By David Sky
I just stopped for over three months when my channel got stalled at around 930 subscribers, a Tarot channel, after well over a year during which time I poured myself into it producing roughly 2.5 hours of video in typically five separate readings per day six days per week during this time. It just became too negative, my bad, allowing myself to get caught up in this feedback loop like some personal algorithm of negativity. I cannot really even claim ignorance kind of aware of it as it was happening but unable to help myself so call it perhaps what it is, an addiction peculiar to Youtube Creators? I do not imagine that I am alone in this but it is possible for “being alone in this” has been a theme in life and I still usually find myself on even a good day at some point thinking, “where the hell AM I and who the hell ARE you people!?”.
I thought that I hear voices but discovered that I do not for hearing voices is an auditory hallucination which I had experienced in the past on fairly low doses of psilocybin mushrooms and that what I experience, and have most of my adult life, is clairaudience. The thoughts then that come distinctly not my own that I notice within my own mind are always loving, kind and wise and more so than am I any of those things by degrees of magnitude though I strive, if feebly always in that general direction. In June of 2021 after a particular difficult period in my life and almost a year and a half after moving to Mexico to live, I “heard” very distinctly, “You are being shut down for your own good. Do no resist.” This shocked me for it´s clarity and also for it´s “tone” much sterner and directive than is usual so it really got my attention which I imagine was the point. I knew exactly what this meant and that what it meant including stopping all work on the tarot channel for this work is energy work, to be clear. There was no doubt at all in my mind and to me, literally crazy as this may sound, this was terrible “news” and the very last thing that I wanted to here since at that point the channel was going very well and I wanted and needed to continue to pour myself into it but having learned over time to listen to this voices, I stopped that very day all production after one short video to explain why I stopped.
I gave it about a month and a half and focusing upon my personal life enduring my first serious bout of illness in Mexico, the classic Montezuma´s Revenge, pushing through a broken toe and settling into a new city in Mexico during that time. I do not much speak of my exact spiritual practices but prayerful meditation during this time increased. After a month and a half or so, I returned to work on the channel but at a vastly reduced pace trying to abide by the edict that I was given but not 100% certain that I was and wondering if I might be jumping the gun on the do not resist part but feeling my way through it as I went. I changed the name of the channel after research during this down time into that as well as the consequences of a hiatus so returned in my rebranded form and for a couple weeks afterwards mentioned this fact in the now four, shorter video I did each day.
It was after six months of this or so that I shut down again as mentioned above having discovered myself in that negative feedback look and determining that perhaps I had violated the warning of not resisting. I was doing the same thing only much better, I felt, just in terms of readings, though my energy was shit and it of course translated negatively into each reading much as I tried to bring it up. The readings went so poorly they literally underperformed readings from when I had just only started on Youtube and I tried everything I could do to improve baffled as to why before it was going so well and now so badly, was it the name change also, the hiatus, some combination finally this coming to the conclusion that I myself was the problem.
I return most recently at vastly reduced levels really to me I think of it as that my channel is now on life support and to do what I mostly wanted here to write about what I call euphemistically, “The TikTok Experiments”. The good news is that I am for now in a much better place in that I really do not care one way or another but the bad news for now is that I do not care one way or another. But it is a great place from which to conduct experiments and I post whatever I want to post no longer abiding my the advice to keep the channel on one single topic and adding in astrology to the channel and discussion of my ongoing writing about my use of psilocybin mushrooms now years ago for personal healing and it is very much up in the air as to how well the channel is going technically and I pay little attention to the metrics that so occupied me previously but I think it is now at 995 and I look forward to doing some live readings finally still in the future not really feeling energetically up to it just yet. Mainly, it no longer feels like a huge bummer to me more of a curiosity and really that word experiment comes mostly to mind which suits my Gemini Midheaven well, I feel. Right or wrong, I never did want to be mistaken for a committed, professional anything.
