Digital Sabbatical
Okay, so I’m just going to come out and say it… What the hell happened to social media? At the beginning of the pandemic, I was feeling incredibly overwhelmed with the amount of information and content that was flooding through my small handheld digital portal to the rest of the world and decided that I’d had enough.
No longer was I going to try and stay plugged in with the latest news events to an unhealthy degree, or even interface with my friends via Instagram and twitter for that matter. I figured if I really wanted to keep in touch with my friends, I could text them or call them up. Especially since, if we’re being honest, neither Instagram or twitter really facilitate what you might call true social interactions, so they weren’t really helping me get much “socialization”" anyways. The way I see it, both Twitter and Instagram are essentially just tools which provide every individual with a soapbox stand for making declarative statements in hopes to garner some sort of attention. Definitely not my vibe, which is pretty unfortunate for me in the capitalistic sense.
For real, it’s some sort of weird fucked up thing when you think about the fact that we’ve normalized the concept of “following” as an acceptable form of “socializing”. I assume “following” was the natural successor the RSS feed, but it still doesn’t really feel like the proper mechanism for facilitating the complexities of what friendship even is. Can we even quantify friendships? Probably not.
Obviously, you can comment and send DMs on those platforms, but these interactions are typically the equivalent of light jabs back and forth sharing a couple of words or sharing a funny relevant meme. I’m not knocking light content sharing, I’m a total believer in the memes as an important tool for web communication and cultural sense making, but there’s a lot of nuance that gets lost on the web when we don’t have mainstream tools for proper long form communication.
Who knows, maybe I’ve just overly-romanticized this image of a world that uses the web not as a tool for maximizing the number of cheap user interactions to facilitate a flywheel of data extraction, but as tool for facilitating deeper connections with strangers who share similar interests or finding common ground with those who are different than us.
Rejoining the Circus
Either way, at the end of 2022 I rejoined the circus and rejoined the “social” frenzy, and was shocked by what I found. Instagram had adopted reels as an attempt to prevent an exodus to tik tok, twitter was bought by Elon Musk and made everyone question whether we should let billionaires own the platforms we use to communicate (when the real question should be, “how do we make these things into protocols that no one person can own?”), and there was some new app called BeReal?
All in all, those findings made me realize the following things.
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Most of social media has basically become a sort of sushi restaurant conveyor belt occupied by people post the same junk over and over in hopes of standing out so you choose to ingest the thing they made, even though there are thousands of identical pieces following close behind.
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Most of that regurgitated junk content fills up a majority of the feed (somewhere between 45%-50%), and when it’s not occupying that feed, 25% of the feed is shitty ads.
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The last 25% of the feed is content from the people you actually want to see content from, AND THEN IT’S NOT EVEN IN ORDER!!!
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You think the people you follow/follow you are your friends, but apparently they aren’t, because a majority of the time I was unplugged, I’d say 95% of them didn’t make an effort to reach out to me (kind of depressing honestly).
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We’re all just pawns in the perpetual content farm that’s designed like an addictive slot machine you can’t get enough of. Even as a returning user that hates it, I can’t help but look away
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As weird as BeReal is, it’s kind of actually dope because I see what is actually happening in my friends lives in real time, and only have to use the app for 10 minutes a day. It’s probably still some fucked up data farm mechanism, but it’s fun for the time being until it dies.
Now What
So where do we go from here? I have no fucking clue. But if I had to say, I’d put my chips on some form of interoperable network that doesn’t use traditional algorithms and has open APIs so that users can build custom applications for connecting. I’m definitely not an innovator in thinking that, but surprise surprise, I’m publishing this blog post on the ethereum blockchain/arweave. If you don’t know what those are, then you probably need another blog post to help you understand, but that explanation ain’t happening here, sorry.
So for now, I’m throwing the towel in and and wrapping it up here. It’s likely that very few people will read this and I’m shouting into the void, but if you did read it, give yourself a pat on the back for sitting through my rantings. I hope there are better social tools ahead of us that might help facilitate our friendship better. Until then, we’re stuck with what we’ve got unless we build something else.
Disclaimer - I’m now realizing that this blog post makes it very much apparent that I may be perpetually “online”, and might sound like I know what I’m talking about, but it’s really just me venting some frustrations I have with the system, so take all of the above with a grain of salt. I just want tools that facilitate more friendship and love in the world, so cheers to that.