Social media is not just where people share information. It’s a replacement for society itself, and intended…

Social media is not just where people share information. It’s a replacement for society itself, and intended to be. The decoupling of societies from their foundations. Now, a literal de-coupling! This fascinating data will get a range of interpretations I’m sure. /1 https://t.co/syvNWeIgTH

Initial analysis shows the trend being driven strongly by women, enabled by their use of software via their mobile phones, to ‘leapfrog’ their usual cultural options. That sounds extremely plausible. Women wanting a better cultural deal. But I think it’s more than that. /2

Because I suspect online life, and particularly social media, doesn’t offer a new deal. It offers you ongoing dependency, to the apps. It decouples our lives from some basic social and cultural institutional foundations. /3

Which could be seen as liberation and progress. Except I think it ignores that the apps (general term for software we increasingly use to transact our personal and social lives) are not very social or cultural things. They’re pretty obvious commercial things. /4

And sure, all cultural artefacts are also commercial artefacts. Books were the same. Users eventually determine their fate, not the commercial interests. But social media in particular is different. Because its algorithms target some core social and cultural behaviours. /5

It’s been such a rapid and astronomical force because it’s a ‘a slot machine for status’, as Will Storr calls it. It targets and creates imitative rivalry, the battle for status and identity, the root of all societies, as Rene Girard spent many years analysing. /6

And as @doctorow has described, it ‘enshittifies’ our social, political and economic relationships, in a bait and switch where the bait is ‘connection’, and the switch is monetising those same connections. Or as I call it, social media is society eating itself. /7

Bruno Latour in his last work on climate change often asked when societies were going to come back into land, in the sense of a plane landing. Meaning when they would end the decoupling, as I call it. When they would rediscover place. Not space, place. /8

Coupling in the relationship sense, as John Burns-Murdoch analysed, is itself historically mostly about place too. Couples raise children in homes. Home as a concept is the heart of any idea of place. In our travel culture, it has no meaning at all. /9

Life shifted from being about place, to being about living a series of decoupled ‘experiences’. Including, now, intimate relationships with other humans. This isn’t a modern conservative argument for ‘family values’. That if we just took phones off these pesky women! Etc. /10

Modern conservatives are the chief destroyers of place, including of family. With their decoupled and globalised ‘economies’, that respect no place. All places become ‘resources’. We need to come into land. We need to rediscover being *grounded* again, in some way. /11

Social media is taking us in exactly the opposite direction to that. Societies eating themselves, decoupling every personal, social, political, economic and other social and cultural history in favour of short-term profits for app developers and owners. /12

In the West at least, we never got over being an empire. For us everything is still about perpetual movement, displacement and accumulation. Our recreation time is dominated by travel, where we accumulate sights and experiences. We turn the world into bucket lists. /13

So in a way this is still us struggling to understand anything except the colonialism we grew up in, as the default for life itself. /end