CONTAGION

Social media didn’t fail us.It worked exactly as designed.

What began as a promise of connection slowly mutated into something else entirely. A system that feeds on attention, rewards outrage, and monetizes distraction at industrial scale. What we are living inside now isn’t a neutral platform. It’s a contagion.

At first, we were invited in.“Connect.”“Build community.”“Find your audience.”

And people did. Creators showed up. Small businesses invested time, talent, and trust. We learned the rules, played the game, and built followings the hard way. Then the rules changed.

Now you pay to gain followers.Then you pay again to reach the followers you already earned.

Visibility became a toll road. Engagement became rationed. The relationship between creator and audience was quietly severed and replaced with an algorithmic middleman demanding rent. This wasn’t evolution. It was enclosure.

Meanwhile, the feed transformed. Not into something better, but into something stickier.

Doom scrolling isn’t accidental. Rage isn’t incidental. Confusion isn’t a bug. Content is tuned to provoke, unsettle, and addict because calm people close apps. Addicted people don’t. Screen time is the product. Human attention is the resource.

The result is a population overstimulated, under-informed, and perpetually agitated. Advertising disguised as content. Propaganda disguised as news. Outrage engineered for engagement. All of it delivered just precisely enough to keep you scrolling but never enough to make you whole.

Small businesses feel it first. Creators feel it hardest. But the damage doesn’t stop there. Attention fragments. Creativity dulls. Presence erodes. Community thins into metrics.

This isn’t about nostalgia for some golden internet age. The past isn’t coming back, and it shouldn’t. This is about discernment. About recognizing when a tool stops serving humans and starts harvesting them.

A contagious system doesn’t announce itself. It spreads quietly, normalized by convenience and comfort, until stepping away feels abnormal.

But awareness still matters. Attention still matters. Choice still matters.

You don’t have to burn the world down.You just have to stop pretending the fire isn’t real.

Related reading:The Contagionhttps://www.bogdanov.com/post/the-contagion

44,400 Hours Lost to Social Mediahttps://www.bogdanov.com/post/i-just-burned-44-400-hours-of-my-life-on-social-media-here-s-the-receipt