So, in thinking about my recent updates that encourage people to stop copying and start engaging, I have discovered what appears to be an interesting feature of Facebook.

Anything I copy gets immediate comments, views, and attention. That is to say that -because it is copied it is receives better placement in people’s newsfeeds-. Meanwhile, my original posts languish in obscurity.

Think about this carefully. You’re being programmed here.

Just like school, you are rewarded for failing to engage or express your creativity, intelligence, diversity and originality. Facebook punishes the expression of these faculties by relegating their output to the oblivion of unseen updates. And, similarly, it rewards you with the attention of friends, peers and strangers WHEN YOU COMPLY BY COPYING SOMETHING.

This is what I am talking about when I say that our minds and lives are remade in the image of what we interact with, and this problem is vastly more prevalent in our time than ever before — in part because we are now interacting directly with algorithms engineered to shape our behavior in their likenesses and according to the goals the engineers of these methods specify by the structure of the systems thus produced.