Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon…
Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon targeted at existing social hierarchies, that’s part of the design brief. It targets trust, in hierarchies of expertise. It makes ‘the people’ supreme. /1 https://t.co/rawbzDvm9b
You might think that sounds a good thing. Pretty much everybody I talk to think that’s what democracy is (a measure of how successful libertarian propaganda has been). Democracy is government FOR the people, not BY the people. The problem is ‘the people’. /2
It doesn’t exist. it was a favourite phrase of dictators like Mussolini and Hitler, because fascism is just populism in its endgame. It’s populism. ‘The people’ isn’t even a thing, it’s a counting construct. Populists love to evoke it for a very practical reason. /3
It allows them to bypass every other established hierarchy of expertise and authority, in favour of this fictitious ‘people’, who they claim to speak for. In reality it’s at best a cobbled-together majority of votes, which they overlay with any ‘mandate’ meaning they like. /4
It makes popularity the ultimate and only measure of what’s right, and the route to ultimate power. How do we not see the crazy stupid disaster that is? Anything can be made popular, the most insane, lethal things, like ‘living with’ pandemics. It’s just marketing. /5
‘The people’ have no voice. They’re a set of numbers, counted votes, which the populists then make say whatever they want them to say. You’re part of the 61%, or the 49%, that’s your ‘voice’. Populists get the voice, to say what being in those majorities or minorities means. /6
Humans figured all of this out before, and now forgot. ‘The public’ was the answer, entirely different to ‘the people’. The public is an analytical dynamic creation, the continuous assessment of collective need by thousands of experts in different areas of social life. /7
The public or civil service. It’s IN THE NAME. Invented by elites! To save their own societies in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. And then dismantled by them from the 1970s, when memories of the tragedies faded. Libertarians hate nothing more. /8
It’s why they invented these platforms, to rapidly accelerate and escalate the assault on public institutions. To replace them with an infrastructure where popularity dominates all. An economy of ‘likes’. Any sane society would shut every single one of these platforms down. /9
Yesterday already. But the platforms are ready for that, even the suggestion of it will attract immediate cries of ‘oppression’ and ‘authoritarianism’. Look what these platforms mobilised against clean energy, Covid action and climate change. All no-brainers. /10
Hierarchies of expertise built over generations, which people used to trust, are not authoritarian. They were there to identify what needed doing, and to reject bullshit. Now we’ve flipped that all on its head, and bullshit reigns. Thanks to social media. /11
It’s an infrastructure that builds high school popularity culture into every age of life. Permanent adolescence. We’re completely stalled, socially and culturally, at adolescence. Not an analogy. /end