Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that short-form social media in general (Twitter and imitators, Instagram, TikTok) is essentially a failed set of media. But I'll concede that's like cramming a Zyn pouch in my mouth while making fun of a guy chain-smoking Marlboros.
I've read speculation that in 30-50 years people will have an attitude towards social media that we have towards cigarettes now.
That would be really nice but that scenario feels pretty optimistic to me on a few points. For one, scientists doing research were able to overcome the lobbying influence and paid think tanks of cigarette companies. I am worried science as a public institution isn't in good enough shape to do that nowadays. Likewise part of the push back against cigarettes included a variety of mandatory labeling and sin taxes on them, and it would take some pretty major shifts for the political will for that kind of action to be viable. Well maybe these things are viable in the EU, the US is pretty screwed.
The only people I trust as little as I trust the owners of corporate social media are the politicians who have decided to cash in on the moment by "regulating" them. I mean, here in progressive Massachusetts, the state house of representatives just this week passed a bill that, depending on the whims of the Attorney General, would require awful.systems to verify the ages of its users by gathering their government-issued IDs or biometrics. We are, you see, a "public website, online service, online application or mobile application that displays content primarily generated by users and allows users to create, share and view user-generated content with other users". And so we would have to "implement an age assurance or verification system to determine whether a current or prospective user on the social media platform" is 16 or older. (Or 14 or 15 with parental consent, but your humble mods lack the resources to parse divorce laws in all localities worldwide, sort out issues of disputed guardianship, etc., etc.) The meaning of what "practicable" age verification is supposed to be would depend upon regulations that the Attorney General has yet to write.
So, yeah, as an old-school listserv nerd who had the I am not on Facebook T-shirt 15 years ago, I don't trust any of these people.
I'm not quite so pessimistic. It's important to remember that the actual practical purpose of the extant corporate social media* is to convey targeted advertising; i.e. an optimization (possibly the last optimization) on American management of global supply chains. Those supply chains were already starting to be optimized past their breaking point: flooded with dissatisfactory junk, easily spoofed by low-quality sellers, on top of broader externalities besides. And now, they have now been blasted into fine dust by a failed presidency partially funded by the social media and online advertising barons. It may yet be something of a self-correcting problem, albeit having done substantial damage in the meantime.
*Twitter is now a fully dedicated advertising campaign for Elon Musk's program of white supremacy, with financial returns no object. It's not quite going according to plan. By this time next decade, the Twitter microblogging permutation of the tech may be thoroughly killed, and if not it'll be disgustingly cringe. Who do you think you are posting like that, Baby Trump?!?!
The collapse of the current American management of global supply chains isn't exactly an optimistic expectation, but I guess it beats social media continuing as it is into the future and maybe a better global order will develop in the aftermath.
Haven't seen any estimates of death toll due to social media but cigarettes is/was pretty staggering (20-40m), way too big to hide - https://www.ucpress.edu/books/golden-holocaust/hardcover - if it's "only" 50 years to flip the consensus on social media, that would be a faster process, I do hope its possible though. Tobacco execs had the good sense to keep a relatively low profile compared to Zuck and Musk, so that might speed it up.