> one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night
leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the
bag.
When that day comes, the moment Facebook and Meta are declared dead I
will go out, order the most expensive bottle of champagne, and
celebrate all night. Future generations of an advanced technological
society will look back in horror and disbelief that a small cadre of
privateers were allowed to run amok dominating the cultural
communications of billions of people. The harms to individuals and
society will take decades to reckon with. The lost opportunities for
us to evolve instead of "amusing ourselves to death" will be one of
the great questions of the future. "Why, while the planet was
burning", they will ask, "did people spend all day sending each other
selfies?"
The problem is not Facebook or Meta. The problem is the disgusting business model of targeted advertising coupled with algorithmic curation of content to increase ad impressions. Facebook happens (happened?) to play that game perfectly but it's not limited to them by any means and another player will just take its place if Meta dies.
I'll keep my bottle of champagne for the day targeted advertising is regulated away, either on privacy grounds or on "Section 230" grounds (if you're curating content to increase engagement it's fair that you should be considered an editor and thus lose Section 230 protection and start being liable for any inflammatory content you promote to increase engagement).
Its funny how little attention your post got. I consider it the most important take on this subject. This is not about Facebook. It's about a corrupt and destructive business model that reflects the insane world we live in today. When that model goes away, it will reflect on other models that revolve around deceptive business practices. So more to the point, when ethics becomes an integral point of doing business, Then I will celebrate the real achievement of our time.
That's not how Section 230 works: it's explicitly designed so that some editing does not open you to full liability for user provided content (but it's common to think it does the opposite). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no... explains.
Why do you signal out “targeted” advertising? Would it be a different story if they advertising was not targeted? I think it would probably be an even worse junk land.
Why do you consider TikTok to be social media? Isn't it just videos shot in a smartphone aspect ratio + comments and a clever discovery algorithm? Is YouTube also social media?
A reasonable definition of social media is that it refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. "
In other words, roughly: a medium in which media created and consumed by the crowds vs. institutions.
Yes. "YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
Yes? Of course? I don't think there is a solid argument against HN being social media either. Same goes with Discord, Telegram, and Signal.
They are all media that you interact with and also interact with others via. The distinction is made with television/radio, where interaction is purely one-way, and is therefore not social media.
> dominating the cultural communications of billions of people
I think it is much worse than dominating. Let me try: as a FB user, your "communication" with your network is not only mediated by FB, but actively manipulated to such a degree that you're no longer communicating directly with individuals in your network. When we give up the ability or the pattern of communicating directly with each other, bad shit happens.
Well, should really look into the history of communication technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. Television, the telegram, and radio were all dominated by private cos that crushed open competition at every opportunity. Do you ever give that any thought? I recommend The Master Switch by Tim Wu if not!
The day meta is declared dead will be the day some other corporation has released an alternative to Facebook/Instagram/etc, probably worse. Hardly anything to celebrate. The cat is out of the bag.
I'm really curious to know what you think that "cat" is ?
Are you thinking that digital technology is irrevocably corrupted and
hereafter can only be employed toward abusive and manipulative ends?
Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to
damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can
never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear?
Or are you alluding to something within the collective psyche, making
a social-anthropology statement of sorts, that people, having tasted
the ruin of apathy, nihilism and decadence will not recover in spirit
and build a more positive technological world?
Or something else?
I'm genuinely curious what you imagine is the powerful force that
underwrites malevolent entities in the digital realm?
I've said it before and I'll say it again - social media is not the root of the problem here. I believe that there could be a great social media platform that respects its users and their privacy. But the minute you let marketing and sales into the room the game changes. They are the ones that see their users as the advert dollars, not the people building the platform. The highly paid executives whose only goal is to squeeze every last penny out for their own personal gain are the issue. This is a systemic problem in technology today: when the goal is profit first, the end user is lost as the target market.
