Prometheus Unplugged

The internet is a scary place and the scariest thing about it is that it is working as intended.

It's a tool for connecting us. Every digital tendril snaking out from the social media leviathans into our lives is there to create a channel where people can talk to people. There are downsides, of course. The erosion of privacy, the dissipation of will and creativity that comes from being a consumer of the endless scroll, the dissonant values of authentic presentation of self and the highly curated versions of the people we wish we were that we project into the feeds of others. That's all there and having a demonstrably negative effect on our individual souls and the macro soul of our culture of a whole.

But each and every one of those downsides are intrinsically tied to the way we use tools as humans. Everything that's shitty about social media is shitty because we made it that way. The negatives aren't externalities imposed from on high by nefarious technocrats or devised by machine intelligences and unleashed algorithmically on an unsuspecting humanity (yet...).

True, advertising pollutes the entire process by creating incentives that prize engagement over any other metric because it is the most valuable. But any system designed to allow humans to communicate with other humans will be co-opted by the atavistic portions of our brains. The mere fact that people can frictionlessly connect and communicate with other people ensures that the future we are living in will come to pass. Pornography comes first with the adoption of any communications tech. Tribalism follows close on its heels, doppler shifting from the high pitched whine of insular niche communities sharing in-jokes to the deep, throaty rumble of nationalists and anti-semites sharing memes and organizing.

But all those impulses were present before the platforms.

We have created social media in our own image - we have seen the monster and it us.