What’s on your digital spoon?

If you spent any time in front of a glowing screen last week, it undoubtedly sent you something about Charlie Kirk. It may have sent you hours of it. His murder is an absolute tragedy on many levels, as is the cold-blooded murder of nearly anyone.

In watching, listening, reading, and chatting with friends and family about current events, it occurred to me that everyone has a slightly different picture of Mr. Kirk. Outside of those who knew him directly, or conversed with him at his events, our picture has been painted entirely by social media — and by talking with others whose picture was created through a similarly narrow digital lens.

The socials spoon-feed us exactly what the socials want to. These days I lump news outlets in the same bucket as social media. Sometimes it confirms our bias. Sometimes it boils our blood. It’s all in the interest of getting more clicks back on those socials and their business partners. If you spend a lot of online effort on religion and scripture, your socials likely sent you lots of Kirk on religion and scripture. If you’re a history nerd, like me, your feed sent you clips of him leveraging historical events into his debates and conversations. If you are particularly zealous, in any direction, about trans, Trump, economics, firearms—pick any hot-button subject—then your feed sent you those subject-matter reels involving Charlie Kirk to affirm or enrage you. One can argue there are forces afoot whose goal, adjacent to all this opinion-tailoring, is to get people to do more than just click…to act. Let that one sink in a bit while considering current events. What pushes an otherwise average person to lash out violently? What pushes your neighbor to post something sounding as if they are suddenly OK with a school shooting as long as someone they hated took the bullet? How did they come to hate someone they’d never met?

We’re in a giant digital telephone game, or psychological operation, depending on your level of jadedness. Seeing and hearing someone firsthand is highest-order intelligence and should be weighted heavily in shaping our opinion. Video and digital imagery are on their way to being considered secondhand, possibly even hearsay. I take everything with a grain of salt these days. If you watch enough content about one topic, you can definitely pick out trends. But all that secondhand data is still provided by a nameless digital entity with unknown motivations. By the time it gets to my eyes and ears, is it a copy of a copy? What is the context? How edited, curated, or even faked is it? Who knows?

There are those prudent and wise media consumers who stay out of all of that and may not have had any idea who Kirk was. Yes, they are out there — God bless them. I am thankfully married to such a treasured human; she keeps me tethered to reality and flush with cat videos, crime podcasts, and common sense.

Your screen sends you what its algorithms think you need in order to engage more. None of it is random. Resistance is nearly futile. We tailor our feed based on who we purposefully follow, like, or search. I often tell people the internet will send you exactly what you are looking for, whether it is accurate or not. Confirmation bias is king and conflict is queen.

As a politically homeless, independent fence-rider, I purposely follow accounts from across the entire political spectrum. I like to think I’m fooling my feeds, and quite often they send me comically tone-deaf content. But at the end of the day I am just another weak human algorithm-targeting success story. I gravitate toward my interests, whether they are subjects I know something about or a new topic about which I am completely ignorant and hope to understand better.

Your social feeds, your search engines, your TV-show history—all of it—tracks you and builds a fantastic target folder based on you. You can delete your cookies, use multiple browsers all claiming sterility of your data, but at the end of the day there is no escape inside the digital infospace if we choose to stay in it.

All our digital content plays a part, large or small, in shaping our opinion of the world and its people. As much as I love disconnecting and spending time outdoors, I cannot stay away from the giant, modern-day Library of Alexandria we find in the interwebs. There is just so much to learn. If we’re lucky, we’re able to step out of our digital echo chamber with actual human relationships and conversations. Long-form conversational podcasts are a close second. Just be wary of what the host or guests have spoon-fed themselves. We can read printed media…it is still ok to pick up a book, magazine, newspaper, or even just a PDF now and then. It can be refreshing!

Social media, at its inception, borrowed algorithms from slot machines. The desired result was the same: keep the customer pulling that lever. Slot machines were doing it long before social media was even invented. I’m sure, these days, the two industries cross-level lessons learned to make all their machinery target us even better.

My late father was a devout practitioner of the gambling arts, specifically slot machines, in a little gambling town near his home. As long as I can remember, generally after the slots went digital, he did well. Not anecdotally well, not I-only-tell-you-about-the-wins well, but statistically, improbably well. Everyone who knew my dad would agree that he didn’t quite think like anyone else. I could write volumes on that. I’m not sure if it was the German propensity to irritate the neighbors or because he was the littlest brother in a giant family. But he had a knack for, and seemed to relish, irritating those around him, and that absolutely helped him at the slots. My working theory is that being both unpredictable and counterintuitive were his best defenses against the machines doing their best to extract all the dusty old grandpa money they could.

He’d up and leave during a winning streak. He’d cash out his credit slips regularly (not unlike clearing your cookies) since that little printed barcode contains your activity history for the next machine’s leveraging. Cash does not. Players cards are a no-no; they give the casino a tally of every nickel spent there and a thesis of your gambling habits rolled up in a single magnetic strip. He’d try new machines as often as he’d go back to old standbys. Friends and family always asked how he did it and he never had a good answer. He sometimes said he just did the opposite of what the machine wanted. He never participated in social media. Given his wiring, I often wonder if the results would have been comical or catastrophic—and for whom.

If you cannot dump them altogether, I encourage everyone to cultivate their socials and searches the same way my dad worked the slots. Your phone, slot machine, TV, or computer is spoon-feeding you what its systems want you to experience in order to smash that like button and extract time and money from you. Trip them up; take in some people or ideas you despise or that have never interested you. You can still reject them after rolling them around a bit; that’s ok. Entertaining or even understanding ideas and opinions we don’t agree with is a hallmark of adulthood. It may reinforce values you already hold true. It may open your mind to understand ideological “foes” a little better. Maybe research the true definition of Nazi or fascist and how history has treated them. And you there, I promise watching that cat video won’t make you any less of a man.

Jonathan Haidt has written several terrific books about social media and its effects, particularly on children. He’s currently behind the growing movement to get smartphones out of classrooms, and I’m all for it. This stuff is tough enough as an adult; one can argue it’s been devastating on new generations of children.

The idea here is to be extremely careful of what your device sends you about a person, a hot topic, or an event. All this is only getting worse with AI-created content. Be wary of your own opinion of someone when that opinion is shaped entirely by clips, reels, soundbites, and short quotes. Double-check your motivation when compelled to type up that smack-down. Triple-check them if you’re spurred to go act in real life. At the end of the day, everyone is a slightly different person than anyone else thinks they are. That’s how life works. Our family and great friends hopefully have that long-form picture of us. Only my Creator and I know my true soul content accurately A to Z. I know there are people out there who only know me from one meeting, one story, or one short interaction, whether it was regrettable or something I’m proud of. My dog’s opinion notwithstanding, I often pray for strength to be the man my Facebook friends think I am.

What’s on your spoon? How has that machine-tailored diet affected your opinions of people, places, and events? The stakes we gamble with feel higher every day.

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David is a father, husband, son, boss, writer, beekeeper, outdoorsman, occasional teacher, compulsive elk hunter, Afghanistan veteran, and living proof that anyone is trainable. He is a 1994 South Dakota School of Mines graduate. David spent 12 years in the Army and Army Reserve as an Engineer Officer before that career was cut short with Afghanistan injuries. He spent decades as a consulting civil engineer working in communities all around the American West and now oversees his firm’s engineering department. David continues to amaze both friend and foe being an engineer who can write a story.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.