I'm working for a small company currently and am watching the same thing play out on a much smaller scale. The company was growing organically at a good clip. We've had zero customer churn in 6+ years and service some of the largest companies in their respective verticals. Company fires the current CEO based on board recommendations, hires a CRO who was in sales at Oracle for 7 years, CRO brings in his overpriced underlings to "manage", CRO starts refocusing all concerns around the sales process (starting with making everyone spend an inordinate amount of time learning/relearning MEDDPICC) and tying up hours of the work week in unproductive oversight meetings. Now I haven't been here long but I've seen this play out before. CRO will sit here for 2+ years and milk it into the ground blaming everyone for every failure but himself. He'll even throw his guys under the bus if needed (which is why they're there in the first place - ownership buffer). We're starting to see product issues because of the focal shift internally and the distraction this guy is creating. It's so unfortunate - I've yet to hear the CRO talk about a customer outside of the subject matter of revenue. It's sick and twisted. These types of "executives" are narcissists through and through and they are the toxic seed that kills great companies.
You forgot the part where after 2 years they are shown the door but with a huge payout and glowing references ostensibly because "We don't want to ruin their careers" but actually: We don't want the market to know we hired this idiot and it took us 2 years to work it out and we don't want to be sued by their high-priced lawyers.
Then they take their "success" to the next company and the cycle repeats.
I suppose the technological implementation of a sort of “bad faith” ethos is the cat, here. And as tends to happen with that sort of degradation of values, other organizations pick up the technique since the bar is lowered. That’s my 2 cents anyway.
> technological implementation of a sort of "bad faith" ethos
Indeed, that's what the parent commenter said.
What I do is look at all those historical "slippery slopes of bad
faith" that didn't survive, and ask "Why not?". What changed in
society and stopped that?
Child labour was set to explode in the industrial revolution. Kids as
young as 7 or 8 worked in factories. At the time it would have been
reasonable to extrapolate that in a few decades all children would need
to be employed in mills and mines. And we can talk about slavery, and
disenfranchisement of women, and many more things in the same way.
To take a counter-example, the proliferation of cars on the roads is
something we have not been able to stem through reason alone. I think
this sets up a sense of "technological exceptionalism" in which
theories of determinism currently dominate. In my opinion this is a
very immature (Level 1 civilisation) view of things.
But when we look at all the malevolent trajectories that were
corrected, it always begins when we name it. Naming a problem
(acknowledging it as undesirable) sets in motion the progress towards
overcoming it.
I think we are living through precisely that age with digital
technology. We are in a process of naming, qualifying and
understanding new harms. We are starting to apply the same progressive
models we have for race, gender and public health, to technology. The
course is set. It might seem time is not be on our side, but the
industrialists of today are no more powerful than those of yesterday
against the tides of society.
You are looking at the last 200 to 300 years and extrapolating. I think however that if you expand the horizon to several thousand years what you see is a very different cycle. A cycle where progress is made over a few hundred years and then is all lost. Every time progress is made everyone thinks, this time is different and then they are wrong.
There are substantive differences to this time around. We had a technological explosion for one which meant in terms of technology we jumped much farther forward than we had before. However the same cultural and civil failings are still there and still proceeding in much the same cycle.
I don't think Social Media is evil per-se. I do think that it is an extremely effective Mob amplifier. We used to have mobs form at a local level and their effects rarely managed to expand to a national level. Now we get global mobs via social media. Mob's have been around forever in human society.
They are rarely rational. Even when they are motivated by real problems they often tear down or destroy as much or more of the good as they do the bad. They tend to be indiscriminate and I don't think we are really prepared for the types of Mobs that Social Media enables. Maybe we'll be able to name this for what it is and find a counter to it. But I haven't seen any effective attempts to name the phenomena for what is. Instead I just see yet another Mob forming with a complaint about how companies are getting away with exploiting people. In this case I think it's less exploitation and more just amplification, intended or otherwise.
How do you limit the amplification without limiting free speech?
> Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear?
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the United States? Absolutely yes.
It’s not that profound. Humans have become addicted to sharing every moment of their lives through social media, and then watching what other people have shared. Most people no longer have time to themselves since they feel like if they don’t share what they are doing they aren’t doing anything. And if they aren’t doing anything they have to keep up with others (FOMO). Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.
> People have become addicted to sharing every moment of their lives
through social media
So, pretty much "option 3". A social shift.
> Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more
engaging and therefore malignant platform.
I agree that there has been a profound change in "western" culture,
and about a third of all the world are in this space (a staggering
three billion people!). But I disagree that is an irreversible state
of affairs and therefore a downward spiral towards worse and worse
technology.
