look at people. I've wanted one thing my entire life — to be a writer who travels the world. I'm living it. So why am I pulling out my phone to see what someone I once met in a bar ten years ago is up to?

The internet has become a stage for our worst impulses. We're all guilty of that bathroom scroll where the cheeks go numb because we're hooked on the trainwrecks sliding past our thumbs, grateful that cringe moment wasn't ours.

Consider this: The biggest act in Instagram music right now is Angine de Poitrine, an electronic duo whose entire vibe feels like a lost 1970s children's television program having a Hunter S. Thompson acid orgy inside a Berlin nightclub. Musically, it’s brilliant; it’s like being trapped inside an avant-garde puppet show. It shouldn't work. It works. 

Gary Vaynerchuk — Gary Vee — has spent twenty years yelling at a generation of brand managers that attention is the asset that matters. Not buyer trust. Not brand loyalty. Not what you're selling. Hardcore attention. He didn't hotwire the machine. He handed everyone the instruction manual and told them winning was the metric worth keeping.

Angine de Poitrine is winning the content war because they’re good and ultimately memorable. 

Blaise Pascal wrote that "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Four hundred years later, we've built an entire economy around proving him right. Some people worship God; many worship money. A shocking number of men worship Gary Vee videos while ignoring their families — maybe some dudes need to lay off the idea of the “grindset” and be a dad. 

And then there are the brands. Brands are now rage-baiting on purpose to get comment sections on fire. Rage baiting is the internet's favorite business model: say something inflammatory, offensive, or stupid enough to make people quote-tweet, stitch, argue, and share it nonstop. On platforms like TikTok, outrage functions as free advertising. Algorithms don't care whether engagement is positive or negative. The result is an ecosystem where creators, brands, and bot farms provoke people because anger blasts past sincerity.

A system that rewards reaction above all else will reward the worst reaction.

Brands are partnering with anyone who can get them clicks. If Doc Martens wanted to collab with me, I'd take the money — I’ve put hundreds of miles on my pair. We all want to be seen in a bigger light than our current selves. Some people get to jet set on brand dimes. Others miss, like Jaguar spending millions on a rebrand that left half the internet wondering whether the company still sold cars. The comments and online commentary was furious, the engagement was massive, and somewhere, a brand person declared the campaign a success. It didn't matter what people thought — even if one of the bosses had to be a sacrificial lamb and made to step down. 

The Design Spec

This isn't a bug. Facebook's own internal researchers found out back in 2017 that the company had weighted an "angry" reaction as equivalent to five likes in its algorithm — a tweak its own people warned would produce "a proportionately higher amount of controversial content" in feeds. The engineers knew. They said "fuck it" and shipped it anyway.

And we rewarded them for it. The average American now spends more than seven hours a day consuming digital media. Every scroll, share, rage-post, and doom spiral taught the machine what worked. It learned the same lesson casinos did: people don't come back because they're happy. They come back because they Want That Shit.

We used to have cutesy brand activation — Wendy's being snarky, the Duolingo bird playing green villain — and it felt harmless, even clever. Then activation got dark. The relatable brand voice became a template, the template became a race, and the race has no finish line except more. What looks like a slippery slope is a design spec: keep or kill. We need you in our ecosystem 24/7, and nothing else will suffice.

The brands figured out what the engineers already had: rage isn't an accident anymore. As Marketing Brew put it, it "became an accelerant brands could predictably trigger." 

That's the thread that runs from Wendy's clapping back at burger chains to whatever brand is doing racism-as-content this week. Tarte Cosmetics drew backlash for posting an anti-Asian slur, Dolce & Gabbana ignited international controversy with a racially insensitive China campaign, and Burger King UK used a sexist slogan on International Women's Day. 

Different controversies, same lesson: attention rewards provocation. The algorithm doesn't distinguish between a joke and a provocation, between a bit and a slur. It's a binary system. It sees the comments stacking up and calls that interest. No such thing as bad engagement — not because that's some cynical marketing maxim, but because the infrastructure was built that way.

Neil Postman saw the shape of this decades ago when he warned that "what we love will ruin us." The internet didn't become exhausting because someone flipped an evil switch. It became exhausting because the incentives worked. We clicked the thing that made us angry. We shared the thing that made us furious. We taught the machine what to feed us and, like any good student, it listened. Fernando Pessoa once wrote that "to be aware of the unconsciousness of life is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence." The internet has turned that tax into an emotional subscription service. We are aware of everything all the time.

