The bait of SM was offering the public ways to ‘connect’. The switch is using those connections to then take…
The bait of SM was offering the public ways to ‘connect’. The switch is using those connections to then take over existing industries, and vacuum up their revenue.
Social media is a bait-and-switch. Many wallow in the bait, not seeing the switch. /1
https://t.co/gh5Jo2sIbr https://t.co/VkYcXYLy30
I had to screenshot the actual headline, because platforms in their enshittification process also bait-and-switch journalism.
Baited media companies by selling them us, previously baited. Then gradually stripping the capacity of these companies to post here. /2
That’s the switch. Our switch was to be sold as an audience, to these companies. Advertisers to these companies were then baited, by offering them both us and the media companies.
They will be switched by making these platforms increasingly the only place to advertise. /3
This is the side of social media that is now taking over the entire world. Because our world IS social. All of it.
It’s not just our ‘social lives’ these platforms take over. That’s us still hypnotised by the bait. Everything we do, in work and politics too, is social. /4
By not understanding that sociality is the organising principle of everything humanity does, we’ve handed over our entire societies, to these platforms.
That’s why we now have what I call toxic sociality. Our own sociality used against us. /5
These platforms are now the obligatory passage point through which you have to transact everything. Be it politics, business, or even the most intimate parts of your personal life.
It’s a bait-and-switch. The bait seduces us to join and stay. The switch screws us. /6
And sociality is not togetherness and connection. It’s violence. We crave connection not out of love for other people. We crave it because of our imitative rivalry.
We compete for status. That’s what social life is. The more social a society is, the more violent it is. /7
It’s a total myth that we live in a time of ‘individualism’. We live in a time of toxic hypersociality. The complete opposite.
Those who sell libertarian individualism are the most toxically social of all. They’re cults, gangs enforcing rigid conformity. /8
Have you ever met a libertarian who is casual and gentle in their beliefs? Whose ‘freedom’ for sale isn’t just an authoritarian set of rules to be followed, defined by them?
Toxic sociality is not just a problem. It’s our ONLY problem. /9
These platforms trap us inside bubbles of relentless imitative rivalry, team sports, where the problems of the world are transformed into fake debates.
They then monetise those debates. Every hash tag and like makes them money. /10
Everything that gets ‘debated’ here has known solutions. Those solutions disappear off into the asymptotic distance, the more we debate them here.
Pulverised into a proliferation of teams, at each other hammer and tongs. /11
The platforms, perhaps originally unknowingly, tapped into humanity’s deepest mechanism of operation. It’s why i say they will destroy us.
We’re breaking human civilisation. Sleepwalking to our own destruction. Because we’re so well baited. We can’t resist the sugar hit.
/end