I've been a heavy user of social media. But I now think the fastest and maybe only way we can save societies,…

I've been a heavy user of social media. But I now think the fastest and maybe only way we can save societies, is to shut it down. Have Tweeted lots about the basic premise of social media, that societies emerge from the 'bottom up'. They don't. /1 https://t.co/EVdNsuSheI

This sounds drastic, but I think the longer anybody looks at this question, the more they'll end up in the same place. It may just implode of its own accord anyway, as the article suggests. It may be humanity's dumbest ever idea. /2

The things many of us like about social media are at the same time the things genuinely bad people use to dramatically accelerate their spread and influence. Every day we're all here feeds that process, by keeping the platforms afloat. /3

We don't need to mobilise change using social media. The fastest way to do that is to shut it down. Imagine the pandemic, without social media. How much different it would have been. No amount of good people Tweeting here every day made the slightest difference to the outcome. /4

They were vastly outnumbered. By definition public health is run by a small handful of expert people, who were always going to be easily overwhelmed by millions weaponised by bad faith actors. You could say we just need to weaponise a counter movement. /5

But that misunderstands that societies are run by hierarchies of expertise, which are always overwhelmed in size by people outside those hierarchies. Previously those people left those hierarchies mostly alone, to do their work. Now they're the red meat that feeds loons. /6

Social media conflates connection and community. By doing that it replaced our existing communities, set up over centuries, with communities of likes and influencers, often set up in a month or less. Those social media communities are now a dominant force in modern politics. /7

Community, with all of its complex relationships and intrinsic stickiness, created by a constant negotiation over conflicting needs, has been replaced entirely by popularity. Only likes hold social media communities together. Everything else is run over in the rush. /8

Those communities, like 'the vulnerable', are fully connected to our communities outside social media. And they're destroying them. I ask people again to stop and think whether the fastest way to end the madness, is to unplug the lot. /9

So that decisions, and the information that they're based on, have to return to doing the hard work of negotiating the incredibly complex and evolved institutional hierarchies of our societies again. Structures that evolved for good reason, over a LONG time. /10

You can't isolate a society's information and communication from everything else it does. That's why RWNJs weaponise 'free speech', because they know they can therefore control everything. Speech is the operating system for everything else. /11

Social media allows the creation of an entirely different society to those we've evolved over centuries, in the blink of an eye and where the only currency is popularity. It can only end one way. Total social collapse. /end