19 April

You could just not post a picture of your baby at all. People know what a dummy is. Everything from the tiniest, most intimate and personal trivia through to our professional and political lives is being actually lived on social media now. A handful of American and Chinese billionaires now literally own societies. Social media is not like the old local paper, where you’d read about what’s happening locally. People are living their actual lives, through these platforms. It’s not information, it’s a social space. A person creates and maintains an identity here, shaped in turn by others on the platforms. The platforms are defined by algorithms, designed mostly to maximise anger and fights between people, which generates likes and activity on the platforms. That generates revenues for platform shareholders. Our societies are now these algorithms. Not government, not any custom or tradition.