No. It is a tool. Like all tools humans have created, we've decided to bash the working class over the head with it.
Unequivocally YES, humanity was much better off before. MySpace was ok, you could make a profile and link with other like minded people, but Facebook quickly turned everything to trash. Constant “sharing” of shit posts has been extremely detrimental to society. Now that it is largely populated and propagated by bots, it’s even more ruinous.
Social media was not a mistake, it’s a deliberate calculated attack on historical norms of communication and relationship building. A tool to make a deliberate shift from those with fewer but more meaningful relationships to drive change, to utilizing the power of minimally informed crowds turned into mobs that do your bidding.
Nope. Capitalist social media was a mistake, as a corollary of capitalism being a mistake, itself a corollary of developing hierarchical and authoritarian societies being a mistake.
The Fediverse itself provides an imperfect but serviceable implementation of a liberatory social media. The fact that we are both speaking to each other on proletarian class-conscious (in particular, anarchist) servers demonstrates that social media can be useful to spread class-conscious perspectives, in particular anarchist perspectives in direct opposition to State control.
Aren't capitalism and hierarchical societies in general a necessary stage of human development?
Aren't capitalism and hierarchical societies in general a necessary stage of human development?
My answer is no. Capitalism and hierarchical societies have achieved impressive things...in spite of their capitalism and hierarchy, not because of it. If our society went directly to anarchy, we would have been better off by now.
How do you see anarchy in the past (like, say, in ancient Rome)? And why do you think humanity went to hierarchy? Genuinely curious.
How do you see anarchy in the past (like, say, in ancient Rome)?
... Not to be contentious, but ancient Rome was not anarchy in any meaningful sense. Like not even the dictionary definition. Rome was pretty firmly lorded over by a State, and that State maintained the """order""" of the ruling class for generations.
What anarchists mean by "anarchy" is a society without hierarchy. Some hunter-gatherer societies were surprisingly horizontal in their organization, but these societies were not, in general, anarchic, because they likely still had some hierarchies like sexism, in-group/out-group dynamics, and authoritarian social structures. We can look to the past for examples of specific horizontal and anti-authoritarian practices, but none of these societies were truly anarchic because they had not yet grasped the importance of abolishing all hierarchy.
Better (but imperfect) historical approximations of anarchy at scale were Revolutionary Catalonia and the Makhnovshcina.
And why do you think humanity went to hierarchy?
I think the big thing was agriculture. IMO, we were not psychologically prepared as a species to master agriculture so quickly. Some people were able to build up huge stockpiles of resources within a few generations. Once they got their power, they refused to give it up. Thus, the powerful structured our world around their whims over generations. Capitalism is the latest such scheme. Hierarchies maximize the variables authoritarians care about: control, domination, and abuse. It is only natural that abusers establish systems that best reward their kind.
To be clear, I'm absolutely not against agriculture. Quite the opposite! In my view, actively making sure that the fruits of humanity are equally available to all is necessary to break the feedback loop that enabled authoritarians to take power. But more generally: we need to bake horizontalness, autonomy, agency, and free association into all future systems and organizations from minute one.
Depends what you mean by social media.
Digital socialization is not necessarily bad.
Easy self-publishing at scale is not necessarily bad.
A marketplace for human attention, where products are optimized for “stickiness” and “eyeball-hours” is bad, but doesn’t necessarily need to be social media. (Buzzfeed comes to mind, and Ricki Lake before that.)
The social media that we ended up with is essentially a chokehold on the means of digital socialization, forcing users to perform for an audience instead of connecting to individuals, and capturing the economic value of that performance as an asset for the platform owners.
We could’ve ended up with something quite different.
Here’s a hot take though:
Products that are built under these conditions will inevitably tend towards a shape that reflects the logic of the market, and they continue to reflect that logic even when financial incentives are removed.
For instance, Lemmy is very Reddit-shaped, and therefore reflects some of the market logic behind Reddit, even after you stick it on the fediverse.
Edit: Barry’s Economics has an excellent video on exactly what sucks about the social dynamics baked into these platforms: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F9QzXjUB10
Abigail busts some myths about social media and democracy
social media was unavoidable. there's just too much curiosity about the novelty. but yeah, it's questionable today.
Social media was not a mistake, but unregulated social media was.
The whole incentive for businessman to 'innovate' in tech is to skirt around the law. We have had laws about theft for centuries, but now since its 'digital' theft we have to write new laws for some reason?
Just an example, but social media/tech unregulated is what got us here.
When governments tried to regulate digital stuff 30 years ago, we got anti-circumvention laws that let corporations put digital locks on everything that are illegal to break. It would be hard to convince me governments regulating social media 20 years ago would have been anything short of a disaster.
I doubt it would have been all that different, because those laws would have been written by the same capitalist class that runs corporate social media today.
Social media was not a mistake, but unregulated social media was.
You’re so right, the open source, non-profit threadiverse would be so much better if bourgeois states censored us.
I agree, the problem is the Sillicon Valley, VC-backed business model. If it was allowed to develop slower and less commercially, what would evolve would have been much less unhealthy for society
Social media run by corporations based on algorithms designed to maximize engagement was a mistake. It may, however have been inevitable.
By that I mean I'm not sure a clever person with a time machine could go back 25 years and prevent it from having roughly the popularity and influence it does now even if someone with a quarter century of future knowledge tried to outcompete it with something that isn't centralized or optimized for engagement. Those traits were evolutionary advantages over that time period.
I see many problems with it echoing those of mainstream mass media. Especially with the advent of billionaire-owned social media and the increasing viability of automated posting, we see the same inequality present itself - the richest can pay for bigger microphones and astroturf the place. Even just places like Lemmy and connected tools show what a world of difference it makes to be a little further away from the mass bot armies and the profit motive.
I do believe there are some types of social media which can be constructive, but these are not like the general-audience mass social media we see (facebook/insta/tiktok/youtube/reddit) or even the more direct derivatives, like most of the well-known Lemmy instances. But one must have an idea of why the social media is being made and design it around that purpose. Lemmy is ultimately a reddit alternative. And its most popular communities were/are either bunkers for banned communities or clones of subreddits, hosted on very general instances. There's no defining vision. It's an improvement, yes!, but it's far from what a digital social space can be.
I still say the algorithm was the flaw. Misinformation can be combated with facts, but only if you see the rebuttals.
bots and unlabled echo chambers are the worst parts of social media, along with Zelous Moderators that enforce non-existent rules.
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