We’re Living In a DYSTOPIA and Most People Don't Even Know It

In 1986, a man named Scott McLean was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real and I was like, "Well, they're going to figure out this is not me, they're going to do their police job." Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Even to examine the backfire effect, wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. The 9-to-5 job means fluorescent lights, a chair that never quite fits your body and days that are measured in emails, meetings and screens as barely any sunlight and barely any movement. We work so we can afford things we don't really need with money that disappears the moment it arrives. We're exhausted, but productive, stressed, but functioning, and we all call this normal. If you describe this life to someone a hundred years ago, sitting indoors all day staring at glowing rectangles, they wouldn't call it progress, they'd call it crazy, a dystopia, plain and simple. Which is why the real question isn't whether we're headed toward some dark dystopian future, it's whether we're already living in one and just too used to it to even notice. Hey guys, it's Andrew, thanks for tuning into this episode of Every Town. For today, we're going deep into the darkest corners of our shared reality. This episode is truly terrifying because each and every one of us is affected by this horrible happening and the worst part is everyone's barely even noticing. So, let's go take a good look in the mirror together because we're already living in a dystopia. Back in 2021, Eric Schmidt, one of Google's executives was trying to explain what his company actually did. He said, quote, "If we did have a category, it would be personal information. Everything you've ever heard or seen or experienced will be searchable. Your whole life will be searchable. The most people missed it, the journalists in the room, the tech reporters, and the early investors. They had all heard those words and just moved on to the next question like it was nothing. Nobody realized they just witnessed the birth of something entirely new and very dark. The thing about dystopias that we see portrayed in movies is that they announce themselves in a very clear way. There are uniforms, curfews, soldiers standing on street corners. The villains wear black and speak in slogans. And tell us plainly what they're about to take. Real dystopias though, don't work like that. They don't arrive with sirens or speeches, and they slip in quietly one small compromise at a time. And these often feel harmless on their own but slowly, almost imperceptibly. The world reshapes itself, until the life you're living looks nothing like the one you thought you were signing up for. But by the time you realize something's wrong, leaving no longer feels like an option, it's just too abstract because this is now the reality you live in. We didn't have our privacy ripped away from us in a violent way, but we gave it up for convenience. Every single one of us clicked, I agree on terms we never even read. We downloaded apps that wanted our contacts, our location, our photos, sometimes even our microphone. In exchange, we got connected, free social media and free maps that always seem to know where we were going, it felt like a fair trade, maybe even a smart one. A Harvard professor, Shoshana Zubab spent years studying this shift, and she calls it surveillance capitalism. In her work, she describes a new kind of economic system, when the treats human experience itself is raw material. Our movements, our searches, our habits, our impulses, all quietly extracted and repurposed. This wasn't just about collecting data, and what companies eventually realized was far more powerful. If they could understand us well enough, they could predict what we'd do next, and once you can predict behavior, you can influence it. Those predictions became products, sold, traded, and optimized for whoever was willing to pay the most. And you know this is real because you've seen it yourself. You were talking about dog food with a friend or getting healthy. And the next time you were online, bam, they were feeding you ads for exactly those things. But here's the messed up part. When this first started happening, people all thought it was crazy. Now almost every single one of us accepts it, almost welcomes it. So, how do we get here? How did something this invasive become so normal? And more importantly, who was watching when it all began? In the year 2000, Google was running out of time. The dot com bubble that just burst. Money was disappearing overnight, and investors were circling the exits. Google had built something remarkable, a search engine that actually works. But no one inside the company could explain how it was supposed to actually make money. And then someone noticed something small. Every time a person's search, they left something behind. Not just the words they typed, but how long they stayed on a page, what they clicked, and what they skipped, which links they hovered over, even the spelling mistakes they made along the way. Well, Google have been collecting all of it, quietly, automatically, treating it like digital exhaust, leftovers and waste. But one data scientist saw it differently. This wasn't exhaust, it was inside. Because when you gathered enough of these traces, from enough people, you could start to see patterns. And once you could see patterns, you could begin to predict behavior. What