“Social Media is dead…”
“What we call social media networks are anything but…”
Conspiracy Revelation: 1.4.2023: Very complete and well-written summary…
“by Edward Ongweso Jr
November 8, 2022”
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“TikTok, which is now either the first or second most popular website on the internet, is nominally “social media.”
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“We could mourn the loss of social media and debate the reasons for this shift…combined with basic degradation of the platforms in the search for profit—or we could seize the moment and arrive at a more radical conclusion: that true social media doesn’t actually exist, and never did.”
…. What we do have, and sometimes enjoy, are a series of communication networks interested in providing a paltry simulacrum of sociality in service of behavior modification and profit maximization.
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It’s important to keep this in mind because forgetting that we don’t actually have real social networks—that is, networks centered on bonds and groups that go beyond content or consumption…”
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“Today, we recognize that the technologies responsible for social media do not always harmoniously synergize with one another to create wonderful communities.
It’s relatively easy for these networks to incite a genocide, spark a mental health crisis, radicalize people, black out entire countries, and surveil specific populations. ”
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“The solution isn’t to simply collectively choose another alternative, but to mobilize to undermine the current system, which, again, is hostile at every level to alternatives.”
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“hostile to anything
but the anti-social arrangements we were tricked into calling social media.
It’s also that our politics are hostile to it, our economics are hostile to it, our legal codes are hostile to it, and our culture is hostile to it.
With all of this in mind, it makes sense that the communication networks we call “social media” dominate today.
This is a world where the geopolitics of the Cold War gave birth to Silicon Valley and the military collaboration behind what we call the internet; it´s a world where the economics of post-World War II gave birth to a surveillance regime ensuring production and consumption sustained a golden age of capitalism. Ours is a world where the hegemon’s political system is dominated by the interests of profiteers, monopolists, rent-seekers, and asset managers trying to swim amid declining rates of profit, financializing everything they can at the risk of creating increasingly unstable asset bubbles.
These are not things that engender the creation of networks where we can socialize with one another, but instead where we watch others to an extent and are more actively watched by larger, private sector institutions interested in figuring out how to turn a profit (as well as governments interested in surveilling or controlling their populations).”
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“And, until there´s a fundamental shift, we will never see true social media on a massive scale.”
Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgv79/social-media-is-dead