It’s unlikely any of us remember the precise moment social media went from a tool to connect with people to a tool of ‘feeds,’ sponsored content, and AI slop. The internet more generally went from the world wide web — where anything and everything was exploratory — to what we have now, a tightly controlled corporate ecosystem where your data, your clicks, and your eyeballs are even more important than you.
Sure! There’s plenty of so-called ‘content,’ but less conversation; plenty of ‘reactions’ but a lot less range of opinion. Somehow, we keep scrolling anyway, often to the detriment of our intelligence and our communities, like a Pavlovian experiment.
Our guest on the Collapse Life podcast this week, Pickax founder Jeff Dornik, has taken that vague feeling that something has shifted and pinned it down in a way that’s hard to unsee once you see it.
We all know the entire environment on ‘social media’ is being quietly and continuously shaped by systems designed to reward certain behaviors and phase out others. And once you see the pattern that Dornik lays out, you start to notice how much of your own behavior has been formed by it, even despite your best efforts. The algorithms affect what you say, what you don’t say, how you frame things, even what you decide is worth engaging with in the first place.
That’s where Pickax comes in, or at least where it tries to. No algorithmic boosting or hidden throttling. Just a chronological feed and a structure that forces a different kind of interaction that depends on actually engaging with real people.
Watch the full conversation. It’s worth your time — and it might just change how you move through the internet from now on.
