This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its…

This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its extreme libertarian beliefs, mostly invented social media. Think about how it taps into all that idealistic tosh about ‘the people’ creating ‘bottom-up’ change. /1 https://t.co/4U9Ek3fCsn

Nearly everybody I know believes some version of that ‘the people’ rubbish, trapped inside the libertarian spider web of beliefs that is also woven into the DNA of social media. They seriously feel we can use social media to build social change. McLuhan always got it. /2

‘The medium is the message’. It’s not all that important what content circulates on social media, it’s the nature of the medium itself that creates the actual social change. If you provide widespread access to tools that allow the mobilisation of every belief, completely…/3

…decoupled from existing hierarchies of expertise and authority, don’t be surprised when your society becomes like several million Martin Luthers pinning its list of demands to every institutional door. Protestantism gone viral, a protest society. /4

Public policy is replaced with what’s ‘trending’. Populism metastasizes into an endless series of battles between competing tribes or groups for popular support. Fads and fashions run riot through social organisation, with no settled outcome or link to existing expertise. /5

As I say a lot, it’s society as a giant high school, because this is in fact how high schools have always functioned. Rather than leaving school and being inducted into the older institutions of public life, people now use social media to continue the high school social model…/6

…into adult life. And that’s what we’re living right now, the increasing stuck adolescence of society, incapable of taking on adult problems. /end