8 July

I know that what people most want to see on FB and other social media, is what’s happening in other peoples’ lives. It’s what I refuse to post here, and thought I’d explain why. Do we think about what it means, to surrender our personal and social spaces, to these platforms? It’s not just a ‘tool’, increasingly both our personal and social lives are carried out ON these platforms. What other public spaces do we have? None. These platforms had already captured much of our economic lives, our businesses. Now they’ve vacuumed up our personal and social lives as well. And what do these platforms do with the things they capture? They weaponise them as rivalries. They turn them into ‘debates’, because debates generate activity and likes. Then they monetise them. It’s why your FB feed is now continuously full of ads, every time you mention anything. It’s why basic tasks like building new energy systems or transitioning to better electric vehicles are bogged down in ludicrous ‘debates’ that are completely devoid of any facts or sense. It turns friends against friends, and families against each other. I ask people to at least think about what it means that people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk now literally own the spaces where we live our personal and social lives. It’s destroying our societies, and peoples’ mental health, as their anxieties are whipped up and then monetised.