Disciple Syndrome: Why We Worship Brands And How To Stop It

We need to abandon the idea of role models altogether and find new routes to personal development. The notion that here in the 2020s, you could put a savvy entrepreneur in front of a large group of naive hopefuls, and NOT end up with one billionaire and a queue outside a food-bank, is, frankly, ridiculous.

If social media has accomplished any useful Darwinian purpose, it's been to educate us in our own stupidity. One of the most sobering things social media has taught us, is that we no longer need people to be the offspring of a deity or to perform miracles in order to garner our worship. All we need them to do is:

a) Have a soapbox.
b) Agree with us.

Once they've met these two conditions, we will blindly applaud and submit to every self-serving action they take, however much we suffer in the process. A brief, demonstrational interlude...

The “Emptyvist”: Why Twitter’s Hate Speech Rules Are Not Enough

Acrimony has been normalised on Twitter. Here’s the REAL route to reversing the tide.

The “emptyvist”. An activist with a lack of things to rebel against. One who pursues activism as a means of gaining attention, approval and online status rather than a means of achieving a positive result for society. Sound familiar? It will if you use Twitter, I’m sure. The short-form conversation platform is now so overrun with wildly overexaggerated “emptyvist” hate, that ToS updates just seem futile. Where does Twitter go from here?

In recent times we’ve seen the major social media platforms introducing new clauses to their Terms of Service, in a bid to stem hate speech. And nowhere has this process been more alive than on Twitter. But to date, it hasn’t worked. Although extremists are more limited in what they can and can’t say, hate has remained a pseudo-currency on Twitter. The recognition that hate is a psuedo-currency, is growing. And as more people recognise hate as a form of currency, so too grows hate itself.