Instagram Is Creating Idiocracy

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]How many books did you read last year?

[00:00:02]If you're like 40% of British people, the answer is zero. And it's not really like the other 60% are ravid readers either. Even college students whose entire job is to study aren't actually reading books. Professors across the US are teaching classes to students who can't read full books anymore. This is a massive neon sign that we're plummeting towards idiocracy. And soon kids aren't going to be able to read at all. So yesterday I came to the realization my students can't read that is the tragic truth and I struggle with being told that I have to focus on certain standards on grade level text when my kids are not reading grade level.

[00:00:47]>> 40% of American fourth graders are below a minimum basic level of reading comprehension. Test scores have been plummeting for years, and kids literally can't sit still in class or understand basic instructions. It's almost like there's something distracting them.

[00:01:17]mind-numbing, isn't it? Well, this is exactly the problem. For years now, teachers have been reporting massive problems with behavior, making stories like this all too common. In a comment on the teacher subreddits, a user described their middle school students in a truly dystopian way. Literally all my middle schoolers want to talk about are Tik Tok trends and memes. That's it.

[00:01:39]My school prohibits phones from the first home room bell to the dismissal bell. As soon as the bell rings at the end of the day, they're pulling their phones out of their bags and scrolling Tik Tok as they walk out of the door.

[00:01:50]They literally don't know how to function without it. It's scary. Other teachers chimed in with their own similar experiences. We took the kids to Not Berry Farm and they were just on their phones the entire time. A lot of them didn't ride any rides. I had multiple kids tell me their favorite part was the 5-hour bus ride there because they got to be on their phones the whole time. Insane.

[00:02:12]>> Children are put on a tablet. They're put on a TV screen. They have phones at the right age of six and seven. They They don't read anything. They don't watch regular TV. They don't see commercials. They are glued to a screen 24/7 with instant gratification. They don't know how to be bored. They don't know how to use their imagination.

[00:02:31]Social media has poisoned kids' brains so badly to the point that actual roller coasters are less interesting than the dopamine dispensers in their pockets.

[00:02:40]>> Students are not reading anymore.

[00:02:42]They're not reading on their own.

[00:02:43]They're not reading for class assignments. I stopped giving independent reading because students were just not doing it and were happy to take the zero or the F or the D in order to not read the book. So, they were actively trying not to read anything.

[00:03:00]>> Now that the cat's out of the bag, no social media ban for kids is ever going to reverse this process. But the truly awful thing here is that this was all planned.

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[00:04:30]Meanwhile, the tech oligarchs have taken over control of the news people watch, the social media sites that they use, and they've even gutted the education system just when it was most needed. Put together all of these pieces, and the picture becomes clear. We're rocketing towards idiocracy. This isn't the first time the education system has been designed to suit their own interests.

[00:04:52]Public schooling and education has always had a purpose outside of actual education.

[00:04:57]>> Do you know Paul Gotti?

[00:04:59]>> No.

[00:04:59]>> Okay. Gotti I I hope I have his name right. He was teacher of the year in New York State a number of years. He was no uh admirer of the current education system, let's say. And he wrote a history of the education system which was extremely interesting. The Prussians established the first public education system and the reason they did it >> was because the Prussian emperor wanted to produce obedient soldiers, you know, disciplined obedient soldiers. Now that was adopted in the United States in the late 1800s by industrialists mostly. All sorts of rural people were pouring into the cities to start working in factories. Their kids needed to be cared for while they worked and then their kids were likely to have factory jobs.

[00:05:41]And so the purpose of the public education system, and this is why there's rows of desks and factory bells and this insistence on timing, was to produce disciplined, obedient workers.

[00:05:52]>> Men like Rockefeller and Cargi, whose names are still all over the public education system, weren't purely motivated by the good of the nation.

[00:05:59]They wanted to shape the next generation to fit the needs of their machines. In this case, they were men who followed strict time schedules and who would be able to work the machines they were assigned to. Rockefeller is often quoted as saying, "I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."

[00:06:15]The results of this philosophy speak for themselves. Now, however you feel about Jordan Peterson, it doesn't really matter. This has been noticed and discussed by people all around society.

[00:06:25]In one of his lectures, Noam Chosky had a lot to say about this. First, he plainly says the same thing. The basic institutional role and function of the schools and why they're supported is to provide an ideological service. There's a real selection for obedience and conformity. Let me just tell you a personal story. My oldest friend, closest friend, is a guy who came to the United States from Latafia when he was 15. The first thing that struck him about American schools was the fact that if he got a C in a course, nobody cared.

[00:06:53]But if he went to school 3 minutes late, he was sent to the principal's office.

[00:06:57]That's ultimately why public education was instituted in the United States in place to meet the needs of a newly emerging industry. It's not often that both sides of the political spectrum can agree on the same thing. But here we have it plain as day. To change the fabric of society, they didn't put their focus on the adults. They targeted children, indoctrinating them when their brains were still vulnerable to these repetition techniques. Every day was managed like the factory. They taught them to respond to the bell, to sit still and work for hourly periods, to blindly listen to the person in charge.

