For 5 years now many of us have come here to express anger and disbelief that basic things like controlling…

For 5 years now many of us have come here to express anger and disbelief that basic things like controlling the spread of a pandemic aren’t being done. A few years ago I realised doing that is part of the problem. Mistaking these platforms for society. /1

These platforms operationalise a view of society. It’s what IT more generally has always done. Technologies embed a view of the world. They promote and produce a view of society that says ‘the people’ generate society. /2

Anybody who follows me knows I think this is a suicidal belief, for civilisations. Not only do ‘the people’ not run societies (and never have), ‘the people’ is not even a thing. It’s a retrospective justification for high status individuals and groups, for their actions. /3

Politicians for example always evoke the mandate of the people, when they win elections. In reality voters just put some numbers next to names on a ballot paper. Those numbers are then aggregated, and winners claim they mean anything they choose them to mean. /4

While saying ‘the people have spoken!’ The people didn’t speak, they put some ticks or numbers next to some names. That is literally all that they did. Social media is another profit-hungry brain fart from Silicon Valley types. Empowering and decentralising society! /5

Horseshit. Like all IT products, what it does is strip away existing status hierarchies, and replace them with new ones, headed by the owners of the IT products. Social media barons now run the world. With total impunity, governments look on helpless as they gut societies. /6

They swallowed up traditional media, and commerce, and now politics as well. Meanwhile the rest of the population, drunk on the idea that everybody having a daily opinion on everything, on these platforms, is democracy at work. /7

Including daily pleading to do something, anything, about our collective messes. None of which translates into any action, because the entire purpose of these platforms is to translate that pleading and anger into one thing only. /8

Profits and power for the owners and shareholders, of these platforms. Look at how Musk has weaponised X now as his global platform for massive interference in established democracies. /9

While we all believe ‘the people’ run democracies, and not the status hierarchies that actually do, our civilisations will continue to spin out of control. And we will continue to express our outrage here, as if it’s some form of public square. /10

When in reality social media is the key weapon for the building of Silicon Valley status hierarchies. How do we not see the astronomical wealth and influence of Silicon Valley, even long before social media, and recognise what’s actually going on? /11

A world now crippled by cybercrime too, courtesy of this shift. Totally beholden to these coding behemoths. This is the American disease. A nation so pathologically at war with the idea of collective anything, that the ‘American Dream’ is not seen for what it really is. /12

The desperate desire to escape the social nightmare generated by this collective vacuum at the root of American life, by building fabulously wealthy enclaves, gated communities, to escape the chaos and violence. That’s the true Silicon Valley motivation. /13

The Nerd Reich, as @gilduran76 wonderfully calls it. The dystopian total society-replacing fantasies generated by tech entrepreneurs. And then released into every other society that uses these ‘tools’, really Trojan Horses for these libertarian fantasies. /14

Fantasies generated by the desperation to avoid being road kill in a society that recognises no collective ‘we’. /end