In November 2025, the TBIJ published a story documenting how a man in Sri Lanka made $300k by producing anti-immigration content for UK Facebook users. He wasn’t British, and he seemingly wasn’t ideological. He was simply fluent in the economics of attention.
The stories we think in. The “self” feels solid, but I’ve come to think of it more like an internal narrator — stitching perception, memory and prediction into something coherent enough to live inside. Consciousness often feels like reading that story as it writes itself. Once you see it that way, narrative stops being entertainment. It becomes the architecture we use to make sense of the world.
Culture as shared code. Genes are the hardcoded layer. Memes — the Dawkins kind, not the JPEG kind — are the soft weights floating between minds. Culture becomes a distributed prediction system running on millions of brains at once. Not centralised, or coordinated, but emergent. Cultural change is simply what happens when a large enough number of brains update their internal stories.
Where the factory externalises itself. If culture is the software running across millions of minds, platforms are the hardware. They don’t just transmit stories — they optimise them for scale. A narrative factory running nonstop, optimised for engagement and ad revenue rather than truth or insight. The advertising stacks built by the likes of Google and Meta might be one of the most socially net-negative inventions that humans have created. Not because advertising itself is inherently harmful, but because these ecosystems sit on top of total opacity, monopoly leverage and incentives that reward emotional manipulation at scale.
Consciousness isn’t immune to its environment. Working closely with AI has made me reflect more on how humans think and how easily that process is to nudge. Large language models generate narrative in the same basic rhythm our brains do: prediction layered on prediction. When the information we consume is shaped by machinery tuned for provocation, it rewires the inner narrator. Shift the internal story, and behaviour follows. Shift enough behaviour, and culture follows.
Technology without shiny object syndrome. Grouping “big tech” together is often unhelpful. Hyperscale cloud and enterprise SaaS share almost nothing with the behavioural extraction of ad-funded platforms. One is infrastructure, with legitimate concerns around sustainability and monopolisation. The other demonstrates psychological leverage.
The open question. The problem isn’t that bad actors exist, or that AI can generate infinite content, or that platforms incentivise emotion. The scary part is how seamlessly all of this plugs into the way human consciousness already works. If our minds run on stories, and our culture is shaped by shared stories, then the systems that control story production hold enormous influence over the future.
How do we stay conscious in a world constantly trying to rewrite the story inside our own heads?
Noticing the factory at work is the first act of resistance. Refusing to let it write your story is the second.