26 December

In my recovery I’m thinking again about my social media use, from 2026. I’m tired of debates and arguments over basic things with friends and family. The societies we grew up in had institutionalised expertise that took care of most aspects of life, so it didn’t matter a lot if people had bizarre opinions, it didn’t impact our lives. Now with social media it really does. Peoples’ often batshit crazy beliefs now have power. They can form or join groups of people with similar batshit crazy ideas, and achieve real political power to change everybody’s lives. ‘Living with’ Covid one example, from a public health point of view it’s just complete BS, a total rejection of 150 years of progress. We have *always* been able to control pathogens, in my lifetime, until this last pandemic, when instead we dismantled a public health system that doubled our life expectancies in the last century. In social media society what trends, what’s popular, *is* reality. No harsh truths or decisions will ever be made that might be unpopular. Nobody even remembers earlier fights against infectious disease, the sacrifices that had to be made. And worse, by opening up these core parts of our social operating system to everybody to ‘debate’, you end up spending much of your life fighting and arguing with everybody, including the people closest to you, to do basics like stay healthy. That’s social media’s business model. To turn everything into a fight or a debate, because that generates clicks/traffic, which generates revenue. It seeming like a nice place to ‘connect’ is just bait, to get people on the platforms. Once there the platforms fuck over society, from top to bottom. They destroy centuries of institutionalised progress in social life. At the same time it’s pretty much impossible now to stay friends with people, if they have batshit crazy beliefs. Those beliefs have become their identities. Challenge the beliefs, they feel you’re challenging the most fundamental thing about who they are. The beliefs give them social status, a place to stand in society now that the institutions are broken. So you’re left having to decide whether to live a life guided by reality, or by the need to constantly appease people. I suspect I’ve burned a lot of bridges in the past few years, in my own friend groups, because I won’t appease. The consequences are now too serious, your health just for starters can be destroyed. I won’t stand back and watch the society I enjoyed living in be taken over by social media warriors and their idiot ideas, destroying my kids’ future and threatening their and my health. My workplace is under continuous assault from these same networked morons. There’s no escape now. Thankfully I’m close to retirement and can soon escape the need to negotiate this bullshit every day. But I’ll still fight for my kids and to rescue what’s left of our inherited traditions. I fight with knowledge, not debates or activism. Spinoza is a hero of mine, and as he said, only knowledge ever sets you free. He was excommunicated from his entire community for doing it, there he is in the image. That’s the choice you have to make, at certain forks in the road in history.