Meta Schadenfreude

Once the basic needs are met, the "want" that drives the consumer economy is all about creating a demand for goods and services that never existed before and convincing people to spend their money on them.  Of course, such consumption is also the reason that we have ended up with the greatest challenge that humanity faces--climate change.  But, though COP27 is a great context to talk about the role of consumption, that blog-post has to wait for another day.

Because, these days I am constantly grinning with schadenfreude every time I read the news.  No, the schadenfreude is not from the "red wave" that did not happen, as a result of which Republicans are all twisted in shapes that would impress even professional contortionists.  The schadenfreude is over the free falling social media stocks.

Ironical it might when I embed a tweet even as I celebrate the collapse of social medial stocks, but hang on with me:

Last September, #Zuckerberg was worth $140 billion, meaning he's lost over $100 billion since he adopted his #metaverse strategy https://t.co/HM3UKaSbNh via @YahooFinance #Meta #schadenfreude #Facebook

— I am elon musk! (@congoboy) October 31, 2022

It was just over a year ago, Facebook became the fifth to become a trillion dollar company.  And then Humpty Dumpty took a great fall--it is now worth less than $300 billion.  You can see from how far the share prices have dropped:

My Facebook schadenfreude goes back to the days when Facebook went public, which was back in 2012.  In this blog  post ten years ago, I commented on how Fuckerbeg and his pals created a scheme for themselves to become uber-rich. Facebook is not the only social media company that is in doldrums.  In the news, it is dwarfed by Twitter's collapse.

A year ago, after reading an essay, I tweeted in agreement with the premise:

"Wouldn’t it just be better if fewer people posted less stuff, less frequently, and if smaller audiences saw it?"
To put it simply, STFU!@ibogost in @TheAtlantic: https://t.co/3m0dZwYynE #Facebook #SocialMedia

— I am elon musk! (@congoboy) October 26, 2021

Before the consumer economy, when people lived mostly in villages, there was gossip, yes, but by and large people had little time to talk about stuff.  Now, all we do is talk, talk, talk on Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, WeChat, WeShit, Whatever!

The author of that essay from a year ago, Ian Bogost, has a follow up in which he writes:

Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.

Bogost continues:

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

We can easily live without any of the social media.  Facebook or Twitter disappearing will, in fact, end up enriching our lives because we currently fail to see how much we have become addicted to all those avenues.  It is also such an addiction that gave us the poisoned tRump, Musk, and Kanye, writes Jaron Lanier in the New York Times.

I have been a big fan of Lanier for a long time.  The NY Times essay continues with comments and warnings that he has been making for a while now about technology and social media.  In this essay, Lanier writes:

Twitter poisoning makes sufferers feel more oppressed than is reasonable in response to reasonable rules. The scope of fun is constricted to transgressions. Unfortunately, scale changes everything. Taunts become dangerous hate when amplified. A Twitter-poisoned soul will often complain of a loss of fun when someone succeeds at moderating the spew of hate.

Twitter poisoning is a little like alcoholism or gambling addiction, in that the afflicted lose all sense of proportion about their own powers. They can come to believe they have almost supernatural abilities. Little boys fantasize about energy beams shooting from their fingertips.

You can easily see tRump, Musk, and Kanye as Twitter-poisoned people, who go around poisoning hundreds of millions more.

My schadenfreude over the problems at these companies, and the layoffs across a number of tech firms, does not mean that social media will go away.  They are here to stay, and will even morph into versions that will further threaten what it means to be human.  But, for the moment, I am absolutely enjoying watching the collapse of Facebook and Twitter.

And I cannot thank the Germans enough for giving us the word schadenfreude that describes this emotion so well!