It’s these two buttons that more than anything else are destroying Western democracies. The two functions…

It’s these two buttons that more than anything else are destroying Western democracies. The two functions that converted social networking, a healthy and powerful thing, into social media, a toxic, civilisation-ending collective suicide. Here’s why. /1 https://t.co/yZACYgU5xJ

Social networking was happening for years before social media emerged. People making connections with other people, for a whole variety of reasons. ‘Networking’. Overwhelmingly what drove those older networks was topics of interest. The content. /2

Social media then came along, and literally hijacked social networking. It added two specific things that not only made its owners obscenely rich and powerful, it tapped into the DNA of human life and behaviour. It had no idea about the Pandora’s Box it had opened. /3

Social networking was much more about knowledge, than about sociality itself. It wasn’t really a rival to the social organisation of societies, it enriched the existing social organisation. Social media took off because it did the opposite. /4

It went from hijacking social networking, to hijacking societies themselves. By introducing something humans can’t resist, the basis of all human behaviour. Imitative comparison between people. The rot started with ‘likes’. /5

The emphasis shifted from the content of what people posted (social networking), to the *popularity* of what they posted (likes). The rest is history. An entire economy of popularity exploded into life, on the platforms. Likes and the ‘influencers’ who generated them. /6

Mimetic rivalry is the basis of all human civilisation. Or to be more accurate, the control and suppression of mimetic rivalry is. Mimetic rivalry unchecked leads to uncontrolled violence and destruction. Rene Girard showed us this. /7

Gabriel Tarde showed more than a century ago, left to themselves humans will imitate one another to the exclusion of all else, in their every waking moment. But this imitation produces rivalry, violence. They copy others to fit in, to have status, in social groups (teams). /8

And thus to the ‘comment’ button. Many now deactivate that button in use, because they know the damage it causes. Commenting coupled to the economy of likes becomes the battleground for imitative rivalry. Watch the instant ‘pile-on’ in comments social media posts produce. /9

Comments become the way one social group can launch an incursion into other groups. Like the small army of combustion vehicle boy racers who pile in to every post about EVs. Likes and comments, combined, changed our entire culture. /10

They gave us a social media leader of the free world. The King of the Influencers. He even created his own platform, he showed us the source of his power. The fastest and most profound way to repair our societies today would be to simply turn social media off. /11

The entire edifice of initiative rivalry/populism would collapse, in an instant. But because it’s so entrenched and that won’t happen, AI may be our only hope. It’s already eroding this like-comment mechanism. /12

People are shifting away from the socials and their imitative rivalry, to arbitrate their ‘real’ lives (though we live inside social media now). They’re going to AI, individually, outside their old social media teams. AI’s anti-sociality may save the world. /end