> 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.
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.
[1] https://digitalvegan.net