someone was likely to click next, what they were leaning toward, and what had their attention in that moment. And if you could predict that, advertisers would pay handsomely to be placed directly in its path. Google called it the click-through rate, and it saved the company. But more than that, it created a template, a model that would be copied, refined, and then scaled across the entire tech industry. The human behavior was no longer just information, it was inventory. Probably the best watchword has been offered for years by observers of social media. Don't think you're the customer, you are the product. That didn't take long for Facebook to catch on. In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg hired Cheryl Sandberg away from Google, and she brought the blueprint with her. In a year, Facebook rewrote its privacy rules from the ground up. The company decided, in Zuckerberg's words, that certain things would simply become the social norms now, whether it users agreed or not. Translated into plain language, your information would be taken, analyzed, and sold, and the company was betting that most people would complain quietly, and then log back in anyway. And that's exactly what we all did. Today, Google processes trillions of data points every single day. Facebook's prediction systems generate millions of forecasts every single second, about what you'll click, what you'll buy, and what might pull you just a little further in one direction. This is no longer just advertising. Just being built are detailed behavioral models, quiet profiles of your personality, your anxieties, your habits, and your weak spots. And access to those models is for sale, to insurance companies, political campaigns, employers, data brokers, even foreign governments. The average American has their location and online behavior exposed 747 times a day through real-time bidding systems, companies competing in milliseconds for the chance to influence them. In Europe where privacy protections are stronger than anywhere else in the world, it still happens 376 times a day. There's no real escape, no meaningful opt-out, and extraction doesn't pause. I mean, really, do you enjoy scrolling through Instagram? Facebook, TikTok, or wherever online? I mean, does it really bring you happiness? No, it does not. And yet you wake up in the morning, it's the first thing you do. And that's the intention. This is what surveillance capitalism is. And you might think, well, I can always just get offline. Well, not really. Because at this point in time, participation is an optional. That's just an illusion. Even though I've shut off all the different apparatuses that would keep Google from monitoring me, they're still doing it. Because they were doing it through third-party apps. I mean, try applying for a job without email. Try staying connected to family without social media. Try navigating an unfamiliar city without GPS. And the basic tools of modern life all come with a cost. And that cost is constant observation. But this loss of privacy was only the first phase. Because once these companies had enough data, they realized something even more powerful than prediction. They didn't just have to anticipate our behavior. They could steer it. Shoshana Zuboff describes this shift as moving from data collection to what she calls behavioral actuation. It sounds abstract and technical, but what it really means is this. The same systems built to watch you can also be used to nudge you, to shape your choices, to influence what you believe and to quietly push behavior and directions chosen by somebody else. And most of the time, you never even feel it happening. Raise your hand if you've been putting off a doctor's appointment. Yeah, lines up too. If something feels off my usual process is doom stroll symptoms, self-diagnose and tell myself it's probably nothing. And then just live with it. 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Honestly, I use this and you should too, so stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to ZockDock.com/everytown to find an instantly book a doctor you love today. That's z-o-c-d-o-c.com/everytown. ZockDock.com/everytown. Thanks to ZockDock for sponsoring this message. (upbeat music) Facebook's own engineers have admitted this in internal documents. The system is built to maximize engagement, which really means keeping you on the platform as long as possible, reacting as intensely as possible. And guess what? The algorithm learned quickly that outrage works best. So that feeling you have about how the world's gone crazy in recent years, it certainly appears like that to most of us, even if it isn't actually true. To the algorithm figured out that misinformation spreads faster than facts. Fear, it outperforms reassurance, and extremes beat moderation. So that's what gets amplified. And it's not because executives or the governments that surround plotting to radicalize people, but because the machine is optimized for one thing only, keeping you scrolling. Everything else becomes collateral damage, truth, mental health, social trust, even democracy itself. In 2021, Facebook's own privacy engineer has wrote a memo acknowledging something even more unsettling. They said they no longer know where user data actually goes once it enters the system. They compared it to pouring ink into a lake and then trying to put it back into the bottle. Their internal systems, they said, have open borders. They