My criticism of social media is a criticism of the founding beliefs that created it. Here they are in plain…

My criticism of social media is a criticism of the founding beliefs that created it. Here they are in plain view, from the infamous AIER. The home of the GBD. Democracies do NOT emerge from the ‘bottom’ up’ That’s a libertarian fantasy. /1 https://t.co/lKRAmLUyCs

That fantasy has many of the victims of political libertarians madly ‘organising’ and ‘mobilising’ every day, thinking they’re creating a better world by all their ‘bottom up’ action. It’s a con, designed to distract them and absorb all of their energy. /2

Energy that could be used to take over the world, but which instead is engaged in the futile task of daily trying to rebuild societies one brick at a time. Societies that *already exist*, and don’t need rebuilding. We did that all, already, with many fights and struggles. /3

At the same time communities fractured and destroyed by libertarian politics cling to social media for the social connection it gives them, in the ruins of those fractured communities. That’s a noble thing to do. But it’s perverse to praise the platforms for it. /4

These platforms are the vanguard of the libertarian movement. Their beliefs created the platform, the profits from them go back to libertarian billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. It’s really astonishing that people don’t join those dots. Follow the money. /5

They’re using this technology to weaponise and monetise the destruction their political beliefs wreak on societies. Not only are they destroying societies, they’re using social media to both assist the destruction, and profit from it at the same time. /6

The seductive social connection people feel here IS the business model. We shouldn’t need billionaires to have social connection, who then profit from it. They now own our social space as well as our economic and political space. /7

Ultimately though the technology distracts from the underlying beliefs in play here. And both sides of the current political battles converge upon that same idea, that democracy and society are ‘bottom up’ processes. They aren’t, they never were and never will be. /8

All change, in all groups of humans of whatever size, is LED into existence, by about 5% of the group. Our representative democracies were set up in exactly this way, not bottom up. They’re led, by a small handful of representatives. /9

The role of the people or public is to select representatives, who then lead an intrinsically *hierarchical* system, like all systems. Hierarchies of expertise. But the libertarians, largely through social media, have now replaced this with populism. /10

An idea that counties are now run by ‘the people’ (which isn’t even a thing, except as a description of a group that has no necessary connection). And if we all chatter away on social media every day, that’s democracy in action. /11

And when that leads to exponential increases in conflict and bullshit, the libertarian masters of the platforms intervene to remove any remaining hint of actual hierarchical management, to regulate the thing. So that it becomes a true sewer. /12

I’m still here, that’s not a contradiction of my own beliefs. I don’t for a moment think anything here is changing the world. Like others I use the things that the platforms make possible, but at the same time criticise the much bigger damage the platforms are doing. /13

I get lots of ‘love it or leave’ from people who object to that, not even seeing their behaviour as like the anti-immigration knuckleheads they’d normally be appalled by. Their view of society through the tiny bubble of shared interests here on social media demands it. /14

It’s what the libertarians want. Society fractured into millions of individual realities, endlessly at war with each other. It’s what this platform feeds off. I want the public back. The public has no hope of surviving social media. Most of them don’t even use it. /15

A public is people living together, solving problems together, through their elected representatives and the institutions that regulate that public life. Not teams set up on social media platforms, blocking and assaulting the things they don’t like. It’s online gaming. /end