In the wake of the recent political developments, I am raising a conscientious objection to the continued submission of the citizenry to social manipulation. Oh, what, you haven’t seen the movie?
What’s wrong with social media?
Initially envisioned as a digital Rolodex and quasi-dating app of sorts for college students, at its inception, The Facebook required an email address with a “.edu” domain. If you never had one, I will explain: they are associated with academic institutions. That’s right, it was an exclusive enclave for the highly educated (and heavily burdened with student loan debt). What was it like back then?
Circa 2004, Facebook allowed students to publish their class schedule and created a digital dorm room “wall” for “friends” to leave messages. In the early aughts, text messages were pay-per-use, telephone minutes were titrated, and WiFi was not ubiquitous. 4G was unheard of, much less 5G. The first status update function I recall featured a fixed rhetorical template of “[User] is …” I could update it via SMS using predictive text. “Jesse is so excited!. Zack is playing a prank on Slater. Lisa is shopping for red lipstick.” Quaint, really.
An alternative to clunky and proletarian MySpace, Zuckerberg created the digital “third place” that Starbucks valiantly attempted. The application has always begged for our personal information and interests. What classes are you taking? Where are you? With whom do you associate and at what frequency? Hometown identities and tepid political positions fell to the side in collective amazement at the intelligence of campus squirrels across the country.
With a desire to connect with folks who shared interests in our general vicinity, we projectile vomit our data. While this is the Facebook I knew and became conditioned to, in the two decades since, the landscape has unrecognizably changed.
Facebook is your favorite mall.
“What’s on your mind?” That’s the prompt, as of this writing, that Facebook, a social media platform commandeered by Mark Zuckerberg, and subsidiary of Meta, uses to provoke us. In a closed environment inspired by and vaguely reminiscent of Ivy League social stratification, we share our most vulnerable thoughts with our “friends”. So we think when we thumb warrior our way across the QWERTY keyboard.
Or, some of us do. Some just shit-post. What does it matter? Social media platforms thrive on engagement and it turns out that shit-posting is more profitable than thought-sharing.
I do not recall precisely when the Facebook opened admission. But I remember with sickening clarity how I felt when I first downloaded my full Facebook data file. The application collects vast amounts of data, including unpublished status updates, locations from which users post, geotag data from photos, details of the user messages, among a universe of other datapoints. Then, they aggregate the data collected, batch users as advertising demographics, and sell us all to corporate interests, who flood our feed with services and products we probably do not need but definitely would be curious about.
Likewise, the algorithm displays a unique stream of “social” media to each end-user. When the available sources of social engagement were limited to closely-knit college communities, this fostered an environment of discourse, free speech, and open exchange of ideas. Apparently, this was not profitable enough. Once the application opened admission, their user base exploded. Facebook, like Twitter, maintained a straight face as they reported hundreds of thousands and then millions of unique daily users.
Unlike Twitter, Facebook did not get itself tied up in a very public debacle about how many of those users are verifiable humans versus bots. No need; it is obvious, isn’t it? There are a sufficient number of what I will call “hologram” users that outside influencers have more presence in my News Feed than real people.
When I log on to Facebook now, I feel like I am walking into a dilapidate and run-down local mall. There’s a guy harassing me to stop and get my hands rubbed with lotion. As soon as I get past him, I have to dodge the poisons of the sweet shoppe and the food court. What am I doing here again?
Novelty and narcissism precludes regulations and real community
Want to connect with people who have shared interests in your nearby area? Go outside. That’s all it takes.
Why not both? IRL community AND online connection? Gently, the cost is not comparable to the benefit. We now know, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the premiere of The Social Network, that Zuckerberg’s motto of “move fast and break things,” harkened a level of success for the company. But what has it done to the social fabric of our global community?
Assume with me that the “hologram” users are engagement farming tools operated by for-profit or otherwise vested (foreign?) interests. Assume also that negative subject matter, discord, and abusive comments thrive, and that lengthy explication is rejected in favor of memes. Is this where you want to spend your mornings? In a crucible of content designed to spike cortisol?
If that sounds particularly nefarious of a company that claims to want to build a global community, consider that the methodology for getting us all to adopt the platform was literal psychological conditioning. Each notification serves as another hit of dopamine, leading us back to the place where we ant to get a feel-good burst of connection. Instead, we get poison.
Surely, if this application had negative impacts on individual or public health, our legislators and government would step in, right? Wrong. I mean, bless their hearts, they tried. With care toward those with different neurodivergent and socially conditioned or genetically inherited psychological or emotional sensitivities… Zuckerberg played our U.S. Congressional representatives like an autistic fiddle. In the words of Bruno Mars, “don’t believe me? Just watch!”
In my educated opinion, the novelty of social media as a utility-type service and the narcissist tendencies of both the CEO and our congressional representatives worked in synergy to escape even light regulation. To my knowledge, social media companies are not subject to the regulatory authority and framework of any of our federal communications, utility, education, or public health agencies. Social media is the digital wild west of the global world.
What alternatives are there to social media?
Do what you want. My purpose is to call your attention to the facade. I, personally, do not want to be provoked to anger for a few pennies to fall into the coffers of an oligarch. I will not play the game any longer. Instead, I am building a sex-positive and fully self-sustainable mutual aid community. Join me, if you dare.
With gratitude,
Madam M’Lynn ❤
meagandoesmarrero 