SOCIAL MEDIA IS EVIL

I liked social media when it first appeared. It gave me the chance to get in touch with old friends and see what they’re up to in life. I became disturbed when I noticed personality quizzes pop up that my friends would share with me and which I never took. The number of these quizzes multiplied rapidly after 2010,  My first thought was that these quizzes would be used to develop personality profiles to manipulate people for advertisers. At the time, I didn’t imagine they would be used to tear apart the United States.

I briefly worked in advertising at the turn of the century during the original dot com bubble.  Aside from first hearing the words “eyeball capture” it was also the dawn of guerrilla marketing in the service of major brands: graffiti tags, hiring attractive infiltrators to go to bars and push specific liquor, fake “events” to push products and on and on. The easiest way to manipulate people is for it to be fun and not let them know they’re being manipulated. The purpose of the manipulation is to suck money out of their pockets for things they don’t need. It all moved online with MySpace and then Facebook.

Social media allows us to present an idealized version of ourselves. Very few people post pictures of what they look like when they wake up, of their dirty old car, of their overgrown or dried up lawn, or of them and how they spend most of their time – alone, hunched over a computer screen. Instead they post those rare moments when they’re happy, surrounded by friends, at an exciting event or when they’re all dressed up and put together. In the movie business it is called hyper-reality. It breeds jealousy among friends, family and acquaintances over the simulated life that the poster doesn’t even have.

The social media companies hired psychologists to figure out how to get us to spend more time on their apps to addict us with little rewards such as likes and page views, to figure out how to more effectively manipulate us for the benefit of advertisers. The effect this has had on adults who grew up in the analog age is alarming, the effect it has on our children is horrific. Genuine human interaction breeds a coming together of opinion as humans are social animals but in the world of social media it leads to an atomization of opinion as people interact with AI, bots and trolls. People forego real relationships and experiences for ersatz life – cold, inhuman and predatory.

The need for clicks, likes and “engagement” causes news organizations and opinion makers to aim for hyperbole and extremism as it’s the surest way to guarantee ad revenue. The dirty secret of youtube and social media political sites is that they get half their views from people who hate them, so their is an incentive to antagonize opponents rather than engage with them.

Our geopolitical opponents knew all this. China could see the likely outcome and protected themselves with the great firewall to prevent foreigners from stirring up malcontent at home.  Our amoral tech companies engaged with Russia and China to create market share at the expense of their fellow citizens, allowing the Chinese to develop a powerful social monitoring system and the Russians to aid the splitting apart of the American people using social media.

Studies have found that the more people use social media, the more depressed they become. I think that is inarguable and it’s only going to get worse as Alexa, our phones and even our TVs now spy on us to continue building our online profiles to offer us up for sale and manipulation to the highest bidder.

I have friends on every side of the political spectrum and I’ve refused to let the divisiveness of social media affect those friendships.  Only by unplugging and having real conversations can we build real community.  I can’t subject myself to the manipulation machine that is social media any longer as I feel it warps us into something we are not.

I’ll be permanently leaving Facebook in a couple of days as I cannot be a part of something that is damaging humanity and causing so much unhappiness, so if you want to check in on my writing, this will soon be the only place you find it as I’ll eventually leave Twitter as well.

My advice to social media “users” is to quit and rejoin the human race.

Freewill – Rush