Slight, Imperceptible, Gradual

The powers of evolution used in social media

Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash

I knew magic was possible after my first physiology class on nerve conduction.

Not magic in the sense of mysticism, but by hijacking the weaknesses of our nervous system.

Nerves work through the all-or-none principle. That is, if the impulse does not cross a certain threshold, it will not fire. This includes sensory and motor nerves. Magicians prefer utilizing the former, and from the little I know, either through misdirection or through slight, imperceptible changes.

Charlie Munger once gave the example of the frog that got boiled without its knowledge. All you needed to do was change the temperature slightly by a degree every so often. Our nerves cannot detect this slight change. Charlie called it contrast-miscalculation tendency.

Our nerves only work through sharp contrasts. They either fire or don’t. But after slight changes along a slippery slope, it hardly becomes perceptible that something is going on. These changes can be fast or slow, provided they are imperceptible. And they attain a hidden force when done gradually.

Gradual changes can be powerful. Evolution by Natural Selection relies on slow, gradual changes over long periods to weed out the less fit species. The theory predicts that intermediates are bound to exist. However, by relying on the fossil record, this evidence is lacking. What we get is a punctuated snapshot.

If slow and gradual changes are the mechanism of evolution, and intermediates get eliminated to give a saltative, punctuated picture, then we are likely to see the same case hailing from the effects of social media. Three cogs behind this motion machine are slight, imperceptible, and gradual.

Architecture of choice

This lack of self control I fear is never ending Controlling

— Chester Bennington

A recovering alcoholic is always advised to keep the drink away from his vicinity, far from where he can easily access it.

It doesn’t help staring down a bottle of your previously favourite drink to prove your mettle.

This is an example of the architecture of choice. By eliminating the cues that trigger your decision, you make it easier to lean toward the right choice. It starts by identifying the cues. In psychiatry, they are called precipitants or precipitators.

In social media, these are ever so subtle. As for alcohol, you can identify the bottle and remove every one of them from the house, and change your route to and from work to avoid the local pub. For social media, you have little room.

In TikTok, for instance, the content is the algorithm. It takes a few minutes to know your preferences, then it starts curating and shoving the content towards you.

The first question to ask is: Is that really being social? If all you’re getting is content, is it how social interactions operate?

Consider that for most social media apps, users are consumers, and a small number are creators. As of 2025, the most popular app is TikTok, meaning little interaction.

Speaking of interactions, in social gatherings, everyone contributes, not a single person. That’s what meaningful lectures do. I’ll let you think about YouTube in that regard.

Now, Google has introduced ‘Short Videos’. Slight. It was so slight, I barely detected it. Thanks to an article by Ted Gioia, I spotted it.

Think about how it was introduced. It was set there to influence your architecture of choice. You were never involved.

As of February this year, the average adult spends 2 hours and 20 minutes online. Assuming you are lucky enough to sleep for 8 hours and work for another 8, that leaves less than 6 hours. More than a third of that is spent online. And yet, detecting these slight changes, such as the introduction of the short videos tab on Google, bypasses us.

Magic? No. Just slight, imperceptible, and gradual.

Gym rats spend around the same time maintaining their physique or improving it. That’s the time you spend being influenced by social media. The architecture of each platform limits your choices to what they offer you.

Initially, there was no short video option after a Google search. I’d be interested in knowing which of the search options are picked the most since the short-video introduction.

YouTube then brought shorts. You’d see the shorts before scrolling to the other long-form videos. Isn’t that architectural design?

Ever heard the phrase that you’re the product of all your decisions? Well, guess what? Your decisions are now being shaped by a far-off entity ever so slightly, imperceptibly, and gradually over time.

Chris Ferrie writes:

These systems aren’t just responding to your desires. They’re architecting them, anticipating needs you haven’t even had the decency to invent yet. One study showed AI can improve demand forecasting accuracy by up to 50% — which is boardroom jargon for “we know what you’ll buy before you do, sucker.”

Endowment Effect and Pavlovian Conditioning

When an artist takes their time to make their piece of art, the final product gets a heightened value based on their individual effort and expenses.