[00:07:29]These feedback loops repeated over and over again year after year change society. Fast forward to today and that education system is still pretty much the same. Only it's been left to rot. In fact, for decades, kids were taught using a system that didn't actually teach children how to read. From around the late 80s to about a decade ago, schools across the West taught reading using the whole language system. It emphasized teaching kids to read by making them guess the meanings of words or phrases rather than by sounding out the letters and actually understanding the word itself. Despite being proven as inferior and inadequate, whole language was still pushed for decades because it profited the people selling the learning materials. It was only when a 2022 investigation showed all of this that the fast finally ended. But by the time that scandal broke, an entire generation of children had already been failed by it. Some of them are now adults walking around with high school diplomas they can't even read. Take a 19-year-old who just started her freshman year of the University of Connecticut. She graduated from the Hartford public school system last year. The only problem she's completely illiterate even today. Could you read this or would it take you a long time?

[00:08:42]>> It's impossible. I see these words everywhere.

[00:08:44]>> Alicia graduated from the Hartford public school system last year, but she says today she is illiterate. She still doesn't know how to read or write.

[00:08:53]>> By high school, she was using text to speech apps to fake her way through every single assignment. So, if you had an assignment where you had to write something, you'd open up a document like this and then do what?

[00:09:05]>> I would go here. Um, so use the text to speech.

[00:09:09]>> It says dictate.

[00:09:10]>> Dictate. Yep. I love pizza.

[00:09:13]>> This is how you would do your assignments. If you had to read something, that's how you do it. Her mother begged the school for help for years and got nothing but empty promises. Now she's sowing the Hartford Board of Education. Whether you believe her story or not, profit became the incentive a long time ago for the people who are truly in power, who have no interest in educating people. And why would they want to educate regular people? They don't need factory workers anymore. Western nations aren't producer economies anymore. They're consumer economies.

[00:09:42]>> And that's exactly what happened.

[00:09:43]American manufacturing collapsed. Yeah.

[00:09:45]And they did it all for money. And they did it all because they were greedy.

[00:09:49]They were already rich. All you need to do to confirm this is to take a drive through any town or city in middle America. Poverty, deprivation, and hopelessness everywhere because the jobs just vanished.

[00:10:01]>> They don't care that their grades are low. They don't care that they're not reading. And when I had honest conversations with some of my students, I got the constant refrain that nothing is going to work for them anyway.

[00:10:17]They're never going to be able to get ahead. They're never going to be able to own a home. They're never going to be able to raise a family like their parents and grandparents did. So why even try?

[00:10:28]>> While this process began years before they entered the scene, the tech moguls have been complicit in its completion.

[00:10:34]Now the middle class is evaporating and the working class don't work anymore.

[00:10:39]Now regular people are only relevant as consumers and to consume you don't need any level of education at all. In fact, it actually gets in the way of it. The corporations which used to want workers have moved overseas to exploit cheaper labor. So at home in the US, they've been replaced by ones who specialize in extracting wealth. They're gambling companies price gouging grocery stores and social media companies as the newest, most lucrative operations of all. In Idiocracy, the movie predicts that entertainment would eventually devolve into a mess of flashing colors and slapstick toilet humor. Our My Balls was the most extreme version of this they could come up with. As we've seen already, it pales in comparison to modern Brain. Brain rot ditches the complicated world building and context that Almy My Balls establishes in the first second or so. The algorithm would just see this as wasted time. It wouldn't work for the attention spans is designed to cater to. We're what, 20 years from when YouTube was first released. What's entertainment going to look like in another decade or so? Tik Tok's only been around for like 8 years.

[00:11:44]Well, like any addictive substance, brain rot has varying levels of strength. Adults might watch less offensive, slower paced, informative shorts with actual artistic value. But the real addicts, who are mostly children, need something a lot stronger.

[00:11:56]The social media companies, just like the tobacco companies before them, know that targeting new users is really all they need to do. If they can get someone hooked, then they've probably got a lifetime customer. This has been established for years. A whistleblower who was interviewed by the Senate in 2021 said exactly this. Facebook understands that if they want to continue to grow, they have to find new users. They have to make sure that that the next generation is just as engaged with Instagram as the current one. Um, and the way they'll do that is by making sure that children establish habits before they have good self-regulation, >> by hooking kids.

[00:12:32]>> By hooking kids, >> straight from the horse's mouth. Yet, it's only now, 5 years later, that some impotent efforts have been made to stop kids getting hooked. It's far too little and too late. The lockdowns put this process into overdrive, separating kids almost entirely from their actual lives and locking them into the virtual worlds. Then they were just expected to go back to normal straight after. Gen Z and older generations are hooked as well, just to varying degrees of severity. The problems with reading, as we saw, goes pretty far up the age range. It's a cultural shift towards ignorance and ultimately stupidity, the very definition of idiocracy. Lots of people have noticed these changes, but they don't always see them as negative.

