I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call.
Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta.
I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.
I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.
I was one of those technology skids at that time and had more hope for the world. It was a time before I learned ****** was an *** *** *********** job. Before I watched Ron Paul collect the largest grassroots donation drive ('Moneybomb') and then his reach get clubbed like a baby seal by the establishment thereafter. It made me realize The Farm is real and what slop most Farm animals enjoy is just that: slop, prepared in a manner which makes the animal more useful/productive relative to cost. I also realize that there are complexities to ascending to the class of Farmer (or merely Farm-hand) which call for the cybernetic sentimental feedback system being built. How do you manage a farm of human livestock and not get killed? How do you do it in such a way that you can plan a hundred years out and hand it all off to your choice grandson(s)?
I’ve been saying for a while that I expect the next big “veganeque” movement to be some kind of modern luddites. Maybe not as detached from modern society as the Amish, but a more 90s-like tech scene.
No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums.
Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook.
I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades.
Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.)
It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles.
I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.
I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.