Our digital culture delivers the same value as a zombie’s sex appeal.
This isn’t the work of evil masterminds. It’s the handiwork of mediocre opportunists. There’s no conspiracy other than trying to pretend these shortcuts to building real society and markets, hastily stitched together, is sustainable. The tech-bros posture as visionaries, but the design isn’t brilliant — it’s basic. A casino for your brain, engineered not to develop you but to drain you of personal and financial value.
We’re not Luddites resisting technology. We’re resisting entropy and mediocrity. We want real progress. We want better.
Slot Machines & Firehoses
While there may have been an actual desire at the beginning to innovate real progress, the effort collapsed into a scramble for short-cuts to wealth. The drive for cash replaced the drive for value. Instead of innovating real benefit, they went for a quick buck using design shortcuts, public subsidies, and con-games – like devices that need to be replaced every 3 years.
There’s a reason Google’s corporate motto used to be “don’t be evil.” The people who said it knew there was a real danger of becoming, well, what they’ve become, a conglomerate mess of mediocrity undermining society. Collective intelligence is a powerful force at the tribe level, up to a hundred people. At the corporate level, collective IQ regresses exponentially. Corporations exist not because of visionary leadership, groundbreaking innovation after innovation, or value to society and the market, but only because of lethargy. They don’t earn their place, they grab it and hold on through bloat.
Consequently, the digital landscape produced from a couple decades of clamoring for money over actual progress is rather dystopian. Progress is something you build on, not something you have to dismantle to start over again to do right.
Our digital culture is at best the Las Vegas of design inside and out: a cheap, flashy, noisy facade. It’s culture in the most basic definition. Just barely. Nothing of this will or should last. The user experience and interface of devices, websites, and platforms has been directed not by artists and the finest of human achievement but by the lowest. The digital structures and rooms we spend most of our time in are tacky casinos. We think Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino is actually Paris because we don’t know any better. Digitally we’ve never been to the real city of lights.
Collective Collapse, Publicly Subsidized
The collapse of executive function isn’t just personal, it’s collective. When attention fragments at the individual level, it scales up into dysfunction at the cultural level. You can’t build coherence out of incoherence. A scattered society cannot coordinate. It goes to war with itself.
Shared focus is what makes human collaboration possible. It’s how we built cathedrals, launched space programs, and developed vaccines. Musk and Bezos aren’t advancing progress, they’re taking advantage of public subsidies and years of dismantling of the collective intelligence that built the original space program to put their names on it, slowing it down.
Likewise the zombie economy doesn’t reward collaboration — it rewards noise and superficial appearances. The long arc of problem-solving, the patient labor of discovery and refinement, the creation of an artful life, gets drowned out by quarterly earnings calls and algorithm updates.
The result is that meaningful progress stalls. The hard work of cumulative knowledge, the kind that builds on itself generation after generation, is interrupted. Instead of a body of shared achievement, we get fractured fragments: viral posts, outrage cycles, short-term hacks. We aren’t stacking stones into an acropolis, we’re scattering gravel into the wind.
The shallow spaces where this collapse happens reveal everything. We should be meeting in the Forum — a place of real civic and value exchange, where ideas are tested, refined, and built upon.
At scale, this lack is devastating. A society without executive function cannot navigate solutions for climate change, cannot reform education, cannot coordinate on anything that requires sustained focus.
False Prophets, Fake Value
Art, fine art, the hard work required to create it, is the discipline — in both senses — we need to reclaim executive function.
Where art refines complexity into meaning, contemporary design collapses into the basic, not the brilliant. Humans created art from the days of cave living forward as we need it.
The absence of fine art, sublime design, is both the warning and solution. You can’t bypass the hard work required to build real value.
Strip away their shortcuts, the government handouts — the subsidized infrastructure, the tax loopholes, the deregulation — and the so-called “drivers” of the economy aren’t driving anything. They’re dragging us backward.
If they were real entrepreneurs, they’d be building sustainable value. That’s an art. Instead, they’re chasing rockets while the rest of us try to make payroll on a platform optimized for distraction.
We all know it, but keep playing along, building our careers and ambitions on a structure of false returns.
The valuations are fake. The innovation is fake. The returns are fake. The economic engine is held together with tax breaks and borrowed time. It’s collapsing all around us, the question is do we continue to slide with it or do we begin the work of building something real? That’s an art — and like all art, it demands rigor, patience, and vision.
What if we simply… stopped?
What if we walked away?
What if Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Amazon collapsed into the algorithmic husks they’re becoming — ghost towns of bots selling to bots?
What if we used real search engines instead of Google: a data vacuum, optimized for ad delivery and behavioral manipulation?
These platforms aren’t giving us value. They’re giving us noise.
Remember blogs? Newsletters worth reading? Real conversations?
Remember when the internet was weird, human, imperfect — and real?
We don’t need to reclaim “social media.” We need to reclaim being social.
The tools exist. The alternatives exist.
What’s missing is the awareness that we have the power to choose.
Let them sell to the bots.
We can build something better.
The zombie economy is a casino running on credit — cognitive and financial.
We don’t have to keep betting against ourselves.
It’s time to build for real.
Read the Rest of the Series:
This is Part 4 of a 5-part series on Executive Function — what it is, how it breaks down, and why reclaiming it matters now more than ever.