For democracy to survive, social media has to be shut down. (Bear with me.) The really dangerous thing about…

For democracy to survive, social media has to be shut down. (Bear with me.) The really dangerous thing about social media isn’t the technology itself, it’s the core idea behind it, that society builds itself from the bottom up. That ‘the people’ build society. /1

That idea will destroy democracy, and actually any society or system of government. Because it’s empirically incorrect. As I’ve Tweeted in relation to voluntary masking, without a group being led it reverts immediately to social conformity. To copying or imitating one another. /2

And even when led, conformity is always the mechanism, it’s just that it then conforms to what its leader desires. Social media mostly comes out of the US, with its particular and in many ways extreme form of individualism, libertarianism. It’s a technology that implements... /3

…that belief system. And by osmosis it then shapes other countries who use the technology in similar ways. Technology doesn’t determine, but it definitely affords. Social media is the libertarian Trojan Horse, transforming the world. Destroying it. Which sounds too strong. /4

But I don’t think it is. These platforms are fracturing all our established institutions, all of our ways of doing things that it took us centuries, even millennia, to develop and refine. And they’re doing it very fast. It made a reality TV star President and mobilised an…/5

…assault on the seat of US democracy. It’s true that the technology is enabling a social process of conformity that was always there, but the existentially lethal difference is that this process is now decoupled from our institutions. It’s naked popularity, with no…/6

…connection to any accumulated wisdom. Wisdom that it cost us a lot of suffering and lives to obtain. Replacing what we know with a million tribes, all following their favourite influencers, reinventing civilisation every day in waves of fashions and fads. Social chaos…/7

…and ultimately breakdown. Popularity is the weakest possible social cement. It’s stalling all social development at an adolescent stage of continuous jostling for status in hierarchies of popularity. It’s already forcing our previous popularity machine, elections, into the…/8

…background, with what’s ‘trending’ fracturing each electoral term into many mini-elections. 3 PMs in the UK in this year alone. I’ve also Tweeted that this is the real push to independents in politics as well, not any sort of fundamental shift but just a splintering of…/9

…popular choice. Like washing powders, or cars. If you look around every day, you’ll see this exploding libertarian fracturing and splintering of all of our history, our civilisation, into separate fragments. And social media is the accelerant doing it. /end