How do humans become capable of treating other humans as objects? By refusing to see them. By reducing them to a category, a story, a fact that can be processed and moved past.
Social media has made this our default mode. Everything is content. Everyone is a take. I wrote in 2023 that social platforms stopped being social the moment they needed to generate profit. By then we were all hooked on likes, hearts, and retweets, and the boost they gave to our egos. The algorithm doesn’t see a person. It sees a signal. As I argued in 2020, the command is always the same: corral attention at any cost. Journalism at its worst has caught the same disease. The unmasking story is just attention farming. The moment happens, clicks follow, and then you are part of yesterday’s terabyte. That Banksy and Satoshi are real people with real exposure on the other end of it is incidental.
— Read on om.co/2026/04/08/banksy-satoshi-the-unmasking-impulse/