One of the things that makes living within a crowdsourced [social media] Panopticon like we do right now so increasingly difficult is that the rules and norms we're expected to follow are constantly changing. What's permitted today, may not be tomorrow, and so even our past actions can be the seeds of a future downfall. The situation is made even more sinister as the rules, norms, and values that we are expected to follow are not an emergent and spontaneous by-product of the interactions of social media users, but are increasingly being shaped to align with the interests of certain corporations, governments and other powerful global institutions. By manipulating what we see and what we don’t see, and the frequency with which we see things, tech companies can effectively influence what we believe and what we value. The more time we spend glued to our screens, scrolling through these manipulated and censored social media feeds, the more we run the risk of becoming mere automatons serving the interests of a small group of elitists whose ultimate goal is to control and exploit us for their own selfish benefit.

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