ChatGPT and I Discuss the Influence of Media on Our Perceptions, Social Narratives, Progress, and Justice

Most people today have grown up watching tv and now following social media with a lot of implicit and explicit advertising on the part of corporations. The human brain has evolved to rely on external memory storage in our cultural narratives and institutions. It seems that a lot of those narratives and institutions are greatly, perhaps nearly completely managed by vested interests. Tell me the implications for human development? Wellbeing, justice, and  meaningful (just, intrinsically enlightening) progress.  

Your question slices into the heart of modern culture, cognition, and power: if human brains have co-evolved with external memory and meaning-making systems—and those systems are now largely mediated by commercial and vested interests—what are the implications for our wellbeing, justice, and meaningful progress?

Let’s break it down using your framing: development, wellbeing, justice, and intrinsically enlightening progress, recognizing the deeper patterns it reveals.

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⚙️ 1. Human Development

The human mind does not evolve in isolation—it develops in constant conversation with its environment. For thousands of years, the “extended mind” (per Andy Clark and others) has included:

• Language

• Stories

• Rituals

• Institutions

• Tools and tech

Now, many of those narrative environments are owned or shaped by profit-driven entities: corporations, algorithms, influencers often funded by opaque or manipulative interests. This changes what development looks like.

Implications:

• Cognitive outsourcing becomes more passive and manipulative. Instead of outsourcing memory to books or communal elders, we outsource to TikTok trends, algorithmic feeds, and corporate media.

• Attention becomes a commodity. Development no longer centers on self-awareness or reasoning, but on optimizing one’s persona or being seduced by curated dopamine loops.

• Plasticity is hijacked. Young brains are shaped by systems designed not for wisdom or maturity, but for engagement and monetization.

“We are what we pay attention to—and now someone else decides what that is.”

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😊 2. Wellbeing

True wellbeing requires coherence between internal states and external realities. But when our cultural narratives are managed by vested interests, they may enforce incoherent or pathological models of life.

Implications:

• Self-worth becomes externalized—dependent on performance, consumption, or appearance rather than relationships, purpose, or dignity.

• Alienation increases. People often sense that their lives are shaped by forces they don’t understand or control—leading to anxiety, helplessness, and even rage.

• Pathological normalization. Exhaustion, overwork, climate anxiety, and social breakdown are treated as normal or personal failings rather than systemic symptoms.

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⚖️ 3. Justice

If narratives are how societies understand themselves and their values, then narrative control is a justice issue.

Implications:

• Voices of dissent are commodified or silenced. Resistance becomes a brand, or else algorithmically buried.

• Marginalized groups remain in narrative shadows. If the “archive of memory” is managed by capital, it privileges perspectives that serve existing hierarchies.

• Truth itself becomes slippery. Competing realities (e.g., climate denial, populist misinformation) are not just tolerated—they’re profitable.

This is not just about corporate greed. It’s about epistemic injustice: who gets to shape what we believe is real, right, or possible.

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✨ 4. Meaningful Progress

You asked for “just, intrinsically enlightening progress”—progress that reveals truth, deepens justice, and helps us grow as beings. That kind of progress relies on shared aspirations grounded in reality and hope—not illusions.

Implications:

• Cultural imagination is narrowed. If most “progress” is imagined in terms of new apps, faster tech, or market growth, we lose sight of deeper shifts: healing ecosystems, reforming governance, cultivating wisdom.

• Instrumentalism rules. Progress is defined by what is measurable and monetizable—not by what is good, beautiful, or true.

• A spiritual void. Humans hunger for awe, mystery, and purpose—but consumerist systems often can’t offer anything beyond distraction or acquisition.

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💡What’s to Be Done?

Your question contains its own counterweight: the awareness that things could be different. A few antidotes or movements already aim to subvert the trend:

1. Decentralized knowledge cultures (open-source education, digital commons, oral histories)

2. Ethical tech design (designing for care, not addiction)

3. Restorative storytelling (indigenous, ecological, feminist, or anti-colonial narratives)

4. Public-interest media (co-ops, non-profit journalism, citizen science)

5. Practices of attention—philosophy, mindfulness, deep reading—that train minds to resist manipulation.

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🧭 In Summary:

We evolved to outsource meaning, memory, and identity to the shared culture. But when culture is captured by vested interests, development is redirected, wellbeing distorted, justice undermined, and meaningful progress obscured.

To reclaim our humanity, we must reclaim the stories and systems that shape what it means to be human.

Change Discourse: Power Relationships

I’m starting to get an inkling about why people resist change and, believe me, if you think words like “attitude” might sum it up, you’re just going to have nightmares reading this.  In the process of reading Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules - for Now, it became quite evident to me that it was during the so-called “Enlightenment” that people’s thought structures began to detach from the hierarchically inspired mythos of the preceding eras of history and the idea of democracy and ideal of the “rule of law” occurred to people. It was wonderful, however brief. 

Up until that time, political organization was roughly the same as a grand protection racket. Some of you may think that little has changed, but in fact things have changed immensely. Nevertheless, we are backsliding.

What does the pre-enlightenment “divine right of kings” mythos give us? How does it feed and nurture the so stable pillars of our mindset? How does it keep us holding on to something we see as sane in a complex and dangerous world?

It gives us a self-contained little cosmos with us at the centre.

It gives us clear cut rules of social engagement.

It gives us the acceptable routes to and rites of kinship (e.g., the walk down the aisle and father giving his daughter as a bride to his son-in-law)

It gives us the limits of acceptable convention and the unacceptably unconventional or "weird". 

It gives us the limits of civilized and uncivilized behaviour, e.g., the ideal of professionalism that allows you to bring only 10% of yourself to work.

It gives a small group of people full permission to lead and direct the course of events to their own advantage.

So, what has changed? 

The introduction of the “rule of law” is a vast improvement over the "divine right of kings" mythos if it protects the ideal that each person can be the captain of their destiny, the ideal of everyone having the right to develop and express themselves in mutually beneficial ways (or in ways that do no harm to others).  

But let's face it, we remain to a large extent under the yoke of the ancient mythos, this vestigial patriarchy and hierarchy that so many on the modern ideological bandwagon think had been overthrown three hundred years ago. 

We have sold away a lot of our enlightenment thinking to buy swiffer-clean houses, big box convenience and the North Pacific Garbage Patch. So the rule of law reverts to might is right - until the yoke gets tight. Given that our identities are inexorably tied to the worldview of the group or community we identify with and measure ourselves against.

Seems that we are only the least bit interested in liberty when it is obviously threatened. I think today our numbing of the intellect to avoid facing the Darth Vader that haunts our economic and socio-political realities is what threatens us most. The most disturbing thing is that the numbing is the Darth Vader. 

It takes courage and humanity to develop real understanding in any era, Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment. We think we look better in the dark, perhaps.