I can remember the ancient and early days of social media. For me, this was about fifteen years ago. I was a late arriver, intentionally skipping all the initial hype, only diving in once it was mainstream. Part of this is certainly a submerged streak of Luddite in my soulish DNA. I always skew toward the human, but eventually, I signed on. That was then and this is now. Social media started out presenting itself as an augmentation of human contact, but its long-term trajectory is about leaving the party, so to speak. The hidden hands and mind behind it will never let it stay your friend and servant forever or even long term. It will always and eventually need to control you.
The core of American centric social media, in my observation, presently consists of 4 platforms. On a y axis, Facebook encompasses almost everyone, on paper, but really, it’s only the old. TikTok holds a lock on the kids. On a x axis Instagram addresses lifestyle interests and is also the refuge of disgruntled Facebookers. Twitter is the public square. Of course, there are countless others, rivals, upstarts, new conservative options, and many special interest communities only slightly less ubiquitous than the four biggest. Some may eventually knock off one or more of the big four, but just today they’re secondary.
Facebook has worked hard to make itself obsolete. For Zuckerberg, it was a good gig while it lasted. He had made a pretty decent cash machine based on a simple formula of offering ads in exchange for organic human connections. How could you screw up something so fundamental? First you openly abuse your users by not-so-gradually taking away the whole connections part of the bargain and give them just enough token connection to not immediately quit. You replace connections with promoted, guided, preferred content curated by Facebook bots. Next you demonize roughly half of your user base by spending your ad fortune on political interests that they despise for which those same entities also hate that same half of your user base. Then you chase the newest shiny thing (Meta) that you think younger demographics will like, but they don’t, they hate it. Now you have mostly old people left. What you don’t realize is that their engagement is in freefall as well. Facebook is becoming conspicuously void of repartee. Everyone is leaving the party and they ain’t coming back. A day is now conceivable where Facebook could exit this list of top four social media.
Twitter, up until fall 2022 was the Soviet Union. They had done their revolution; it was complete, and the politburo ruled. They ran interference, controlled access, quickly ‘jailed’ and banished all dissidents. They were the mouthpiece for the regime. But like all statist dictatorships, they had a hard time paying the bills. Even commissars want and need to eat, like gourmet vegan hot meals and warm baths in view of whatever ocean they were working close to, and free espresso all day and every day. The edifice crumbled. Enter Elon Musk. With Elon’s purchase of Twitter, a great personal risk even for one of his wealth, he brought back capitalism, management, adulthood, and glasnost. Twitter is not entirely fixed, not by a long shot. Its code is still corrupted to work for the regime automatically and there are still hidden operatives. Twitter is a throwback to what the web and social media used to be, so enjoy it while you can. While I don’t fear Elon Musk changing his guiding motivations, history tells us that something will happen and that any lifecycle lasting more than 5-10 years is somewhere between rare and impossible in the tech world. I have no idea what it will be, but it will happen. Enjoy the Prague Spring while you can.
Instagram is the bright and shiny things, lifestyle, influencing, branding, live your dream space. It shares some of the same underpinnings as Facebook, being owned by Zuckerberg, but is less vulnerable only because of the format and audience. Its already locked down by its rules. Instagram is already under assault from rivals. Look for it to eventually meet its Darwinian end if for no other reason than Meta’s inability to respond and create on its own.
TikTok is the Chinese spy in your kid’s bedroom. Of course, .1% of its users care. If China sent a guided missile to every geo-location where a device was using TikTok, none of its users would care, but since it’s most popular with kids, parents should care. Imagine that you were invited to visit an open house of the middle school where you intended to send your child. In this [hypothetical] open house, school is in session. You arrive and view a lobby and cafeteria full of wild kids. There are three gang fights in progress. Various girls around the cafeteria are singled out and are being screamed at and shouted at with insults about their looks, cloths, and neighborhood. Boys are being taunted, told to fight other boys. Not to be exclusionary, there are also a large representation of fully and partially transitioned child trannies standing on tables, accusing all the others of hate, pulling on some to join them. There are just as many of them hunkering under tables and in corners, afraid to move. Would you send your child to this school? The most pressing issue with TikTok is not some guy named Wang sitting at a computer in Shanghai spying on your phone although that is theoretically a real issue. The biggest issue is the parents not curious or responsible enough to give their kids even a baseline of basic protections. I’ll admit, the short video component is entertaining and there are plenty that are benign. But there is nothing on TikTok worth risking your kid’s mental and moral health. TikTok is the Fentanyl of social media and in its current cultural context, it’s irredeemable.
In the early days, the World Wide Web presented a sense of wild optimism for free flow and access the rest of the world. That optimism is long gone, replaced by the zeitgeist of the day, the exact opposite, authoritarian control. Social media is at the leading edge of that control. The spirit of the age is not a disembodied force of evil or dominance; it originates in the thoughts and intentions of real people with power, a whole other decentralized network of malicious individuals organized much like the Internet itself. Some stand to make fortunes, others to reap the perquisites of dominion, others to feel validation against those that they hate in their dark hearts; there are countless motivations to quench freedom. The same Internet that afforded unlimited sharing, connection, and freedom is the same thing that enables ultimate excruciating granular control of every human being on the face of the earth. It took a while but the evil among us figured out how to game it for their own very personal benefit at your expense. The social media that we see today is like a slide on a microscope. You are the specimen. It feels free to swim with your fellow protozoa on a slide that seems like an ocean to us. Be assured, there is a lens in the sky, an electrode to herd beings around and a trashcan for when the lens in the sky has no further utility for you to enjoy memes. Social media will still provide some tangible benefits to some, but it is a law of diminishing returns and an active component pumping harm into your soul. At best, it may still provide information sharing and messaging, but we will all go elsewhere to be truly human.
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