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Cake day: May 7th, 2026

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  • Just so you understand: social media apps (and websites!) measure your linger time (how long the device’s viewport is over specific stuff), the cadence of your typing, correlate the use timing to generate an idea of your sleep/work schedule, use tons of seemingly innocuous device reported metrics and naturally scrape your cookies through cross application “attacks” in addition to paying attention to the interactive parts they surface to you like clicking stuff, liking or favoriting, repeat viewing, friending or whatever.

    There’s two reasons I’m saying this: one is because you may not realize that the algorithm is showing you porno because it recognizes that you interacted with porno just by being disgusted by it or by letting the screen rest there long enough to tug one out. It doesn’t know the difference.

    The other is to hopefully help make it clear exactly how wrong people were when they called social media the panopticon.

    The panopticon isn’t just a word we use to describe surveillance, but a real building design some English guy came up with where all the prisoners cells are in a big circle and so you save on guard costs because one guard in a central tower can look at any particular one.

    It’s a stupid idea because prison guards are cheap and provide more than just the threat of observation and it relies on the prisoners all knowing they could be observed, not being certain that they are being observed.

    Social media is an unimaginable inversion of the panopticon where the prisoner is in the middle surrounded by manned guard posts all equipped with searchlights pointed at him.

    Just bear in mind that when you do bring up this stuff to your brother you’re gonna need to mediate your recognition of how insane the world is.