Antisocial media

Any social metagame is cancerous at best and corrosive at worst.

Earlier I found myself scrolling through the profiles and networks of my profile on Substack and Twitter, clicking through names I recognised and soaking in all of the data about them, what they’re up to, and who they are connected to. It felt wrong, somehow, but I couldn’t understand right away why. Once I started thinking about it, it hit me: this is the stuff that you cannot care about.

Many of the people online I am estranged from maintain a social network, and that network exists around their person, regardless of their merit to the world. They are going to have friends, because that’s what people do, generally speaking. Unfortunately, social media suggests that this network is not the unremarkable den of chatter and kinship that it is, but something more: it is their ‘following’. It puts a person who is irrelevant on a kind of pedestal and makes them out to be more fundamentally prolific than they actually are. You cannot care about this without going insane or becoming a parody of yourself.

I realised the thing that disgusts me about seeing these things is not what they are, but that I am seeing it, and that it is insinuated through presentation that this is a basis for some kind of great success or notoriety that does not actually exist. It makes it appear like they have something they do not deserve, or that they have something I deserve but lack. None of that is true. They are irrelevant, just like everyone else. Until we’re receiving awards from institutions or being written about in reputable magazines (no, Substacks do not count, no matter how popular they are), we are too.

Social media causes amnesia of the value of content in the first place. It smears away that initial impetus of news, events, and creative good, manipulating it just long enough to catch people’s curiosity, and then like a virus it unloads a big nasty metagame of social graphing on top of it, entrapping the user in delusions of measure. A person with 50,000 followers is not successful or desirable in any sense of the word. They are not worth listening to. They don’t have interesting thoughts. A false consensus has been created to tell you that the dog shit they write is actually good.

While much of this is accelerated by the incidence of bots, to be sure, I think the observation I made earlier brings home that this is more fundamental to the medium. Maybe a more honest medium would be the old forum software, with the download link to whatever you care about. Remember all the places that would try to put download links behind registration? Yeah, that was pretty dumb of them. I think the same egotism is at work on Twitter and Substack.

I’m gonna stop calling it social media and start calling it antisocial media. Anyone who questions me about it will be asked to explain how it’s not an accurate descriptor. And then I’ll be on my forums.