Social Media: From Connection to Deception

 I still remember the first time I logged into Orkut as a teenager. My heart raced a little when a new “friend request” popped up, or when someone wrote a sweet testimonial on my profile, P.S. I got first conversation with my first love over Orkut. Those were innocent days. We posted badly lit selfies, shared forwarded jokes that ended with “PJs,” tagged friends in silly quizzes, and flirted in the most awkward, harmless ways. Social media felt like an extension of the school corridor; loud, chaotic, and full of laughter.

Then the world rushed in.

Almost overnight, everyone got a smartphone. Grandparents joined Facebook, uncles discovered Twitter, and suddenly the timeline was no longer about weekend plans or crush confessions. It became a war zone. People who smiled at each other during family weddings were tearing one another apart over politics, religion, and caste. Perfectly normal human beings turned into keyboard warriors before breakfast. A joke could start a riot; a rumor could ruin a life.

And then came the money.

Authentic voices got drowned out by “content creators.” Product reviews stopped being honest, they became 60-second advertisements with discount codes. Memes, once the purest form of humor, started carrying brand logos in the corner. Even heartbreak posts felt scripted for engagement. Likes, shares, and followers became the new currency, and truth was the first casualty.

Today when I scroll, I don’t recognize the internet I once loved. It feels like a tired, angry machine that runs on outrage and sponsored posts. Worst of all, children are growing up inside this machine, absorbing half-truths, comparing their bodies to filtered faces, learning that self-worth is measured in views. With AI deepfakes and bot armies joining the chaos, we can no longer tell what’s real and what’s manufactured. The line between reality and illusion has vanished.

That’s why, when I heard Australia is banning social media for kids under 16, something inside me exhaled. Finally, someone is drawing a boundary. A childhood should be filled with scraped knees, secret forts, boring afternoons that force you to invent your own games, not endless scrolling through other people’s curated highlight reels. Let children discover the world with their own eyes before we hand them a screen that teaches them to hate, to pose, to perform.

So here’s my quiet plea to all of us who still remember the old internet:

• Pause before you share. Ask yourself: Am I adding light or just more noise?
• Never outsource your thinking to an influencer with a ring light. Most of them are selling something—sometimes a product, sometimes an ideology, always themselves.
• Protect the kids. Delay the phone, delay the apps, delay the poison for as long as you can.
• And please, step outside. Touch grass, talk to a real human without recording it, watch a sunset that no filter can improve.

Life beyond the screen is still there; messy, slow, unfiltered, and breathtakingly real.

In a world that screams for your attention, the quiet act of thinking for yourself remains the last true rebellion.

Take it back.

The Metabolic Fate of Civilizations: From Slow Dawn to Accelerating Dusk

 

There was a time when the world changed slowly — so slowly that generations passed without noticing.
For thousands of years, the rhythm of life remained the same: sun, soil, seed, harvest.
Fire was a revolution that lasted millennia. The wheel took centuries to spread. Even when iron, writing, and empires appeared, humanity still moved at the pace of the seasons.

But today, change hums at the speed of thought.
An idea born in one corner of the planet reaches billions in seconds.
Machines now learn faster than our minds can adapt.
Every year feels shorter, not because the clocks have changed — but because the density of events within a year has multiplied.

We have entered the age of accelerating returns, the very phenomenon Ray Kurzweil described:

“The rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems tends to increase exponentially.”

From the steam engine to the microchip, from telegrams to quantum computing — every invention becomes the foundation for the next, tightening the feedback loop of progress.
And like a biological metabolism that speeds up, the pulse of civilization beats faster with every passing decade.

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The Long Sleep of History

For almost all of human existence, nothing really changed.
If you were born in 5000 BCE and somehow woke up again in 1500 CE, the world would look familiar — people farming, trading, praying, fighting wars, and living by nature’s mercy.

The Industrial Revolution cracked that slowness.
The Scientific Revolution poured fuel.
Then the Digital Revolution — and now the AI Revolution — shattered the very idea of gradual progress.

It took us 100,000 years to invent the plow,
10,000 years to reach the steam engine,
200 years to reach the microchip,
and barely 20 years to create self-learning AI.

The curve is no longer linear — it’s vertical.
We’ve gone from millennia to decades to days.

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Acceleration and the Cost of Speed

But every acceleration in nature comes at a cost.
In biology, species with high metabolic rates — hummingbirds, shrews — live fast and die young.
In physics, high-energy systems lose stability quickly.
In civilization, the same pattern may apply: the faster we evolve, the shorter our equilibrium lasts.

Thinkers like Joseph Tainter (in The Collapse of Complex Societies) argued that as complexity rises, the energy needed to sustain it increases exponentially — until the system can no longer pay its own energetic cost.

Similarly, Ilya Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures suggests that systems driven far from equilibrium either collapse or reorganize into a higher order — a form of evolution through instability.

Kurzweil’s vision of the Technological Singularity aligns eerily with this — a point where acceleration becomes infinite, and civilization either transcends or implodes under its own speed.

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The Universe’s Echo

Even the cosmos follows this rhythm.
Massive stars burn faster and die sooner, collapsing into black holes or scattering their essence as nebulae.
Maybe civilizations, too, follow that path — burning through knowledge and matter until they either collapse or transcend into another state of being.

Perhaps that’s not tragedy — it’s nature.
Entropy isn’t the enemy; it’s the teacher reminding us that balance is sacred, that everything bright must also learn to cool down if it wishes to endure.

Perhaps civilizations are like stars —
our brilliance depends on how quickly we convert energy into progress.
But unless we learn to balance that burn, we risk turning our light into an explosion instead of an evolution.

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Wisdom: The Missing Counterweight

Acceleration is not destiny — it is a direction.
What we lack is not intelligence, but equilibrium.
Maybe the next revolution should not be technological, but philosophical — a collective decision to balance progress with wisdom, innovation with reflection.

If progress is metabolism, wisdom must be the breath between its beats.
We may not stop the acceleration, but we can learn to steer it.
Because survival in the age of speed won’t belong to the fastest — it will belong to those who master rhythm.