The people who run social media sites knew all the stuff in your 2nd paragraph would happen from about 2010 onward.
I… remember reading blogs of people working for them, explaining how a human brain can’t really handle knowing or having more than roughly 50 to 100 friends, after some threshold is passed, your brain switches into another mode of social thinking.
… And they knew that, and so much more, and exploited the fuck out of literally everyone, first to sell ads, then they realized data was the new oil.
Yeah, basically, social media was a mistake.
Algos will always naturally ‘conclude’ that the best way to drive engagement is to promote things that make people paranoid and angry, and speak to their insecurities, and make them worse.
Now we can literally buy an AI neck pendant friend for $99, for people who are so pathetic and so in need of validation they will just literally buy a simulacra of a friend, because socialization itself has been destroyed.
We are living through a kind of cyberpunk dystopia somehow more insidious and fundamentally debasing of what it even means to be human than any author I’ve read predicted or warned against.
My response so far has been ‘the only winning move is not to play’, I will never tie my real identity directly to any web presence ever again, nuked all my shit, everywhere, when Cambridge Analytica broke.
They have been social engineering with supercomputers for a decade now, and it is more or less making them so much money they literally do not know what to do with it, as it hollows out everyone and everything, acts as gasoline on their accelerationist fire.
… call this a parasocial relationship if you want, but I miss David Bowie.
I am old enough that I remeber having to actually memorize phone numbers, used a phone booth a few times, could navigate around my town and generally on highways without a GPS/Map mounted to the dash.
The kids barely ever knew the analog world, and its not like us Millenials are any better parents than ours were.
When the infrastructure starts to give out, from climate disasters, or people can’t afford it any more due to economic depression…
A bunch of people are basically going to go into withdrawl and become feral.
Why think, why learn? AI does it for you!
Untill that service is no longer available in your area.
I’m old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad’s truck. Didn’t have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.
I don’t think there’s any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I’d like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn’t make it.
I wanna poke fun at you for actually having an 8 track, but at this point, culture is auto-cannibalizing, so I think we should just mostly celebrate, and maybe personally archive, what was once good.
The people who run social media sites knew all the stuff in your 2nd paragraph would happen from about 2010 onward.
I… remember reading blogs of people working for them, explaining how a human brain can’t really handle knowing or having more than roughly 50 to 100 friends, after some threshold is passed, your brain switches into another mode of social thinking.
… And they knew that, and so much more, and exploited the fuck out of literally everyone, first to sell ads, then they realized data was the new oil.
Yeah, basically, social media was a mistake.
Algos will always naturally ‘conclude’ that the best way to drive engagement is to promote things that make people paranoid and angry, and speak to their insecurities, and make them worse.
Now we can literally buy an AI neck pendant friend for $99, for people who are so pathetic and so in need of validation they will just literally buy a simulacra of a friend, because socialization itself has been destroyed.
We are living through a kind of cyberpunk dystopia somehow more insidious and fundamentally debasing of what it even means to be human than any author I’ve read predicted or warned against.
My response so far has been ‘the only winning move is not to play’, I will never tie my real identity directly to any web presence ever again, nuked all my shit, everywhere, when Cambridge Analytica broke.
They have been social engineering with supercomputers for a decade now, and it is more or less making them so much money they literally do not know what to do with it, as it hollows out everyone and everything, acts as gasoline on their accelerationist fire.
… call this a parasocial relationship if you want, but I miss David Bowie.
If they only still made them like Bowie…
I agree with everything that you’ve said, it’s sad and pathetic, but we’ve invited the monster inside. The calls are coming from inside the house now.
Black Mirror?
Oh, you mean the phone you hold in front of your face all the time, everyday, right?
When the screen’s not on… literally black, glossy, relflective…
Please tell me I am not the only person who immediately made that association when that show came out.
You definitely aren’t.
I really do feel terribly for Gen Z and A.
I am old enough that I remeber having to actually memorize phone numbers, used a phone booth a few times, could navigate around my town and generally on highways without a GPS/Map mounted to the dash.
The kids barely ever knew the analog world, and its not like us Millenials are any better parents than ours were.
When the infrastructure starts to give out, from climate disasters, or people can’t afford it any more due to economic depression…
A bunch of people are basically going to go into withdrawl and become feral.
Why think, why learn? AI does it for you!
Untill that service is no longer available in your area.
I’m old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad’s truck. Didn’t have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.
I don’t think there’s any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I’d like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn’t make it.
“We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far…”
I wanna poke fun at you for actually having an 8 track, but at this point, culture is auto-cannibalizing, so I think we should just mostly celebrate, and maybe personally archive, what was once good.