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.

Power and human instincts

 I'm reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Harari. He says

"how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks [a.k.a. Socioeconomic systems] when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance."

Turns out these scripts tend to invoke a divine decree as a warrant for legitimacy, as we know. But it's very doubtful that these hierarchical orders were planned and hammered out by Hammurabi and co. with many times the cunning of a modern PR consultancy or even fully consciously, as Harari insinuates.  Who is going to accept and carry out his social role no matter how lowly just because some clever storytellers concocted and disseminated the very story to organize hundreds of thousands into stable economic networks? Narratives probably emerged and evolved along with mass cooperation networks. The numinousness bestowed via divine blessing on the experience of the revelation of "justice" (which differs based on the socioeconomic organization in play) is a strong hint that there is indeed an instinctive aspect to human narratives supporting the social order. We don't get it yet because we're too focussed on discrete entities as ontically  "fundamental" (perhaps part and parcel of the individualist script in play today that has supported the socioeconomic order known as capitalism.)

Narratives can be concocted and are influential but the notion that the powerful can manage to manipulate the organization of whole civilizations by consciously concocting tales of divinely legitimated justice is utterly simplistic. Nevertheless this and similar explanations are advanced indirectly in works like Ian Morris's Why the West Rules for Now. One thing the historical supposition of a transcendental source of justice has left even non religious investigators today is the sense that we are above nature and that our various versions of narratives of justice are not instinctually rooted. 

It is a mistake to confuse methodology with objectivity

People use a variety of evaluative processes in business to ensure objectivity. But the dangerous fact is that these evaluative processes, these methodologies, even the most rigorous, are woefully insufficient to guarantee objectivity.

Why? There are three basic dangers in relying on method to ensure objectivity.

1. The normative dangers

The overarching danger attaching to evaluative models is the belief that we can use methodology as a legitimating device, even if our evaluative methodology has flaws. Furthermore, if any kind of injustice has resulted from the application of a methodology how can it even be called an injustice, if the "test" for justice is the methodology?

2. The epistemic dangers

I use staffing as a paradigmatic example because of its situation, which cross-cuts the human and the operational domains of management.

To ensure transparency and effectiveness, it is assumed that a method which permits the definition, measurement and testing of people's "competencies" will do the job.  First, who guarantees that the definition of competencies is appropriate? What sanctions the applicable criterion?  It depends on the motive - are the criteria sanctioned in terms of the business needs that the hire will meet or the efficiencies that the hiring process will meet? (If you have to think more than 5 seconds on that one, you're in trouble.)

Second, competency is not a feature of potential hires like the number of doors on a car. People are living, learning beings with potential and we can't screen for traits we haven't identified but might have found very valuable.

Competencies mean little without relationship to motivation to develop them further and opportunities to use them.

We have a collective Western habit of freeze-framing states and confusing the ability to label the frame with the ability to recognize the meaningful stuff in phenomena. Nothing living stands still, including the level of the abilities of your potential staff.

3. The ontological dangers

Empiricism is at pains to distinguish itself from teleology - the identification of ends. The underlying belief at stake is the idea that a grand purpose or design to everything is an anthropomorphic projection. This may or may not have clear import in certain areas of scientific research, but to carry that principle of wariness over into the types of planning whose purpose is to improve quality of life is ludicrous.

For example, in staffing (the most clear examples come from that domain, as I explained earlier), operationally defining merit criteria in terms of a screening methodology puts the methodological cart before the ontological horse. A competency is not an exhausively definable capacity, but a set of potentials that evolves over time. Efforts should be made to ensure fairness and objectivity, and to ensure thereby that the right person is selected for the job (i.e., the "telos" or end is that the essential criteria are connected to the needs of the job and the person's fitness for the role overall is assessed according to those ends). This connection is lost when the specific criteria become disconnected and itemized, and especially when they become too narrowly defined due to a different objective - the objective to manage the "empirical" screening process efficiently. Of course, divorced from its ends, efficiency has no meaning. This is neither fair nor effective.

I may have said this before, but it is clear that no matter how much “empirical evidence” we have, in the end it is our capacity for meaningful valuation that allows us to identify worthwhile goals and our capacity for reasoning that allows us to collect the relevant evidence in support of those and assess it. These two capacities are not separate, but deeply connected in us and contribute equally to the quality of our lives. My examples tend to be drawn from staffing because they are the most straightforward, but the underlying principles could apply to many areas public admin.

Going against the grain of the contemporary Zeitgeist, to ensure objectivity, and by extension, fairness,  in people or program evaluation, we should be sure to use our capacities for meaningful valuation and reason to the best of our abilities.