But to the TikTok experiments and to be clear as a Dinosaur have never had any interest in it or Twittering but someone had suggested trying it so I did and said OK I will create two videos each day of a short length, ten minutes as that is now the length for TikTok, and post the exact same videos on TikTok and Youtube and use the exact same thumbnails and verbiage. I researched the nature of the algorithms functioning behind the scenes in these platforms and wanted to somehow see in real time in some fashion how it may be operating for myself since not being a computer scientist, it is all just theory. One pointed story by a programmer who knew exactly how it works having in part created the programs, most pointedly spoke of a friend who virtually went insane around conspiracy theory unwittingly a victim of what this programmer described as not any deliberate attempt by anyone to achieve this ends (as a confirmed conspiracy theorist I would beg to differ on that part LOL) but merely the dumb but wickedly effective functioning of these algorithms. His friend was wild eyed and disheveled having lost his wife, his family and finally his job like some crack addict after delving into so called “Conspiracy Theory” initially innocently enough. The more he watched say Alex Jones, the more the algorithm methodically showed him similar material that he then watched and so on driving his viewing experience such that after some months of this, to him the entire world seemed surely on the verge of destruction because, after all, it was all the news was talking about! He asked his friend, where is the conspiracy, and his friend said OMG man IT´S EVERYWHERE HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE IT!
He explained the situation from his unique position and did more than that by setting up a new account with a new email from a new IP address and over a period of weeks every day when his friend would come over, they would go into that account and view the world. Eventually it led to some balance and restored sanity by demonstrating that beyond a shadow of a doubt, the algorithms are methodically and precisely creating echo chambers and – ergo the validity of conspiracy theory in my opinion, ironically perhaps – not only completely distorting our perceptions of reality itself but completely obfuscating the very purpose of news and information in the first place which is to provide arguably some independent and fact based assessment of our world.
But with three different TikToks using likewise three different accounts what I found was astounding and total confirmation of what this programmer was saying. For one, TikTok outperformed my Youtube videos with zero subscribers out of the shoot and almost a thousand on Youtube by a factor of five or ten to one and this with the exact same videos presented insofar as the two platforms allowed in the exact same form and with the exact same verbiage. Not only that but I actually began to get requests for personal readings from TikTok as well and actually make a little money for my work. Beyond that, what I noticed when I simply brought it up and did not comment on anything was an astounding array of Ukraine is winning, go Ukraine videos and even I went so far as to try at least to flip through them all at the same rate and fast so as not to linger since I believe that the algorithm even is basing it´s feed off of how long we watch but the obvious and to use a military term, bombardment of Ukrainian blue and yellow flag waving kind of blew me away. Surely from watching that feed, Russia was not only losing this war very badly but in real danger of Ukraine now advancing on them and conquering Mother Russia just as soon as they got all their war goodies form the USA, the virtuous and tireless supporter or freedom and democracy worldwide that it is.
The main way that the population is controlled is through the partisan political machine and here we see this in action with the right in their echo chamber convinced that the problem is not the government but the those darn Democrats and the left in their Echo chamber convinced that the problem is not the government but those darn Republicans and everyone always one election away from fixing America and weirdly refusing to see that this has never worked at least throughout my 62 years of life after having elected one or the other over and over again always to no avail. It has always been there way only now with the technology, it is going into hyperdrive and in massive irony to me and a massive feat of gaslighting now the problem is said to be those darn people spreading disinformation on the internet and if we could only stop them, all would be right as rain making freedom of speech this cornerstone of American democracy now the ultimate culprit for all our problems.
The problem with America, Gonzalo Lira nailed it recently, is that it produces nothing anymore other than now bad Hollywood films, global Think Tanks consisting of various forms of just old fashioned bullshit that help no one and weapons of war and war and strife and destruction which will never be addressed because it goes unsaid in either eco chamber so far as I can see and that, I suppose, is the function of the echo chambers in the first place.
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