When you buy a car because you would love to have it in your parking lot, the value you place on it is higher than what your regular Joe would assign it.

Parents will be cross with me when I stress the point that their sons or daughters are hardly any different from other parents’. They would immediately wax poetic about how their children are different and invaluable.

That’s the endowment effect.

We endow the objects we own and the people we hold dear, even when it’s difficult to validate that point.

After buying a Tesla, the reasons one would give may be tied to climate safety and efficiency, but the other reasons are hardly ever brought up. These satellite around pride and status signals.

Nobody I know would ever openly say they bought something flashy because they wanted people to know it was flashy. It would always linger along the lines of — I loved it, or liked it, or wanted it.

People buy, then justify the buy later. They make the decision, then rationalize it. These decisions have, over time, shifted from a walk outside your home to a simple scroll on your device.

And guess what’s controlling your choices in subtle, imperceptible, and gradual ways?

As superconnectors, influencers are sought by large companies because of their audiences. They improve the chances of selling products simply through another psychological effect — classical conditioning.

We all know about Pavlov and the bell. Coke has been using this technique for decades. Make an ad that people want to associate with and observe as people rush to consume it, hoping they get the feeling they saw from the ad.

Taste the feeling, that’s Coke’s tagline nowadays. It’s slowed down for you to savour every bit of it. Now you desire what you cannot have, but hope that by purchasing the product, you’ll get a feel of what it advertises.

Models do the same with merchandise. Often, you’d hear women saying that what they ordered is different from what they got. The outfit embraced the model perfectly, but on them, it hardly looks the same. Most of the time.

When Pavlov rang the bell, the dog knew food would follow. Thus, it started salivating. When the ad was run with a cool guy smoking, every young man wanted a piece of that. So they bought cigarettes to feel cool.

Now, when influencers are used to sell a product, the audience would want to purchase it, so they can feel as cool as the influencer they like. The hope is that they would be just as cool.

Coupled with the endowment effect, once you purchase the product, you will justify why you bought it. You have to feel like you’re the one who made the decision when it has been orchestrated outside your field of awareness. How?

Slight, imperceptible, gradual changes.

From doubt to directed finding of self

I can’t seem To find myself again My walls are closing in

— *Chester Bennington*

Freya India wrote a powerful piece about doubt.

The Gen Z writer, as she’s popularly known, expressed the ever-growing doubt among a generation that has never known how to trust or have faith in a single stance. Ted Gioia gave the symmetrical equivalent: declining trust.

With no one to trust and with heightening levels of doubt, the most susceptible people are the ones spending most of their time on social media.

In many online shows and from various social circles, I’ve heard the claim that many people want to find who they are first. They want to know themselves before they can commit to anything. This is a recipe for potential manipulation.

First, not knowing oneself makes you a subject of the architecture crafted by the social media moguls. Second, by living in an abundance economy, your choices hardly gravitate towards a preferred personal attractor — that is, a lack of individual taste. Basically, you surrender to the social media gods, who will infuse in you a sense of doubt, but with slight, imperceptible, and gradual changes, make you feel like you’re in control.

Then you’ll justify your decisions. Internal voices become echoes. Social media creates echo chambers for your ‘perceived’ decisions. AI will only work to cement this chamber as it hardly ever disagrees with you, unless you suggest an absolute lie like claiming that Putin is the president of the USA.

By spending most of your time online, you won’t find yourself. You will find a self artificially created so that you can become an easy target. Because they created this self, they can promise their customers that you will buy a certain product with near certainty.

And you will justify it through the endowment effect of psychology.

What I’m trying to say is…

Design influences choice.

The designer moves like a magician, making sure you get wrapped, warped into their trick, with little rebellion.

Psychology does the rest.

But you can rebel by identifying their tricks. Awareness is the first step. Acting on it is the other. The most painful one is cutting down your time on social media. Painful, but necessary. Pain isn’t cheap.

Once you become sensitive to the designs, you can weave your way out.

I don’t speak like the Avatar, with the ready answers. I speak as someone still in the pits, but crawling out.

[embed]This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube