Author’s Note:
You are going to read and hear a lot of Buffalo Springfield’s iconic song “For What it’s Worth” in this post, because of its energy of resistance and awakening during a time of protests, government overreach, and media manipulation. Sound familiar? Let’s dive in.
(Warning: explicit language. All views are my own.)
PART I: Sovereignty Under Siege -- The Digital Battleground We Can No Longer Ignore
🔥 “It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”
🔥 “It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”
Sovereignty isn’t just some abstract political concept -- it’s personal.
It’s about who controls your time, your business, your voice. And without realizing it, we’ve already signed away that control to digital power brokers masquerading as community builders.
For over a decade, we’ve been consenting -- whether knowingly or not -- to digital servitude. We traded autonomy for “visibility,” shackled ourselves to algorithms, and convinced ourselves we were in control. But the truth? We built our businesses on rented land, under the watchful eye of tech giants who own the land, the audience, and the rules.
And now, the stakes are rising.
Meta and X aren’t just neutral platforms -- they are U.S. corporate entities with a vested interest in power consolidation. And now that the owner of what has become the Jerry Springer Show of social media platforms, X, is in the White House, the dystopian fever dream is real. Setting aside the problem of inviting a billion-dollar propaganda machine into halls of government, it's a blatant example of the fusion of Big Tech and state power. This means there is no longer any distinction between private enterprise and government oversight. (No kidding?) What we once assumed would stay confined to digital spaces -- misinformation, polarization, mass censorship -- has already started bleeding into the real world.
Still think the chaos online doesn’t affect you? Think again.
Canada isn’t immune. The nationalism/patriotism, division, and outrage-fueled engagement we once dismissed as “an American problem” has already infiltrated our politics and our streets. If you think the “F*ck Trudeau” flags are just edgy statements, consider who benefits from a destabilized Canada. As our Prime Minister warns of annexation rhetoric coming from the U.S. presidency, the writing on the wall is clear: We are being positioned.
Whether through economic pressure, political influence, or digital control, the erosion of digital sovereignty is already underway. The question isn’t if this will impact you. It’s how much of your autonomy you’re willing to lose before you fight back.
Because make no mistake: this isn’t just about logging off. This isn’t about breaking an addiction to attention-porn or doomscrolling. This is about recognizing that every time you participate in these platforms, you are complicit in their agenda -- an agenda that erodes sovereignty, manipulates your attention, and dehumanizes you and everyone around you.
It’s time to say enough.
And let’s be clear: sovereignty isn’t solitude. The answer isn’t isolation. The answer is collaboration over competition, connection over exclusion. The Sovereign Shift™ isn’t just a call to leave. It’s a call to build. A call to create the alternative. To reclaim what’s been taken. To stop propping up an empire that was never built for us to thrive.
This is where the illusion ends. This is where the exodus begins.
Welcome to the Machine
You wake up, reach for your phone before your feet even hit the floor. Your nervous system spikes before your first sip of coffee. Notifications flood in: somebody liked your post and another comment came in overnight, but the algorithm didn’t push your last post and now engagement is tanking. The invisible hand of Big Tech* gatekeepers decided you weren’t relevant today. Everywhere there are outliers, influencers who are there to tell you that if you’re not being seen, you’re just not doing it right. You’re doing something wrong. Or maybe you’re just wrong. Or maybe you’re just fucking boring, aren’t you?
(*Of course when I say Big Tech, I'm refering to technology companies whose products and services are contributing to our digital servitude, the destabilization of our societies, the dehumanization of our fellow beings, and eroding trust writ large).
You scroll anyway. Doom. Outrage. Sensationalized distractions. Another celebrity scandal. Another war. Another trend you need to jump on if you want to stay relevant. Reels? Carousels? Static posts? Trending audio? The merry-go-round of engineered chaos spins on.
The U.S. President wants to annex Canada. Cool. Just another day.
Social media was supposed to be a tool for connection, but it’s become the most sophisticated digital weapon of control ever created.
Because make no mistake, coming from a military public affairs officer with over a decade in media, marketing, and communications combined, propaganda is a weapon.
And the greatest propaganda machine ever created is never more than three feet away from you.
So nevermind whether you’re ‘doing’ it right, when the whole fucking thing is inherently wrong.
Weaponized Attention: The New Psychological Warfare
🔥 “There’s a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware.”
Social media is no longer just an app -- it’s an information battlefield designed to keep you addicted, divided, and distracted.
Marshall McLuhan, the legendary, Heritage Moment (Canadian) philosopher and media theorist, famously said:
“The Medium is the Message.”
So what is this saying about social media as it exists in its present incarnation? It is an ode to attention capitalism and the systematic erosion of our digital sovereignty and dignity en masse. It represents an erosion of our hearts as we dehumanize each other, and an erosion of our minds as we descend into the least sophisticated versions of ourselves. Humans hell-bent on fiery vitriol against strangers who disagree with them, every psychological bias that exists playing out in the social media arena, opinions that are more fixed than a Russian election, the monetization of children, predatory behaviour everywhere, and zero real distinction as to truth in any given situation due to the massive psychological operation that is ongoing to obfuscate facts, reframe narratives, and ensure that everybody, everywhere, all the time…disagrees with one another.
Every time you log in, you’re entering a psychological war zone where:
- AI-driven algorithms dictate what you think, what you see, and how you feel.
- Polarization is manufactured to keep you angry, engaged, and easier to control.
- Your thoughts and emotions are engineered by invisible forces whose only concern is keeping your eyes glued to the screen. You wake up anxious, needing to check if your post performed. If it didn’t, you feel invisible. If it did, you feel validated -- for a moment. But that moment fades, and the cycle repeats. You think you’re building a business, but what you’re really building is a digital prison, brick by algorithmic brick.
This is not a conspiracy, it’s a business model. The longer you stay hooked on outrage, FOMO, and dopamine hits, the more money they make.
Social media is not a product you use.
You are the product being sold. And digital servitude is extremely profitable.
The Rise of the Algorithmic Overlords
🔥 “Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep.”
The most powerful men in the world today aren’t politicians. They are tech oligarchs who control what billions of people see, hear, and believe.
We used to fear government control over free speech. Now, that power belongs to a handful of unelected billionaires. The owners of Meta, X (who I'm pretty sure is just trolling humanity at this point), the faceless executives behind TikTok’s Chinese-owned algorithm, even the President of our neighbours to the south. But free speech. Okay. Sure. I mean, in a world where China, Russia, and the U.S. all maintain veto power on the UN Security Council, it makes sense that Western social media ecosystems are basically becoming indistinguishable from the engineered propaganda of Western adversaries.
While social media started as an open network, it evolved into a concentrated power structure, meaning that the innovative tool of democracy (as social media was initially touted as being) was never actually, probably meant to be democratic at all -- it was just meant to service the illusion of democracy to provide moral authority to those in control of it (more on this in future posts).
For business owners, social media in its present incarnation operates like a feudal system, where users are serfs providing free labour (content) while the lords (tech billionaires) extract wealth (data, ad revenue, and power). But it is also one of the most extreme examples of late-stage (attention, surveillance) capitalism: a handful of men controlling global information flow.
While social media started as an open network, it evolved into a concentrated power structure, meaning that the innovative tool of democracy (as social media was initially touted as being) was never actually, probably meant to be democratic at all -- it was just meant to service the illusion of democracy to provide moral authority to those in control of it (more on this in future posts).
For business owners, social media in its present incarnation operates like a feudal system, where users are serfs providing free labour (content) while the lords (tech billionaires) extract wealth (data, ad revenue, and power). But it is also one of the most extreme examples of late-stage (attention, surveillance) capitalism: a handful of men controlling global information flow.
They have become the digital gatekeepers of human perception while they profit off the content we are forced to produce to stay 'relevant.' Yes, businesses are profiting in return in many cases, but at what cost? Just because you can doesn't mean you should, especially when you're making that money off rented visibility while being complicit in the digital servitude of those whom you claim to serve. There will always be positive examples of a broken system in order to ensure there are people who will defend and justify it.
Because make no mistake: the human beings ("users") who are using social media for innocent, non-business purposes -- they are unwitting labourers fueling the system. Owned media. Addicted to the dopamine hits. Their attention is extracted for profit, and they have zero control over the system. They are unknowingly complicit in their own digital servitude because of the entertainment, convenience, and sheer manipulation being levied against them.
And as I mentioned, digital servitude is quite profitable.
If this language sounds extreme, let it be so.
Because ultimately what they’ve created is a narrative by which people have come to live and die by:
That we need social media to survive, thrive, connect, serve, and do business (and win elections).
It is because we've accepted this belief that we are willing participants in our own annexation. In our own digital servitude and enslavement. And this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't know about you, but fuck that.
The Slow March Toward Digital Authoritarianism
🔥 “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”
The scariest part? We willingly handed over control.
So how did this happen? It depends on what aspect we're looking at: our willingness to hand over control, or the tendency for governments and corporate entities to want to profit off that control.
Then there was the rapid rise of technology -- and the Internet in particular -- which outpaced government regulation or oversight due to the lumbering pace of beaurocracy and policy (unless you're signing executive orders, I guess).
