I’m not seeing any platform generating the power old Twitter had to help shape public debate. The minute it…

I’m not seeing any platform generating the power old Twitter had to help shape public debate. The minute it began to have an impact, the billionaire class bought it and shut it down. They invented social media to make money and promote libertarian politics. /1

No obstruction to either aim will be tolerated. These platforms feed off the social destruction they largely create, they monetise the millions living in fractured societies who flee here to try to regroup. I will always argue to turn social media off, entirely. /2

Because socially and culturally its model is an abomination . An exponential machine to corrode the basics of all civil society in history. It seems so warm and fuzzy, because it allows ordinary people to connect and share information. The con is seductive. /3

It’s a con because people connecting and sharing anything IS what a society has always been. And if you do that while at the same time severing the connections those people have to the society outside social media, suddenly your society IS social media. /4

All of its institutions, developed over millennia, the emergent regulation of these shared interactions based on historical suffering and wisdom, are stripped away in an instant, replaced by an economy of likes. Popularity. Suddenly everybody is an expert in everything. /5

Suddenly anybody who can mobilise enough likes can do anything they want, no matter how vile and anti-social. They can become President of the United States, and then set their followers to work sacking the US parliament. They can demolish action against climate change. /6

They can cripple action against a pandemic, generating lunatic fantasies of ‘living with’ existential emergencies. If they’re popular, it’s all allowable. Nothing can stand in its way. We don’t see it, and so it will destroy us. High school popularity culture. /7

That’s all these platforms are. They perpetuate that high school culture deep into adult life, to all ages. If you feel the world has gone mad because the most brain dead bullies can get away with anything, it’s because that’s what high school was like. /8

It’s the same culture, which through these platforms is now increasingly our entire culture. And even worse, because there aren’t even any teachers or other structures to moderate the damage. It’s pure, unadulterated popularity culture. Not capitalism, not Left or Right. /9

Populism is sweeping all of those stupid team sports distinctions away, and at an accelerating rate. Only what is popular has currency. Politicians, given authority by our older popularity platforms - elections - are increasingly just roadkill to social media tsunamis. /end