I admire them for having a go against the tech giants. They’ll have entire populations addicted to the daily…

I admire them for having a go against the tech giants. They’ll have entire populations addicted to the daily team sports dopamine against them. It won’t work, because the much bigger problem here is thinking about social media platforms as information platforms. /1 https://t.co/9Btwf5MEiV

Social media platforms, like societies themselves, are not for the exchange of information. They’re places where SOCIAL things are negotiated. The battle for social status. In the case of social media, the outright assault on all of our mechanisms of *trust*. /2

The problem with social media isn’t misinformation or disinformation. Societies never run on information, ever. They always run on trust. There is far, far too much information needed for anybody to try to be on top of everything happening in a society. /3

Which is why we have hierarchies of trust, where we delegate responsibility for doing different things, to different people. Not because we’re sheep, but because we can’t do everything ourselves. It’s just logistics. /4

Do we not actually look at what’s on these platforms? It’s not the exchange of information, it’s people rallying around information, building empires of followers and likes, to increase their status. People do the most insane things, like encourage us to live with pandemics. /5

So long as that insane thing builds them likes and followers, and therefore their own social status. And social media is socially lethal, because it’s society stripped entirely of any of its existing checks and balances, that normally assess claims. /6

Replacing all of that, with popularity. Likes. Mediocre, ambitious non-entities are suddenly leading public ‘debates’ on things like public health, something they know exactly nothing about. Social media is strip mining societies of all of their hierarchies of trust. /7

We have to (but won’t) give up this idea that societies work by people processing information every day. Of course the information processing industry want us to believe that, the ‘tech giants’. That substitution allows them to own the world. /8

We should at the same time abandon the related belief that connecting people to each other is intrinsically a good thing. On social media those connections bypass entirely any real world test of the wisdom of a given connection. /9

It’s not just that some of those connections are blatantly unhealthy, like people being groomed or recruited for terrorism, or any of the more obvious nasties SM enables. It’s that societies don’t function as permanent unfiltered crowds. /10

Social media is turning them into permanent football games of mob violence. Connection without context or consequence just leads to violence. That’s what a mob is. Anyway, I know all of this is a lost cause. Populism is social heroin, the dopamine of team sports. /end