Connection is social media’s bait-and-switch. Offer something people can’t resist, some social heroin -…

Connection is social media’s bait-and-switch. Offer something people can’t resist, some social heroin - connecting with others. ‘Networking’. Then weaponise it by turning that connection into team sports. Then monetise the likes those battles create. /1ittif https://t.co/NE0gS93b8H

A brilliant and lethal business model. Target our most fundamental social behaviours. We can’t resist. When discussing social media, you must discuss the full business model. Not just the bait. Many will rush to defend these platforms, because all they see is the bait. /2

To go back to @CoryDoctorow’s definition of enshittification, a succinct summary of the full business model. I’ve highlighted the ‘bait’ part. We’re already well advanced on the switch. Where your ‘connections’ are monetised. You are the product that platforms on-sell. /3 https://t.co/fMMqYg2UDm

And many smart people will say, yes, we know this, but we’re using the platforms for our purposes, not theirs. That’s our modern libertarian tunnel-vision, where everything is only ever refracted through the personal. /4

The much more important thing happening here is the capture of our personal and social lives. These platforms have become the obligatory passage point not just for business (ask the newspapers they’ve destroyed), but now also for transacting our most intimate lives. /5

Which company now doesn’t have people full-time doing ‘the socials’? That’s what an obligatory passage point means. The platforms have swallowed our social and economic infrastructure. Families now interact more on social media than they do in real life. Ditto for friends. /6

The platforms have become our personal and social spaces. The places people scroll all day and night, to maintain their friendship and family lives. That’s the switch. The bait got us in, now the switch uses our capture to monetise it. And it does that by encouraging fights. /7

Turning all of our social interactions into fake ‘debates’. Team sports, as I call it. Nothing generates likes as prodigiously. Imitative rivalry - the battle between teams - is the root of all human behaviour. Most of us know families now split over these debates. /8

That’s what surrendering our social and personal lives to these platforms will do. Pulverise our social relations into monetisable bits. Mention Aunt Martha’s prolapsed haemorrhoids, and suddenly your feed is full of ads for haemorrhoid products. /9

It really amazes me that people can’t see that these platforms are doing this, taking over all of our work and personal and social lives. Vacuuming up profits by monetising older social structures. And let’s talk about what connection really is anyway. /10

Portrayed as this lovely warm and cuddly thing, people connecting. How could you criticise that? Except social connection is that same initiative rivalry I mentioned, that Rene Girard analysed so brilliantly. The root of all social connection is rivalry. /11

Trying to ‘fit in’. To be accepted by some group. An act of anxious desperation, to not be an outsider. To not be ‘lonely’. Humans are social animals. But sociality is brutal, a never-ending rivalry between people, for acceptance and belonging. /12

It’s why these platforms make a fortune, turning everything into debates. That’s our social DNA, rivalry. Yes you can connect with people on here and form a group. That sounds lovely and ‘social’. Except maintaining your membership in that group is a continuous process. /13

And that’s even before the rivalry of that group with other groups begins. Then it’s just every minute of a day in battle. It’s why people have social media breaks, it exhausts them. Constant comparison and rivalry. /14

And what does all of this glorious ‘socialising’ and networking produce? A society? No, lots of hard-shelled groups, set up in opposition to other groups. Neil Finn the musician made a very insightful comment about societies. /15

He said he feels closer to the mix of people in a country town, than he does in a city. That in a country town you’re forced to mix with everybody, whereas cities tend to have enclaves for social groups. Social media groups are enclaves. Little self-contained universes. /16

A society isn’t made of millions of little enclaves, aggregated into a sum. A society is mixture, of everybody, forced to confront each other’s material realities. Exactly the thing that social media can never provide. It would break its business model. /17

It needs competing groups to generate likes and follows and revenue. /end