can't fully track data flows. They can't meaningfully promise restraint to regulators or to users, which is all very convenient. The system has grown too large and too hungry to control. So all the bad stuff happening, there's no one single person to blame. And here's some sobering intel that we all need to be aware of, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. And the lead up to the 26 US presidential election, Americans were exposed to an estimated 760 million instances of fake news online. And that works out to roughly three false stories for every adult in the country. By 2020, we'll Facebook post linking to deceptive websites generated 1.2 billion interactions in a single quarter. In other words, the system was doing exactly what it's built to do. Study after study has shown that misinformation outperforms reliable information across the board. It gets more clicks, more shares, and more reactions regardless of political ideology. And this new system we're all working in has not been built to value the truth. And that is the world we're all living in, and you don't understand. But the complete collapse of our ability to agree on what's true is not our fault. It's all baked into the technology. Now these systems we're talking about are built on a principle borrowed from Cold War era communication theory, one that values speed and volume over meaning. The engineer who formalized it, Claude Shannon, was clear about this. In his model, the meaning of a message didn't matter at all. From an engineering perspective, it was totally irrelevant. All that mattered was that the signal arrived intact. That approach made sense from military communications, but we've taken that same logic and now applied it to human interaction. Platforms like Facebook process messages as raw throughput as interchangeable units. Without regard for whether they're true or false, helpful or harmful. Facebook is amplifying lies and COVID conspiracy theories to the tune of millions and millions of people per day. And they're doing that in a really targeted and strategic way. They are tracking our every move. They are collecting our personal and demographic data and then their driving content to us based on our perceived interests and vulnerabilities. That means a deeply reported investigation from a reputable reporter moves through the system the same way as a fabricated story from the lady across the street. The system can't tell the difference and more importantly, it was never designed to care. The result is a world where shared reality starts to fracture where basic facts become negotiable. Where every major event is instantly surrounded by competing conspiracies, where expertise carries no more weight than guesswork and confidence matters more than accuracy. And as I've said before, this isn't a malfunction. This is the system working exactly as it was built to work and we're all just in the middle of it. While all this is happening, something else is unfolding in the background, something that may prove even more destabilizing in the long run. As data became the most valuable resource on Earth, the institutions that controlled it began to rival. And in some cases surpassed the power of governments. Today, corporations can silence speech instantly removing people from public conversation with the snap of their fingers. They control the platforms, which means they control what billions of people see if they so choose. They decide who gets to participate in this digital economy and who gets locked out. And this is already happening and will continue to do so. (gentle music) (gentle music) So it's no surprise these companies spend enormous sums lobbying lawmakers because they want to keep that control. In 2020 alone, major tech firms spent more than $35 million in just the first half of the year. 94% of members of Congress overseeing privacy and antitrust issues receive money from tech lobbies. And that's a real number you can look up. And the result? Well, the United States. it still has no comprehensive federal privacy law, which means there's no law to broadly regulate the collection, use, and protection of personal data across all sectors. While increasing profits is nice for these big tech companies, this isn't just about that. It's about getting something even more valuable than money, power, and power over people. These companies you see are now quietly stepping into roles once held by democratic institutions. Apple CEO Tim Cook said the quiet part out loud while talking about healthcare. Quote, "We are taking what has been with the institution and empowering the individual." Now, it sounds reassuring, but what that really means is that Apple gets to define what empowerment looks like. Decisions that were once debated in public and shaped by law are being absorbed into private systems, where rules are written internally, enforcement is opaque, and accountability flows upward to executives, not outward towards citizens. This isn't limited to healthcare either. Education, transportation, communication, commerce. Even how we access money or move through cities. More and more of daily life is being mediated by a small number of corporations that answer to shareholders, not voters. When these systems fail, when they cause harm or violate rights or reshape society in damaging ways, there's no real reckoning. There are statements, yes, apologies, finds the barely register on their balance sheet, and then business continues