I’m increasingly bored with social media, it traps people in adolescent cultural games of team bonding and…

I’m increasingly bored with social media, it traps people in adolescent cultural games of team bonding and battling, with other teams. Everything is a pile-on, and adult responsibility is replaced with symbolic ‘I Stand With’ hashtag posturing. The medium is the message. /1

Social networking is a fabulous thing, but social media weaponises and monetises it, and in doing so it’s destroying our cultures and even our civilisations. We are handing over our most basic social operating systems to a handful of billionaires, who own these platforms. /2

Many say the connections they make on the platforms are essential to their lives, not recognising how clearly that shows their entrapment by the platforms. They’re replacing society itself. They’re not tools to share information. They’re a living culture. /3

I have friends who check-out, thinking they escape the endless bickering stupidity of the culture. But there is no escape, because the basic operating systems of societies are now dominated by the platforms. Your life off the platform is fundamentally shaped by them. /4

You are ‘living with’ a pandemic now, because of these platforms. Only in this cultural space does the staggering stupidity of that make any sort of sense. I wish not being here fixed things. You have to be where people are, there is no exit ramp from society. /5

I’ve watched the Terminator movies, and millions believe the essential premise there, that humans might create machines that one day could destroy humans themselves. But AI isn’t the risk. We’ve already done what those movies fear. It’s social media. /6

Sociality is violence, as Girard saw. By making tools that target sociality itself, we are burning down our civilisation one hashtag at a time. Civilisation is the control and restriction of sociality. Because the basis of sociality is imitative rivalry. Girard, again. /7

Or as Noah Smith says, the growth of ‘vertical communities’ at the expense of older style ‘horizontal’ communities - the dominance of sociality over basic social infrastructure and governance - is destroying our societies. /8

Look around you, everything is turned into a pile-on of one form or another. That’s sociality at work, imitative rivalry. These platforms are driving it deep into every tiny nook and cranny of our lives. Existential threats become only stages to perform more team sports. /9

Why I despair at the idea that these platforms are in any way the answer to anything. Like a good hashtag activism will fix the world’s problems. That is the world’s current problem. The medium is the message. /end