Social Media, From the Other Side
There is one line from The Social Dilemma that I have not been able to put down:
"If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product."
Most people hear that and nod and move on. I want to sit with it for a minute, because once you take it seriously, a lot of ordinary things stop looking ordinary.
You do not need to understand technology to follow any of this. If you have a phone, then this is about you, and you should take it seriously.
Why is my photo in front of strangers?
Start with something small.
Say I take a photo of myself. In my head, that photo is for my people. My family. My close friends. The four or five humans who actually know me. That is who it was for.
So why does it end up on a social media platform like Instagram or Facebook, where thousands of people I have never met can look at it, judge it, save it, screenshot it, and decide what kind of person I am from one frame?
And it does not stop at being looked at. A stranger leaves a comment. Someone I have never met decides something about me from one picture and says it out loud. Then that comment reaches the people who actually matter to me, and now I am quarrelling at home over a person whose name I do not even know, who will forget about me in ten seconds and never think about it again.
That is the strange part. The damage does not stay online. It walks into the house. A relationship that took years to build gets shaken by someone who invested nothing, knows nothing, and pays nothing for what they said.
Nobody ever made that decision consciously. There was no day where I sat down and thought, "from today, my personal life is public." It just slowly became the normal thing to do. And once everyone was doing it, not doing it started to look strange.
That is the part that bothers me. Not that privacy was taken. That it was quietly redefined until we handed it over ourselves and called it normal.
Try this experiment. Tell a group of people, seriously, "stop posting your photos online, because it harms our day to day life and creates problems in our real life. There is no privacy left, and strangers will judge us and comment on us for no reason." Watch what happens. You will not be treated like someone making a fair point. You will be treated like someone being difficult, or dramatic, or "too much." That reaction did not come from nowhere. It got built, over years, by companies that need us to keep posting.
When a company can shape what feels normal to you, it is not just selling you things anymore. It is deciding things for you.
Five minutes that turned into two hours
Here is the other thing everyone has felt and almost nobody says out loud.
You open Instagram or YouTube to check one thing. You tell yourself five minutes. You look up and it is one hour later. Sometimes two. You cannot remember a single video you watched. You did not decide to do that. It happened to you.
That is not an accident, and it is not weak willpower. It is the product working correctly.
These apps do not make money when you feel good. They make money when you stay. Every extra minute you scroll is another advertisement shown, another rupee they earned. So everything about the app is arranged to keep you there a little longer — the video that plays automatically, the feed that never ends, the notification that arrives exactly when you were about to put the phone down.
You are not fighting your own laziness. You are up against a system that never gets tired, never gets bored, and has been tested on millions of people to find out exactly what makes you stay.
And here is the detail that should end the argument. Mark Zuckerberg built these platforms, and reports say he keeps his own children away from them. The people who built the machine do not let their kids near it. If it were good for us, would that be the rule in their own house?
Maybe it was built with good intentions. But right now it has become evil. Whatever it was meant to be, right now it is something completely different.
I will say it plainly: I think this is more powerful than a nuclear weapon. A bomb can destroy entire human lives. This changes what people think, what they want, and what they believe is normal — and it does it slowly enough that nobody screams. A weapon that controls a mind does not need to destroy anything. The person carries it willingly, in their pocket, and charges it every night.
Materialistic Money World
Now, maybe this part will annoy some people.
There is a belief going around that views, likes and followers are a career. Get the numbers up, brands will come, money will follow, and you will never need an ordinary job again and you will be financially free.
That is not how the real world works. If it were true, why does Mark Zuckerberg not make reels and dance to a trending song? He built the stage. He knows exactly what it pays, and he is standing behind it, not on it.
Look at 2020. The Indian government banned TikTok, and it was over in a single day. People who had spent years building millions of followers woke up to nothing. Not a bad month, not a drop in earnings — the whole thing simply gone, along with every follower they had collected. They did not do anything wrong. Or maybe they did one thing wrong: they believed success comes overnight, from a dance step and a dialogue in a reel, and that it would keep coming forever. They were not cancelled. A decision was taken far above their heads and their entire income vanished with it.
Some of them rebuilt on Instagram and YouTube. Many never got back to where they were. And the ones who rebuilt only proved the point, because they had to start again from zero on somebody else's platform, which can also be banned, or can quietly change its rules tomorrow.
That is the real lesson. If your income depends on an app you do not own, you do not own a business. You are standing on somebody else's floor, and they can move it whenever they want.
And notice what the genuinely big creators do. The ones earning in crores do not sit still. They move into films, they launch actual companies, they open restaurants and clothing labels and offline stores. Ask yourself why. If the platform were a safe, permanent place to earn from, why would the most successful people on it keep building an exit?
Because they know. They know the audience is rented, not owned. They know attention moves. So they turn the attention into something real while it lasts.
To be clear, I am not against anyone doing well on Instagram or YouTube. If you are creating good work and earning from it, genuinely, good. My problem is with the belief underneath it — the idea that our parents' way of earning, a job, a shop, a business built slowly in the real world, is outdated and beneath us. It is not outdated. It is the ground. Everything online is weather.
I really hope my generation understands this early rather than late. Social media is a place you can use. It is not a place you can stand on.
What I still owe it
I am not going to pretend the whole thing is poison, because I would be lying. I am still on these platforms. I still put my story up there. Whatever I am about to say, I am saying it as someone who has not left.
Almost everything I know how to do, I learned from strangers on the internet who had no reason to help me. Half the opportunities I have had came from some thread or some message. There are people I speak to every week whom I would never have met otherwise.
So the honest position is uncomfortable. The same thing that lets a kid in a small town learn a real skill from someone across the world is the thing that keeps a fourteen-year-old comparing herself to filtered strangers at one in the morning. Same pipe. Different water.
I do not have a clean way to separate those two. I am not sure anyone does.
What actually worked, and what didn't
After watching the documentary I did the whole ritual. Deleted Instagram. Turned the screen black and white. Kept the phone out of the bedroom. Set a screen time limit.
It lasted about eleven days.
Not because the ideas were wrong. The black and white screen genuinely does make the phone boring. It failed because I was doing daily manual work against something that runs by itself, forever, built by people who go home at six and let it keep going.
What actually survived were the changes I only had to make once:
- Notifications off for everything except calls and messages from real people. Not reduced. Off.
- Logged out on the phone, logged in only on the laptop. The extra effort is small, but it is enough that I stopped opening things out of pure habit.
- Unfollowed accounts based on how I felt after watching, not on whether the content was good. Some genuinely talented people went. My feed got duller and my head got quieter.
Everything that needed a decision every single day failed. Everything I could set up once and forget kept working. That is the only real lesson I have from a year of trying.
Where I have landed
The documentary's real argument is not "social media bad."
It is that we built something that measures human attention, told it to collect as much as possible, and then acted surprised when it started consuming the very thing it was counting.
That is not a technology problem. Technology only did what it was told to do. The problem is what we decided to count, and who profits from the counting.
So I do not think we escape this by deleting apps for a week, and I definitely do not think the companies will fix it themselves. If it changes, it changes because the money behind it changes. That part is not in my hands.
What is in my hands is a phone with the notifications switched off, a smaller number of photos going public, and one question I keep asking whenever a screen is nudging me to stay:
Who is this good for? Because it is being paid for by someone, and it is not me.
Personal opinions only. If you have found something that worked for you for longer than eleven days, I genuinely want to hear it. Mail me at swopnajitpalai@gmail.com.