EPT
"Nothing is inherently good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare
Below is a personal anecdote that is unessential to this blog, and it's marked in spoilers to save you some reading time, as it bears little relevance to the topic at hand - documentaries that shift the way you think.
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The first time you get a bunch of viewers while livestreaming to twtich, or uploading a video to youtube, or making tiktoks or youtube shorts, you'll suddenly get this -in some cases euphoric- rush to your brain, making you think that perhaps you are on to something big or something that could lead to a full time career in social media. Well, if you keep going and you don't get viewers, would you still feel that way?.
I've experienced this on...
Twitch. - circa 2012 - 2014. My first big dopamine rushes would come from casting SC2 tournaments from home and getting thousands of viewers while casting.
Facebook - circa 2016-2017 I would take clips from my stream, download them, the upload them to facebook. This was mostly with PUBG highlights, but one video I made got over 2 million views. I made nothing off of my uploads to facebook, but just seeing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people watching the clips, hundreds of comments and shares, it gave me a high every time I would see it.
And youtube. - same with facebook.
I might have had the chance to go full time as a twitch streamer. There were instances when I streamed that I had 300-500 concurrent viewers just doing stuff like walking around the streets of taipei and trying foods at the night markets or going to trade shows like computex or taipei game show, anime conventions like petite fancy, and similar events.
Ultimately, the reason why I quit streaming was because I saw that I had zero privacy. I did not have my girlfriend on stream, and I did not want her on stream, because I didn't want her to become a target if anyone became deranged enough to want to doxx me or something like that. I quit streaming in 2018 and very likely will not be going back to it.
If we take a slight detour to Reddit, I remember there were Subreddits I would browse that would host videos that make people angry, and therefore easily baited upvotes. I used to be one of those vocal guys that would share the video with other people while being angry. This was a regular behavior pattern from me until I saw...
The Social Dillemma
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However, I saw that documentary long after I saw The Great Hack.
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I feel as though both of these documentaries, or at least The Social Dilemma should be a mandatory viewing experience in public schools, possibly suited for early high school students. The key takeaway from The Social Dilemma is that a social media platform is geared to hijack your brain for a certain amount of time each day and make you dependent on it, either for one of two reasons:
1. The agenda of the CEO and board of directors as well as shareholders of that social media company to increase advertising revenue and thus profits.
2. The agenda that any state actors may have to alter your thinking or sew discord among Americans (vaguely speaking as a couple of examples: Russian meddling and the 2016 elections as well as Brexit).
After I finished watching The Social Dilemma, I learned not to assign emotion to anything that I see online and instead question myself about who would benefit me becoming emotional from viewing something. It released my mind from the control of anyone who had an agenda to push.
What are some documentaries you guys recommend? Anything that might give somebody an epiphany? Maybe something that will change the way they think?
