I quit Facebook ;)
It was a lengthy relationship, to which I dragged myself back in the summer of 2008.
But, two years is all it took for me to start worrying about Facebook. I suspended my account. As I noted in a post back in 2011, "There are moments when I worry about all this social media network and the internet ..."
That was the first of a few times when I suspended my account and then got back to Facebook after a while. It was a love-hate relationship. I joked about that:
I feel like the heroine in the formulaic Bollywood movies who alternates between yelling "I hate you" to the hero and "I love you" a few minutes after that!
There are a gazillion posts with the label Facebook, which will demonstrate my worries not only about Facebook but about social media, technology, and artificial intelligence.
Technology, the internet, and social media all had good intentions in the beginning, of course. But, it did not take long for them to become the evil forces of darkness. As one of my go-to tech thinkers, Tristan Harris, puts it:
There was pressure from venture capital to grow really, really quickly. There’s a graph showing how many years it took different companies to get to 100 million users. It used to take ten years, but now you can do it in six months. So if you’re competing with other start-ups for funding, it depends on your ability to grow usage very quickly. Everyone in the tech industry is in denial. We think we’re making the world more open and connected, when in fact the game is just: How do I drive lots of engagement?
When it became all about the numbers, soon it was hell on earth:
Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a fucking cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.
What drives this all? The ability of the tech in social media to tap into our primal feelings of anger, rage, hate, and more.
They’re basically trying to trigger fear and anger to get the outrage cycle going, because outrage is what makes you be more deeply engaged. You spend more time on the site and you share more stuff. Therefore, you’re going to be exposed to more ads, and that makes you more valuable. In 2008, when they put their first app on the iPhone, the whole ballgame changed. Suddenly Bernays’s dream of the universal platform reaching everybody through every medium at the same time was achieved by a single device. You marry the social triggers to personalized content on a device that most people check on their way to pee in the morning and as the last thing they do before they turn the light out at night. You literally have a persuasion engine unlike any created in history.
As I wrote in one of my recent posts, We are fucked, folks. But, there is no going back either. Well, I know that I am not going back to Facebook.
