Taking back what was lost
There is a constant battle for attention today. Social media platforms are optimized to keep you addicted and disconnected from your families, friends, and community. Advertisements hidden in images, videos, and short-form dopamine hits flood your feeds to push constant consumer purchases. Media organizations, political influencers, and anonymous accounts thrust upon you a constant stream of misery and rage. AI-generated content consumes the internet, eroding trust. Focus and productivity tools are marketed and sold to you as a solution to this modern problem.
A quote that has resonated with me since the first time I heard it: "In the end what separates a man from a slave? Money? Power? No, a man chooses, and a slave obeys!" - Andrew Ryan
You become a slave to an algorithm specifically tailored for you. But it absolutely does not need to be this way.
Recently, I read Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols, and I reject Nietzsche's notion of free will:
"""The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.""" - Friedrich Nietzsche
You do have a choice. You can and must exercise your free will to take back what you have lost.
We are not infallible. Even I suffer from this constant battle for attention, and thus decided to work towards a resolution. I believe in Peter Thiel's concept of definite optimism. The future will be better than the present, and it is our obligation to work together to build it. I put together a browser extension that is completely free for you to download and use for this reason. It allows you to add sites to a blocklist, which reroutes your searches away from these parasitical social media platforms.
It is entirely open-source. You can find the code and the free extension to use here: https://github.com/conceptofmind/free-your-mind
I will apply to the app stores, and when accepted, create a maintained extension for you to activate without the need to upload the code directly. This will hopefully make it easier for you to use. The default blocklist of extensions will be updated based on user feedback.
I remain optimistic.