AI is transforming our culture in almost every way, in the same way that social media did decades ago. But…
AI is transforming our culture in almost every way, in the same way that social media did decades ago.
But much more quickly. And I think on balance in a profoundly curative way.
AI is our only hope of rescuing civilisation from social media. I think it’s that important.
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Why such sweeping claims? For two reasons. One because I think the toxicity of social media is almost universally misunderstood and understated.
Social media creates hypersociality. Sociality is violence. Hypersociality is collapse of civilisations. Mass imitative rivalry.
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This is wilfully unseen because the most popular assumption in play is the opposite, that mass sociality is the growth of ‘the people’ running societies. It’s ‘democracy’, flourishing.
This is an almost universal belief, shared by users and owners of these platforms.
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It’s horseshit. As Girard spent a career trying to show, it’s a recipe for complete civilisational collapse. Societies run on status, and making the status of all equivalent, in ‘the people’ way, is an astronomical accelerant of status rivalry.
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Control of that rivalry IS civilisation. Centuries of blood and suffering led to emergent institutions, like monarchies and churches, whose most fundamental role was to contain status rivalry and provide space for civilisation to emerge.
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Social media has been unwinding those centuries of bloody, emergent civilisation in the space of a single lifetime.
It is not ‘social networking’. It’s a toxic, weaponised hijacking of that process which destroys all hierarchies of trust in those emergent institutions.
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The thing AI is doing which is separate to almost everything said about it, is restoring a reference point for status games that is external or relatively transcendent to status games.
People are increasingly going to AI for guidance. It is undermining social media’s grip.
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We know and say incessantly that social media has led entire populations astray, with ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. All attempts to rein that in have failed, because they misdiagnose the actual problem.
Societies don’t run on information. They run on status.
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