Séamas O'Reilly: The clickbait business — and its taunting, teasing condescension

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The things I get recommended on social media have changed over the years. For a long time, it was the usual stuff. Cheap flights, weird gadgets, and scattergun retreads of my Amazon purchases.

You know the type of thing; you buy one backpack and for weeks afterwards you’re advertised other, similar backpacks, and very often the exact same backpack you’ve just bought. I’ve never quite understood this.

Surely, the world’s smartest tech company, the leviathan which controls our lives and rules the planet we live on, know that once people buy a thing, they are no longer in the market for said thing. 

But no, they’ve bet their business model on deciding that anyone who has ever bought a backpack will soon be in pursuit of more backpacks, and every such purchase is merely their first cautious step toward opening that backpack museum they’ve always dreamed of.

That’s only the products I’m advertised, mind you. I get a lot of clickbait too, which has also changed drastically in the last few years. 

They used to focus on telling me “weird tricks” that could make me $1,458 a week just by working from home, or make my diabetes doctor hate me. I don’t have a diabetes doctor — or diabetes, for that matter — but if I did, I imagine I’d like to keep them on side.

For a long time, the collected genius of the global algorithm was very keen on telling me what former X Factor contestant Susan Boyle “looks like now”, and that this knowledge would shock me. 

I never gave in to their taunts, and sometimes regret it. It stopped about five years ago, so she probably looks even more different now, but how would I even know?

Lately, my clickbait has become more mundane, but infinitely more successful in getting me to actually click things. 

There are fewer moneymaking ads and more weirdly compelling taunts about how to do everyday things. I speak, naturally, of “you’ve been doing this wrong your entire life”.

This week alone I’ve been told that I’ve been peeling bananas wrong my entire life, playing Monopoly wrong my entire life, and — from the pages of the New York Times, no less — that I’ve been wearing a backpack wrong my entire life. (Unsurprisingly, this stung most of all, and I shall ensure my forthcoming museum provides explanatory handouts to all visitors).

Sometimes I doubt these things are actual life hacks, or just people working out that these kinds of articles drive engagement and retrofitting a bizarre use of an everyday object into the genre.

I don’t, for example, believe that peeling a banana, eating a pineapple, or opening an oyster, can even involve just one correct process. But such quibbles are irrelevant. 

I still click on them, desperate to be told that I am living like a moron, and a better, more efficient life is possible.

Sometimes there are epiphanies to be found, even if they’re unintended. The other appalling genre of clickbait I’m powerless against is the “how do you do X?” format. 

Here, the X can stand for anything, like tying your laces or adding up two numbers, but — appropriately enough — my most mesmerising recent example was when the X literally just meant “X”, inviting readers to choose between 9 different methods for drawing the 24th letter of the alphabet. Do you start at the top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right? And what comes next?

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

I may be a simple man adrift in a world of mysteries, but I had never once in my life thought that there were so many ways to do this. In fact, I can say quite confidently, that I had never consciously thought about the way that I did it. (For the record: top right to bottom left, then top left to bottom right).

Quite apart from the horror of discovering that hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the replies did it drastically different from me, there was something vertiginous about having to think about this at all, as if the workings of my brain had been peeled back for a harrowing glimpse at the wet circuitry inside.

I realise, in these moments, that I fear self-awareness. A common refrain under such posts is “next you’ll be telling me I’m breathing wrong”, which is intended as a joke but is, in my case, genuinely accurate.

People who like meditation have long told me that tranquillity comes from becoming aware of your own breathing, but I have never found this to be true. The second I become conscious of my own breathing I start to panic.

That’s a bodily function I’d like to continue being automatic, and I have as little interest in controlling my breathing as I have in constantly charging my phone with a hand crank.

The second I do focus on my breathing, you understand, I’m left with the horrifying sense that I don’t know what I’m doing. 

I start wondering how the whole process works, why it’s been going on this long without my involvement, and why I’ve suddenly been put in charge of it now. None of these are feelings I crave.

I picture my respiratory system grimacing as I take the reins, stepping to the side with the forced grins of factory workers as a clumsy, hard-hat-wearing politician takes over their hazardous, heavy machinery for a photo op.

Soon, I am breathing like a cartoon character. I flap my mouth like a Pez dispenser, breathing like someone who has only ever read about inhalation in books, before my autonomic system — firmly, but gently — prises the controls from my hands, pats me on the back, and ushers me away from the press pack so I can resume thinking about food and memes.

There’s a horror to self-awareness, and it’s one that the world’s clickbait farms have weaponised against me to their profit. 

Perhaps if I keep clicking, I will be rid of my fears forever. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll even learn what Susan Boyle looks like now.