Absurd Superficiality

The absurdity of the social media game is structural, not moral. Everyone is incentivised to speak, assert experience, belief, or fact, yet attention is allocated to whatever compresses fastest. To be heard, meaning is thinned, context stripped, time and place over-determined into slogans. Throughput beats processing. What looks like participation is actually a selection regime that rewards superficial coherence over depth. Once inside it, insight becomes costly because it slows the signal. Complexity is punished, not debated. The trap closes because the same mechanism that grants visibility erodes the conditions for understanding, until intelligence itself appears inefficient. This is not a failure of users but of the epistemic economy: a system optimised for circulation rather than sense-making, where thought is flattened to move faster, and having flattened it, finds no space left to think.