The Guy Building the Gundam

And yet, somewhere right now, there's a guy building a Gundam.

He doesn't know what discourse cycle we're on. He couldn't tell you which influencer is drinking pee or which brand manager got a promotion for starting a race war in the comments section. He's sitting at a folding table, clipping tiny pieces of plastic off a sprue and trying not to screw up a decal the size of an eyelash.

The internet has very little to offer him. Not because he's a Luddite or somehow above it all — he's online too, doomscrolls, rotting in bed like the rest of us. But for a few hours, he's occupied by something that doesn't require an audience. No engagement. No personal brand. No content strategy. Zero algorithmic optimization. A dude and his tiny robots and jars of paint. (Chinese company Unitree has built a prototype real Gundam, but honestly, it looks janky as hell, but probably a better use of time than most things once they get it right. I’ll take robot fighting over most hobbies, tbh.)

As Jenny Odell put it, "Attention is the beginning of devotion." The Gundam guy isn't escaping reality. He's devoting himself to something real, however small, in a culture designed to fracture his attention into a thousand monetizable pieces.

That could be what feels so radical now. The happiest people are the ones spending their time on things nobody will ever see: the guy painting Warhammer figurines. The woman quilting. The dude restoring a motorcycle in his garage. People making things with their hands while the rest of us argue with recommendation engines.

The endpoint of all this isn't influencers charging their buttholes with the light of the moon or brands rage-baiting for clicks. It's the realization that every human impulse can be monetized. In 2024 alone, OnlyFans users spent more than $7 billion on the platform. Attention became commerce. Then identity became commerce. Then intimacy became commerce. The machine kept expanding because there was always another part of life left to sell to the highest bidder. 

The internet keeps telling us that everything should become content. The Gundam guy disagrees. The book nerd does, too.

Dumb Phones and the Velvet Revolt

One thing coming into vogue with people who see being online as a toxic reality is the rise of the dumb phone — back when these things in our pockets didn't run our lives or connect us to every atrocity of humankind, moment by moment — no social media. No email. No internet. Only calls and texts. A growing number of people have realized they don't want a better smartphone. They want fewer reasons to look at their phone.

U.S. dumb phone sales reached 2.8 million units in 2023, and demand continued growing through 2024. DumbWireless reported sales jumping from $5,000 in March 2023 to $68,000 in March 2024. These numbers are growing.

Artificial intelligence is being shoved down our throats from our fridges to McDonald's. We want the robot to do our taxes and get us bad ass refunds, not overtake our lives. People want to touch grass, not feel like extracting an enjoyable Tuesday from their lives is akin to removing teeth, because the world revolves around output.

The dumb phone movement is a reaction against an internet that feels like a casino in your pocket. It's not nostalgia. It's a rational consumer response to being treated like an engagement unit.

The Ethics Nobody's Actually Enforcing

I understand the dumb phone people. I want one. I can't have one because I need to be plugged in. I want to be reading the thousands of books in my office. I read a lot. But I could read more.

I see that screen time notification, and I cringe. The machine gets me when I don't want it to. I want to be lost in the world's emotional cafes, reading, chatting, not thinking — and yet I had to snap a photo of my espresso with the cigarettes in the ashtray to let the world know I was in Madrid.

What are we doing to ourselves at the cost of being seen?

Brands should have personality. No one wants boring corporate slop. But the path to visibility — even controversial visibility — forces the question: Who's accountable? The brand? The agency? The platform? The algorithm that learned this from us? Are we all holding the murder weapon?

When brands feel comfortable in the shock economy, that's a bold move in a noisy landscape and a very bad thing at scale. What's damning is that this isn't some grand conspiracy. Companies want to make money, and we let them.

We clicked. We shared. We argued. We taught these machines what to become. We’re chasing validation, that if enough people look, or even guffaw, we’re winning. The attention economy monetizes us against our own common sense, rewarding the person rubbing pee on themselves just as readily as the guy hitting himself with a fucking hammer.

It’s not.

After eating patatas bravas in Barcelona, I snapped a photo because I needed to show people I had them. This wasn't me sharing a moment. It was me saying, "Look where you aren't."

That realization hit me like a brick.

I didn't need the photo. I needed the audience.

That's the part I hated about myself.

Can you blame someone for wanting a dumb phone? I didn't post the espresso because I wanted people to see Madrid. I posted it because I wanted people to see me in Madrid.
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