My social media feeds are flooded with friends, family and others celebrating Christmas, these platforms have…
My social media feeds are flooded with friends, family and others celebrating Christmas, these platforms have become the venue to transact every aspect of our lives now.
Let’s think about that bait and switch. Through the lens again of @doctorow’s enshittification. /1
The most fundamental and disturbing thing about social media is the thing hardly ever mentioned about it. The capture of society itself.
Because societies are 100% social, these technologies targeted society itself. It’s the greatest heist in history. /2
Because we think of the social as just one domain, alongside others like ‘politics’ and ‘economics’, we thought social media was just a fun way to ‘connect’, alongside the other activities of our lives.
But societies are ALL social. Politics and economics are 100% social. /3
We surrendered everything, when we allowed these platforms to exist. Politics and economic activity are driven by these platforms as well.
Every major business and politician now have staff to do ‘the socials’. It’s become the centre of what they do. /4
Hapless friends and family vomit the most intimate details of their personal and social lives onto these platforms, thinking they’re sharing in some ‘community’.
There is increasingly no other community at all, apart from these platforms. /5
The bait was to offer people precisely that. A place to connect with friends and family and colleagues. How wonderful!
That got everybody here. It’s what keeps them here too. To leave is to literally check-out of society itself. /6
The switch was to then progressively enshittify those relationships, to monetise them. And worse, to develop algorithms that would enflame every relationship, tribalising every public issue.
To generate team sports. Status games. /7
As Will Storr brilliantly noticed, the algorithms here are literal slot machines, for status. You post, and then you wait to see who likes it, who follows you. How much social status it gave you.
That’s the actual way slot machines are constructed. To feed that social need. /8
For status and identity. That’s what social media is, and the revenue from these social slot machines goes in one way only.
To the platform owners and to platform shareholders. /9
You won’t convince friends and families of the outrageous heist that this is. They’ll be mostly so deeply addicted to these slot machines now, that they will have no way at all of distinguishing between them, and community life itself. /10
To them social media IS now society. All of it. They get their news here, they ‘do their own research’ here. They figure out what to buy, who to vote for, etc.
It’s a literal heist. of our *entire* societies, and even of our most intimate personal lives. /11
People get great joy by this sense of warm community, all swapping Christmas photos and stories of what they and their families are doing.
Not noticing that their families are increasingly being pulverised into warring tribes. /12
All enabled by our blind spot of not realising that societies are all social, in every detail.
Technologies that target that root mechanism of all human life, will own all human life.
/end