Social Media is Our "First Contact"

Indigenous people met ships; we met screens. Both encounters shattered worlds that weren’t ready for the intruders.

We are not "evolving into social media." We were ambushed by it.

Here is the clean, powerful connection you’re reaching for — the psychological and cultural parallel between Indigenous peoples encountering outsiders for the first time and modern people encountering social media for the first time (and now living inside it).

1. Sudden Exposure to a New "World"

Indigenous first contact:

Entire new technologies, behaviors, beliefs, and power structures appear almost overnight — unfamiliar, overwhelming, and often wrapped in promises or threats.

Social media:

We suddenly encountered a digital world with its own rules, languages, social hierarchies, and incentives. It feels natural now, but it was an alien environment introduced extremely fast.

Correlation: We are not "evolving into social media." We were ambushed by it.

2. Psychological Shock

Indigenous first contact:

The brain had no framework to understand outsiders. This produced awe, fear, fascination, and vulnerability.

Social media:

The human nervous system had no evolutionary template for:

• Infinite attention streams
• Algorithmic reinforcement
• Digital status systems
• Parasocial relationships
• Dopamine farming

Correlation: Both experiences cause cultural shock + psychological overwhelm because the system being introduced wasn’t designed for the people receiving it.

3. Power Imbalance

Indigenous peoples:

One group arrives with superior tech, weapons, navigation, and information control. The imbalance leads to manipulation, dependency, or loss of autonomy.

Social media platforms:

Companies arrive with:

• Supercomputers
• Behavioral science
• AI persuasion
• Algorithmic control
• Data extraction

Humans become the "resource."

Correlation: The ones who "arrive" choose the rules. The ones who "receive" lose control without realizing it.

4. Identity Disruption

Indigenous communities:

First contact disrupts tradition, roles, stories, cosmology, social bonds, and spiritual meaning.

Social media:

We experience:

• Identity fragmentation
• Comparison culture
• Digital personas
• Loss of community roots
• Collapse of shared meaning

Correlation: First contact destabilizes identity — whether it’s a tribe or a timeline.

5. Storytelling Becomes the Battleground

Indigenous peoples:

Colonizers bring new stories about what is valuable, who is powerful, and how society should be ordered. These stories overwrite local ones.

Social media:

Algorithms decide what you see, what counts as "success," and what is worth caring about. Your internal story gets overwritten.

Correlation: The fight is always over narrative sovereignty.

6. Adoption → Dependency

Indigenous peoples:

New tools and items (metal, cloth, medicine) create dependence on the outsiders.

Social media:

We become dependent on validation, digital identity, online community, and the phone as memory/extension of self.

Correlation: What starts as curiosity becomes dependency.

7. Loss of Autonomy

Indigenous peoples:

First contact often leads to systemic loss of land, culture, and sovereignty.

Social media:

We lose attention, boundaries, privacy, and agency.

Correlation: The more we take in, the more is taken from us.

The Core Idea

Social media is our "First Contact." We are the indigenous minds unprepared for the arrival of a new civilization — the digital one.

We didn’t meet an app. We met a new species of intelligence (algorithms) with:

• No morality
• No culture
• No memory
• Only goals

We are still trying to figure out how to be human under these conditions.

“We are the Indigenous psyche visited by the algorithmic colonizer.”