When everything is an advertisement

SEPTEMBER 30 — The only thing I can enjoy without reservation on TikTok is recipe videos.

“Here’s the best way of reheating pizza.”

“Yes, you can make butter mochi in your air fryer.”

“Check out this instant ramen hack!”

Almost everything else on social media pretends to be imparting knowledge but inevitably ends with “If you’d like to know more, link below/in my bio!”

I’m tired.

As the internet becomes so saturated with asks for follows, likes, subscriptions and DMs, it makes me miss the early days of the internet when people were making silly MySpace pages just to play their favourite songs.

Now the internet is just full of aggressive monetisation and “content creating” and while I respect the hustle, I would like my eyeballs to not be assailed with advertising 24-7.

I read about how in China there have been reports of people being unable to call emergency services because advertisements made it impossible to press the button.

Bring back the BlackBerries.

Bring back the legislation.

The author argues that modern life has become too focused on monetisation, consumption and profit at the expense of people’s well-being. — Picture by Yusof Isa

I think companies and individuals need to rethink how we make money and perhaps build some regulation around it all.

Instagram has become the site to monetise by peddling false narratives and overblown personalities.

Threads and Twitter (I still can’t call it X) are now half-full of AI-written wannabe Reddit posts that give themselves away in the first sentence.

We have become a subscription-based society and I’m tired of it.

Instead of paying Microsoft to back up my files in the cloud, I now have two backup folders — one on a laptop, another on a portable drive.

I’m glad I got my 4TB drive months ago before prices skyrocketed; the same drive I bought is now almost twice the price.

October is around the corner which means it’s also Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

I think plenty of people are aware it exists; I would rather people be aware of free or more affordable screenings for it, whether for women or men.

There’s little awareness about the challenges for those with dense breasts, where mammograms might not be sufficient.

Screening for the BRCA and similar genes is also not as common here, likely because it’s expensive.

I’m rather tired of all the superficial “pink-washing” where companies peddle tickets to events and merchandise, claiming they will donate not all, but some of the proceeds to worthwhile organisations.

This is Malaysia — how do I know the worthwhile organisation isn’t some nepobaby’s trust fund?

If companies wish to donate money just donate it instead of asking the public to subsidise said donations by increasing their profits.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t occasionally do self-promoting things — like crowdfunding to literally save my life and my Ko-fi and TNG links are still floating around on the internet, because who doesn’t like money?

Yet it is tiresome to see the internet becoming just one gigantic pay-per-view.

I guess things had already started going downhill when clicks became internet currency, views and followers became measures of worth and it was always about riling up the internet with the freshest clickbait.

But we are also living in a world where honest toil doesn’t mean an easy honest living.

I dread the day when snatch thefts again become common because it’s no longer more profitable to earn a legal wage delivering food than grabbing handbags.

The older I get the more I see that working hard is overrated.

Sure, getting good at skills, human interaction and such should be encouraged. Effort is not the problem here.

It’s when people are working multiple jobs to pay rent and feed their children, and getting MEF stalwarts to agree to paying living wages leads to them clutching their pearls because they’d have to buy one fewer Mercedes this year, that you wonder how any of this is right or just.

Everyone should get to eat. Everyone should have a place to call home. Children, whatever age, should be able to go to school and be children without having to choose between starvation and future upward mobility.

I’m glad I didn’t get more conservative as I got older. If I were any more “woke” I wouldn’t be sleeping.

It shouldn’t be radical to think that everyone deserves a dignified life with their needs met but for now the only choice some people have is to monetise their faces, voices and personalities for as long as they are good enough products for the masses to consume.

The only way we can escape this commodification of our attention is to turn away, put down that phone, sit on the grass...for as long as we can afford to.

Because otherwise we will remain hostage to a world that is built on trapping our eyeballs in a neverending loop of mass consumption.