Vitamodo School · Bundle 6: Information Consumption · Brochure 4 of 10 · Version 1.0
Andris Saulitis, MD
For those who: want to understand the substantive engineering of algorithmic feeds and the substantive cost it produces in attention, emotion, and information environment.
Not for those who: want a wholesale prescription against technology. The substantive response involves substantive selection, not substantive abandonment.
What this is — the clinical reality
This brochure is about the substantive design of the algorithmic feeds that organise much of contemporary information consumption — the social-media feeds, the video-recommendation systems, the news-aggregator feeds, the search-engine results, the personalised content delivery systems. The substantive point of the brochure is that these systems are not neutral conduits of information; they are engineered systems with specific optimisation targets, designed by sophisticated teams with substantial commercial interests that are substantially different from the substantive interests of the patient consuming the content. Recognising the substantive design is, in clinical terms, part of the substantive intervention. The patient who does not recognise the design has substantially less agency in the contest with it than the patient who does.
This brochure is for the reader who wants to understand the substantive structural conditions that produce the patterns covered in the preceding brochures of Bundle 6 — doomscrolling, news anxiety, social-media comparison — and the patterns covered in the brochures still to come. The substantive structural reading is part of what makes the substantive intervention work over time. Patients who treat the algorithmic environment as if it were a neutral medium they happen to be using badly typically achieve less substantive change than patients who recognise the substantive engineering they are operating against.
A note before we go further. The substantive recognition of algorithmic design is not, in honest assessment, a conspiratorial reading. The substantive optimisation targets of the major platforms are substantially public knowledge — they have been described in substantive detail by the engineers who built them, in substantive industry literature, in substantive investigative journalism, and in substantive disclosure by former platform employees who have substantively engaged with the public conversation. The patient who reads this brochure is engaging with substantively documented features of the substantive industry, not with speculative reconstructions of them.
A second note. The substantive recognition does not require wholesale rejection of the technologies or wholesale retreat from contemporary digital life. The substantive position the brochure supports is that the patient who recognises what the algorithmic systems are optimising for can substantively engage with those systems on substantively different terms — using them where they substantively serve, declining them where they substantively do not, and substantively recognising the asymmetry of the contest in either case.
Three frames carry the algorithm-and-attention question.
The first frame is what the algorithm actually does. The substantive engineering, in the form the patient deserves to understand.