Ray knew he wanted to spend less time online. Louis Sideways, of Sideways Marketing, had already crafted a plan with Ray to connect with his friends by asking them to tell him about the online world. That way, he could make offline connections. How Sideways became a digital therapist was anyone’s guess, but he never turned down a client. They only turned him down.
“What do you think I should do?” Ray asked. “I’ve tried app blockers and screen time limits, but nothing seems to work. I just get around them to see the next video. If I delete the apps or change my passwords, then I find out something important has happened and I have to figure out how to get back on.”
“It’s tricky because the apps are designed to keep you watching them,” Sideways said. “So we need to turn the apps against themselves.”
“How do we do that?” Ray asked.
“We find a style of video that makes you want to log off and then flood your algorithm with it,” Sideways replied. He pulled out his phone to start searching.
“I don’t want anything visually upsetting in my news feed. Then I’ll think about that all day.” Ray said. “I like to get angry online, but that’s different than seeing a person or animal in harm’s way.”
“There’s one genre that I think will work for you,” Sideways said. “The lost bicycle.”
“What’s that?” Ray asked.
“People make videos about losing bicycles,” Sideways said. “There are a few different variations of this. Here’s version one.”
Version one showed a girl riding a pink bicycle with streamers on the handlebars while Sarah McLachlan sang “I Will Remember You.”
“Is the girl okay?” Ray asked timidly.
“Yeah, she’s fine,” Sideways said. “She just lost her bike.”
Sideways pulled up another video. This one showed a guy dressed for a safari on a college campus. The guy spoke in what sounded like a fake British accent. “We find on this college campus that the students have migrated home for the winter. Yet still, we survey the bikes they left behind.”
The video cut to racks with bikes without wheels, rusted bikes and wheels without bikes. The safari man continued to narrate.
“I thought they were going to play that Sarah McLachlan song again,” Ray said.
“Oh, they do sometimes,” Sideways said. “There are thousands of these videos.”
“How can there be thousands of them?” Ray said.
“There are videos where people go looking for their bikes. There are videos where people reunite with their bikes. There are videos of people accidentally riding their bikes into a reservoir and watching them sink into the depths. Professional riders have to say goodbye to their old bikes. There are even a few with people stealing the bikes and people confronting the bike thieves.”
“I don’t want to watch these videos,” Ray said.
“That’s the point,” Sideways said. “We flood your social media feeds with these videos and then you’ll stop watching after a few minutes.”
Ray thought about this. “You know, I don’t even know where my bike is right now.”