on as usual. So this is the case, well, what happens to the rest of us, the majority of the population in other words. Well, this is where you really get to see that we're already in that dystopia. For the last 40 years, worker productivity has increased by roughly 62%, and wages, they barely moved. All that value went somewhere, though, and went up, way up to the tippy top. CEO, pay, rose by more than 900% over that same period. The wealth gap is now wider than its been since the 1920s. Just three people in the United States hold more wealth in the entire bottom half of the country combined. That's not a knock on capitalism, it's just what's happening, and the fallout is going to cause some real issues moving forward. We are at a tipping point, and all those people in the bottom half feel it more than ever. That constant, low-grade fear that everything they've built could collapse at any moment. That one medical bill, one car repair, one unexpected expense could wipe them out. Well, at some point, people will get pushed over the edge, and in fact, it's already happening. Sales force recently cut 4,000 customer service jobs and replaced them with AI systems. HP plans to eliminate up to 6,000 positions by 2028. Accenture cut 11,000 roles, explicitly because automation could handle the work. Do a lingo announced it would stop hiring contractors for tasks AI can perform. And every other major company is just following suit. So this isn't the end of the shift, it's only the beginning. A recent Brookings study found that more than 30% of American workers could see at least half of their job tasks disrupted by AI in the coming years. Not factory workers, not truck drivers, we're talking white collar professionals, lawyers, accountants, programmers, teachers, healthcare workers. The jobs you think are safe are not. And all this is happening very fast. Nobody is properly prepared for what's coming next because no one knows exactly what it will be. So right now, we're all just free fallen, trying to keep our heads above water. And in between, we find time to scroll through our social media, hoping for a half-smile to come across our face. If it's not a funny cat video, then it's the relentless drumbeat of crisis and catastrophe. Global shootings, climate disasters, political violence, wars, pandemics, economic crashes. It's a constant crisis, don't you think? No matter where you look. Now you're stressed about the state of the world, so you check the news to feel informed and in control. But guess what? The news makes you more stressed. So you check again, hoping for something reassuring, but that will never happen because it never does. And you know it. More importantly, the algorithm knows the anxiety keeps you engaged. So it just shows you more things to worry about. The cycle then feeds itself and you end up in a loop of worry and compulsive checking. This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened. Yes, all this, it's one system. A system where surveillance, capitalism extracts your data, where algorithms manipulate your behavior, where corporations control the rules, where the economy leaves you behind. And the news keeps you perpetually afraid and divided. It all happened so gradually that we didn't notice. There was no moment where someone announced that privacy was dead in that your life would be turned into a product. It happened. One terms of service agreement at a time, one app downloaded a time, one day of doom scrolling at a time. Some are calling what we're living through an epistemic counter-revolution, a systematic assault on our ability to know things, to trust our own perceptions, to distinguish truth from lies. In those handful of corporations controlling information, who answered to no one and have no incentive to fix this, will they profit from confusion as we've learned? If all this makes sense and feels familiar to you, well you're a part of it. So right now we're living in dystopia, not the Hollywood version with leather jackets and neon lights, but a quieter, more insidious version where the chains are invisible and surveillance feels like service. People are stressed, unhealthy, stuck in office chairs, staring at screens, buried in debt. If you told someone 200 years ago that life would look like this, they'd probably be shocked and terrified. Humans were never meant to sit all day, staring at pixels, and yet here we are. If you're wondering if there's a way out, well, yes there is, but it's not really up to you unless you do something totally drastic, like going and living off the grid on a deserted island. Now the real hope actually is in the future of AI and how it all unfolds. Because part of what we learn from everything we've talked about is that technology doesn't make choices, people do. So the same AI that helps a doctor diagnose cancer can also be used to deny your insurance claim, but really depends on who controls it, who programs it, and they get to decide what to choose for. Hopefully they make the right call, and that right there might actually be the scariest part of all this. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town. Hope y'all enjoyed it. If you did, well dig around as we have a bunch of other stories that you have to hear to believe. I appreciate you very much, so thanks for tuning in. Remember to come on back next week for another episode of Every Town. Feel it's scary, strange, and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.