Self Inventory)

In my last post I made the point that I want to find my own personal responsibility in regard to the murder of Charlie Kirk and take accountability for it. Perhaps it would be possible to conduct that inventory, and genuinely find no fault whatsoever, and then I could have a completely clean conscience and continue living exactly as I was.

That, however, is not the case in this event. As I have examined my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, I found something that I would like to do differently moving forward. There is a prominent regret that I have, one which I believe helped feed into the culture that led to his death.

Divisive Social Media)

And it all has to do with the social media that I choose to engage with. As I look at the big picture of things, I do believe that there is a great, terrible machine in our culture, one that I have been a part of.

In social media, content that is angry, that warns of imminent threat, that gives a simplistic view of an enemy group, is typically the content to get the most clicks and views, which results in more revenue for those channels, which encourages the platform-owner to recommended it other people as well. We are fed content, not because it is true, or virtuous, or good for us, but because it is most likely to get a reaction. And when we give it that reaction, it only encourages the algorithm to amplify that rhetoric even further.

And, like I said, I have been part of that cycle, too. I have watched videos because the titles were provocative, because they stoked my sense of righteous indignation, because they gave me a rush of dopamine.

And it wasn’t even that these channels were doing anything obviously evil, like making calls for violence. But they did still paint the world in terms of “us vs them.” They were still painting an entire group of people as fundamentally wrong and dangerous. They were still increasing anger and division. That alone is enough to push people into desperate patterns of thought, where extreme solutions seem to be the only option. That was the type of content that I regularly engaged with, but I’m here to say that I don’t want to be a part of that anymore.

The Value of Attention)

One of the greatest things that we have to give, is our attention. It is limited, it is finite, and where we point it directs all the rest of our lives. For this reason, it is extremely valuable, and very hotly contested for. Channels become powerful purely by their ability to win our attention from us, and if we do not give those channels our attention any longer, they wither away and die.

So, from this point on, I want to be very careful about whom I give my attention to. I do not want to sell it to voices that are coarse, divisive, and loud. And I already know other channels where the discourse is much more rational, much more open to finding solutions other than domination of “the other side.” I’d like to give my attention to them instead. As such, I have already cancelled a great many of subscriptions and will tell the algorithms to stop recommending those channels when they pop back up on my feed.

Anyway, this was the response that I had from looking at the murder of Charlie Kirk and asking myself what I had done to contribute to it. My answer is, “I gave my attention to the voices of division,” and my personal solution is to not do that anymore.