In January I was thinking a lot about my phone and social media addiction. I wondered how I could curtail these things without giving them up entirely.
Then somehow these videos about the attention economy appeared in my timeline. I’ve watched all of them, and I’ve been thinking about the content of them continuously. To some extent I am skeptical. Who is this person called Cyprian that lives in a faraway land making these videos, and why should I believe him? The videos are simple, minimalistic. You hear occasional sounds of nature in the background. (Could the videos have been created by AI?) At this point in time, we have to ask when someone is creating content, what do they have to gain? What is the end game? Scanning Cyprian’s tweets and his twitter profile I decided that his end game was either selling his followers something related to Bitcoin, or converting them to Jesus Christ. I decided that if the next tweet I saw was about Christ, I would consider him a reliable source and I would take his videos seriously, but if it was about Bitcoin I would assume that his end game was something scammy. Read more