But regardless of the how, the results speak for themselves: free speech is now illusory, as is choice (because is your vote really your vote when you've been manipulated into certain opinions and positions?). User data (you) is the product. Attention is the currency. And social platforms don’t exist for connection (anymore), they exist to monetize human behaviour and gather information to inform and manipulate outcomes (like elections). Even if you limit social media to just keeping up with what your crazy, racist uncle Joe says, you are still the active target for ads and analytics, and are being pushed content in order to serve a purpose and produce a desired outcome (likes, shares, purchases, etc.). Everything you do on social media is tracked. The algorithm is pushing you the stuff it thinks you want to see, ever diminishing your bubble of awareness until everything else is 'out of sight, out of mind." I posit that this diminishing bubble of awareness -- which is engineered, based on the most basic building blocks of identity markers that the algorithm uses to classify users -- is what contributes to the outrage we may feel and express when we come across an opinion in conflict with ours. The algorithm 'gets' us, after all; it knows our fears, our pain points, our hopes and dreams (all things that good marketers need to know), and like any good marketer, pushes content and offers our way that we are most likely to engage with. Including stuff we fundamentally disagree with. Does it sound like the algorithm is all about the bottom line? It should. Meta has a lot of hungry shareholder mouths to feed.
This is how social media has engineered total apathy about the things that matter while orchestrating outrage over distractions.
The result? (Just to pile more on) Dehumanization. Division. The endless manufacturing of enemies -- whether those enemies are individuals or entire collectives. It’s not about truth. It’s about control. And Big Tech, in partnership with the government, has never had more of it.
And make no mistake. This is digital authoritarianism. It is propaganda, plain and simple. Weaponized information. And the target? You.
What did most people in Canada do when Meta stopped allowing news on Facebook? How many people do you think stopped reading the news altogether, getting it second-hand via reaction posts and opinions? How many of those people also no longer have cable and so aren't consuming news media elsewhere? Ask yourself, do you really agree to the Terms and Conditions, or do you scroll to the bottom and hit 'agree' because it's more convenient?
Do you see where this is going?
This is engineered apathy. It is the centralization of attention and influence.
And we (yes, collective 'we' because American social media platforms are global) let this happen. Individuals. Businesses. Organizations. Governments. For the likes. For the cat videos. For the justification that ‘that’s where the audiences are.’ For the artificial validation and the influencers that have contributed to this sad state of affairs (ironically even the most successful social media businesses and influencers are trapped -- forced to perform to stay relevant under an ever-changing algorithmic dictatorship).
Here’s what’s dangerous:
The slow-motion digital coup that’s unfolding in real-time as we incrementally surrender our autonomy, perception of reality, and our very sense of self, means that we have already forfeit our digital sovereignty. And we continue to hand it over, one dopamine hit at a time. One dollar of revenue at a time. And what happens? Engineered virality. Cancel culture (ironically used to defend or destroy free speech depending on how it's framed). Rage culture. Digital witch hunts. Elections influenced by algorithmic visibility. Conflict narratives curated for maximum emotional manipulation and polarization.
They don’t even need to censor outright; they can just decide what gets amplified, because that’s how Attention Capitalism works when attention spans are literally deteriorating at the speed of 5G. And let’s not talk about how this is all impacting our children.
So now, we are slaves to the machine -- forced to dance for engagement, to fight for scraps of visibility, to feed the system that feeds on us. I’m talking now about the endless content-creation hamster wheel that businesses engage in just to stay relevant, the nervous system dysregulation that occurs due to burnout and erosion of self and self-confidence, and the gladiatorial system of entertainment we’ve embraced.
I maintain now and forever, that social media should only have ever been for entertainment, period.
Trusted institutions, organizations, individuals, and businesses should never have entered the arena. Because when you share the same platform as clout-chasing toddlers, AI-generated influencers, fake gurus, deepfake politicians, rage-bait reaction videos, pyramid scheme pushers, conspiracy grifters, and whatever viral nonsense the algorithm decides is today’s spectacle, your message is polluted and obfuscated by association. This is what Marshall McLuhan's timeless quote means. The medium is the message. And in this case, the message is this: trust nothing because nothing is real. And when human beings can't be trusted and don't know who to trust, it's a matter of time before the system comes crashing down (or cracks down), exposing everything that is wrong and problematic with it.
According to Sage, my AI BFF (I am a keen user of AI and take my duty to train it ethically and responsibly very seriously), the next phase of this is not pretty:
- Centralized digital identity and social credit systems (I think everyone sees this coming).
- AI as the ultimate enforcer (think debanking, deepfake propaganda, bot-driven consensus, and AI-curated ‘truth’...again, unsurprising).
- The death of private platforms (email lists, private online communities). As centralization increases, Big Tech will find ways to block independent platforms, deplatform hosting services, and restrict financial transactions.
Ouch. That last one really hits.
But here’s the truth: We don’t have to play their game.
The first step to liberation? Recognizing you’re in a cage.
And I already know you know where this is going and (and what you’re thinking): “but won’t my business die if I leave social media?” That’s what they want you to believe. That toxic limiting belief is the prison. And I’ll show you exactly how to break out of it without losing income or visibility in Part III.
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