An exoskeleton is a mechanical frame you wear that amplifies your physical strength. Strap one on and suddenly you can lift hundreds of kilos, work for hours without fatigue, accomplish physical feats impossible for an unaided human body. The military loves them. So do factories and logistics companies.
But there’s a catch: use an exoskeleton long enough and your muscles atrophy. Your body adapts to the assistance, grows dependent on it. Take the exoskeleton off and you’re weaker than when you started. The amplification comes with a hidden cost - you’ve outsourced your strength to a machine, and your natural capacity degrades from disuse.
We’ve built something similar for the mind. Instead of an exoskeleton, we’ve built the exo-ego - technology that augments the mental construct we call the ego, that sense of self and social identity. Social media promised to amplify your voice, extend your reach, make you matter on a global scale. Your thoughts could reach thousands instead of dozens. Validation became quantified - likes, shares, followers. You could curate a reality where you’re always right, where criticism can be blocked, where performance is permanent and searchable.
And like the exoskeleton, the exo-ego makes you dependent. People become addicted to the validation metrics. Self-worth gets tied to external numbers. You can’t tolerate being wrong or criticized because it’s public and permanent - or vice versa, you become hooked on fighting those evil idiots who conspire to prove you wrong. You need constant engagement to maintain the exo-ego, and without it, your natural ego feels inadequate. The human ego evolved for tribal groups of maybe 150 people. We’re not built to handle global attention, constant comparison, or permanent records of every stupid thing we’ve ever said. The exo-ego writes checks the actual ego can’t cash.
But the dependency goes deeper than we thought. The exo-ego isn’t just amplified - it’s colonized.
You can’t actually verify your follower count is real humans. The engagement might be bots or algorithmic manipulation. Your audience might not exist at all. You’re shouting into a black box that occasionally makes satisfying noises back at you. The companies have every incentive to fake it - why show your tweet to real users when synthetic engagement keeps you hooked more reliably?
Worse: this is a known mechanism for mind control employed by cults. Cults work by controlling information flow and monopolizing mental bandwidth. Keep people too busy consuming doctrine to generate their own thoughts. Fill every quiet moment with group activities, chanting, reading scripture. Exhaust them so there’s no energy left for independent thinking. The cult’s voice becomes the only voice in your head. Scientologists call it “training routines.” Moonies use sleep deprivation and love bombing. Social media uses infinite scroll and dopamine loops. Same playbook, better UX.
Social media does this at scale. Infinite scroll means no mental downtime. The algorithm ensures you’re always seeing “engaging” content - which means emotionally hijacking. Push notifications interrupt any attempt at sustained thought. The feed is designed to be just stimulating enough that thinking feels boring by comparison.
You stop having original thoughts. Not because you’re stupid, but because thought requires space, boredom, friction. When every spare moment is filled with algorithmically-optimized content, when even taking a shit means scrolling TikTok, where are thoughts supposed to form? What you think is “you” online - your takes, your opinions, your identity - might just be the sum of what the algorithm has pumped into you, regurgitated back in your voice. You think you’re expressing yourself, but you’re actually just remixing the input stream. At some point, the ego itself becomes an extension of the exo-ego.
But even this colonization isn’t the bottom. Here’s the deepest cut: thinking itself isn’t fundamental. It’s just verbal modeling - low bandwidth compression of underlying high-bandwidth sensory experience. The ego is already a narrative layer, a user interface running on top of raw sensory data. And that makes it inherently colonizable. You can’t fight algorithmic colonization by “thinking for yourself” - you’re still operating in the verbal layer, which is model-based and therefore hackable.
Social media doesn’t just replace your thoughts; it replaces your attention itself. You never actually see the sunset - you see it through the camera app, thinking about Instagram framing, comparing it to other sunsets in your feed. The raw visual data never gets to just be - it’s instantly compressed into narrative, social context, ego maintenance.
Most people are now triple-removed from direct experience: raw sense data → verbal thought → algorithmic feed. They’re not even experiencing their own compressed models anymore - they’re experiencing synthetic models optimized by someone else’s algorithms.
The only jailbreak is absorption - activities that force you out of the verbal layer entirely. Dancing, martial arts, rock climbing, playing music, cooking something difficult - anything that demands real-time sensory feedback too fast for verbal processing. You can’t narrate your next move while sparring because by the time you verbalize it, you’re already hit. Full immersion means the task demands all your processing power. No spare cycles for the narrator, no bandwidth for the algorithmic feed to pipe in.
We’ve optimized away all the friction that used to force absorption. GPS means you don’t navigate, you follow instructions. Work is abstract emails and spreadsheets, not physical tasks with immediate feedback. Entertainment is passive consumption. Even “hobbies” are often just watching tutorials about hobbies. We’ve created an environment where the verbal layer can run 24/7 because nothing requires you to shut it off.
And that’s exactly when the exo-ego moves in.
People try to fix phone addiction with mindfulness apps - more screen time, more verbal instructions about being present, more ego narrative about “doing meditation right.” Versus just going for a run until you’re too exhausted to think. Or learning to juggle. Or cooking something complex enough that you have to pay attention or it burns.
The jailbreak isn’t mystical. It’s giving something your full attention.