[00:13:11]Francis Fukuyama, who many people see as the figurehead of neoliberalism and this brave new world we're now living in, clearly noticed it. But he only goes so far as to say this. Yeah. No, I think that that's the way people communicate these days. Uh uh it's uh you know, through these little snippets of ideas rather than whole coherent ideas. And I think it's you know, it's pretty important. Um, there's also, I think, a huge generational difference because people in my generation don't think that way.

[00:13:41]>> Really though, it's a great tragedy.

[00:13:43]Imagine one person reads 10 classic books. Cover to cover, they take their time to absorb it and let it settle in.

[00:13:49]The other person follows the Tai Lopez method of reading instead, but they do it for a 100 books or a thousand of them. The difference is that a year later, the person who actually reads the books will probably still remember them.

[00:14:00]They'll have at least a vague idea of what happened, the characters, the ideas of it. The person who skim reads a thousand books will probably barely remember any of it. And even if they do, they won't have internalized the story or really gotten the value out of them.

[00:14:14]You might have seen those videos online where an AI voice just describes the plot of a film. If you have, do you really remember those films? Did you really have any emotional impact or any meaning in your life compared to films you've actually seen properly? Now you've got people basing their entire belief system off snippets of ideas they saw on social media. Technology drained them of their ability to focus and actually think these ideas through. All while offering the junk food replacement as the solution to that problem. This is what's so terrifying about idiocracy. It just leads to totalitarian control. Tech oligarchs are now literally taking over the sources of information. They're tightening their grip on the distribution platforms, not only with social media and influencers individually, but also the source of all content. Like when Bezos bought the Washington Post years ago and has stripped of thousands of journalists and recently began pushing ideas and articles which suit his own interests in politics. After Musk took over Twitter, he has since joked about buying MSNBC.

[00:15:10]Larry Ellison, the multi-billionaire owner of Oracle is the biggest corporate. He became a major stakeholder and controller of Tik Tok recently. Now he's masterminding the 111 billion merging of Paramount and Warner Bros. He already had his grip on CBS. This deal would give him CNN as well. These people may not be sitting at the editor's desk telling them what they should and shouldn't say. But there are of course certain implications, certain topics to hit or ignore, and general pressures towards certain views.

[00:15:38]>> Yeah. Media capture is about who actually controls the platforms and the channels that deliver news and information to us. And part of what we're trying to communicate is the that it's increasingly a smaller and smaller number of people. That capture isn't just people buying, you know, media properties so that they have it as like a vanity purchase. It it comes with a real sense of power.

[00:16:01]>> Despite the fact that nobody wanted it and the vast majority of people scroll past it, Google has been desperate to push their AI overview answers to people's search queries. Lots of people explain this is just one thing tech companies are doing to justify the AI craze and to keep the bubble from popping. But as it takes over and people begin to actually use it, it creates a dangerous problem. Google just isn't really a search engine anymore. It's not just showing you what you were looking for. It's being a middleman. And their AI is the thing making contact with reality, the real information about the world. Then it's passing on what it thinks is relevant to you. Google already controls what the AI thinks is relevant and what isn't. If they want to push a certain narrative, they can subtly leave out certain details from the AI summaries. As tech ownership of the media gets worse too, they'll replace more journalists and people with AI as well. this is already happening.

[00:16:51]Then they can have an AI emphasizing certain details and leaving out others in the stories it writes. Then they can distort that even more when it comes to people googling it later or watching things about it on social media. The truth of any story gets hidden behind these walls. And while you still might be able to get to it if you're determined enough, most people won't. In fact, thanks to AI brain rot and idiocracy, they won't care in the first place. The dictators of old used to have to burn books to stamp out knowledge and truth which didn't fit with their ideology and their worldview. Future dictators won't have to bother. The libraries will remain intact, but the books will be covered with dust. Nobody will want to read them. Now, there's a lot of depressing things about living in adiocracy. At the end of that film, when not Shaw figures out he can't actually go back, he realizes it doesn't even matter. He found his home. As the world gets dumber, it doesn't stop you from being able to get smarter. Those books that the rest of the world are neglecting, all that knowledge and wisdom throughout history is still out there. That's not going to change. So, if you can actually protect your attention span, build discipline, and actually work through hard ideas and long books, you'll feel like a superhuman. Even the tech oligarchs themselves aren't immune to their own idiocracy. Musk is probably more addicted to Twitter than anyone else on the planet. Mark Zuckerberg's replacing himself with an AI agent. And as the world gets dumber, nurturing your own inner curiosity becomes that much more important. And if you can do that, you can be a wolf in a world of sheep.

[00:18:16]And thank you Fume for sponsoring this video. Make sure to check them out using the link in the description below.