Let's not suppose the worst of people. Can they not change. Do all
sick people and addicts remain sick and addicted forever? Or do they
recover?
I wrote a chapter in Digital Vegan that presses a striking metaphor.
The chapter is "Hatland" [1]
It's based on a funny discussion I have with students in lectures
about a photo from the 1940s. Every single person in a crowd of
hundreds of people is wearing a hat! Trilbys, bowlers, caps... men the
women too. In the 40's you just didn't go out without a hat in polite
society. (It's also parodied in Python's "The Meaning of Life")
What people didn't realise is how parochial and fleeting that moment
was. At the time people would have said "The hat is out of the bag!"
A photo from 20 years later has nobody waring hats, but everyone with
long hair and tie-dyes.
By your reasoning we would all be wearing 10ft high top-hats by now,
because "someone else will create an even more engaging and therefore
malignant head wear" :)
It's only when you look at culture as a historian/anthropologist that
you break out of parochialism see the bigger truths.
I don't know that fashion or cultural norms (e.g. hat wearing) are of the same fleetingness as deeper human behaviors like FOMO, narcissism, vanity, etc. These seem so deeply ingrained and transcending hundreds of years that I think it does likely point us in a certain direction.
One might label it a flaw in human evolution (even though it might have had positive selection pressure), something that can be "cured". Perhaps.
> Do all sick people and addicts remain sick and addicted forever? Or do they recover?
I don't know that any significant number of addicts, let alone many or most, ever "recover". But I also don't know that they don't. My money is on the former until we deeply understand addiction and can cure it.
I really appreciate your optimistic perspective — thank you for posting it. I think it's very easy to be cynical and just assume that things will get worse than they are now, and when you do that, you get to be a wise, world-weary and jaded commentator.
It's actually a lot more work to imagine a better society, because that requires actual ideas for what could be different and how we might get there. Saying, "things will be the same but worse" is a lot easier than saying, "things could be different and better, and here's how". (Full disclosure: I'm stealing this idea from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, which I'm currently reading and thoroughly enjoying.)
Notwithstanding its potential to become (or current reality as) a propaganda tool of the Chinese government, based on my very limited experience with it, TikTok actually feels both healthier and stupider (in a vapid entertainment sense) than Facebook and Twitter. I have yet to be outraged by anything I've encountered on TikTok, whereas if I so much as glance at a tweet on Twitter on its web interface, while not logged in, I'm almost guaranteed to be presented with other tweets from people who infuriate or disgust me. Discord also feels healthier than either of those platforms, it's really just a much better version of IRC. As such, perhaps we are already seeing a more healthy ecosystem emerge.
But setting aside the platform side of things, this discussion [1] on the Ezra Klein show calls the current disruptive era "transitory" in the same way that the dawn of other communication media were disruptive and transitory. Eventually, people adjust. Perhaps we are on our way to becoming immune to attention hijacking, outrage politics and FOMO. Speaking for myself, I've certainly become far better at resisting the pull of those phenomena.
> Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Maybe this will end a different way.
For n=me, I've used facebook when I was younger but stopped using it (and all other social networks for their stated purpose - sharing and connecting) when the algos replaced the chronological order and tried to shove odorless excrement in my eyes non-stop. I'm not looking for a new one.
What I do now? I have a couple of private Signal groups where I and my friends shoot the shit. That's where I get most social value out of the Internet. I use Twitter for news. I use Reddit a bit for trash-browsing. That's it.
Now, this might be a function of me getting older and grumpier and preferring meeting people I already know, sure. I wouldn't however assume that this all will end in a more and more terrible "social" networks. Then again, I might be totally off base because I see that TikTok is eating facebook's lunch and it's not any better for humanity I think.
When that day comes, the moment Facebook and Meta are declared dead I will go out, order the most expensive bottle of champagne, and celebrate all night. Future generations of an advanced technological society will look back in horror and disbelief that a small cadre of privateers were allowed to run amok dominating the cultural communications of billions of people. The harms to individuals and society will take decades to reckon with. The lost opportunities for us to evolve instead of "amusing ourselves to death" will be one of the great questions of the future. "Why, while the planet was burning", they will ask, "did people spend all day sending each other selfies?"