The beauty of social media is that it allows people to stop thinking . . . and nobody else notices. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
Once we’ve made “digital visibility” the primary source of our identity, status and self-respect, we’ve doomed ourselves to wandering, compass-less, in a vast artificial wasteland.
That social media is addictive is self-evident. The temptation to continue scrolling is as limitless as the vast wasteland of content.
The destructive nature of this addiction is also self-evident. The net result of this addiction is depression, anxiety and rising rates of self-harm and suicide.
The immense profitability of addiction to screens and social media establishes the corporate incentives to increase their addictive power and thwart attempts to limit this profitable power. Who cares about self-harm and depression when shareholder value is at stake?
Though social media is pitched as connecting us all, it’s actually about control: the platforms control the flow of user-created content, the addictive mechanisms and the monetization of user engagement.
What’s less obvious is the incentive for users to keep creating content for the tech platforms to monetize. This is of course the great “innovation” of social media: entice users to create content so the corporation gets all this content for free. The second “innovation” is to monetize the users’ attention / “engagement,” a two-fer: monetize the free user-created content and then monetize the addicted users who can’t stop scrolling.
I admit to laughing at videos of people falling into manhole covers, driving into a body of water, walking right off a pier while deep in hiveborg world.
May they enjoy the simulacrum delusion to the point of intoxication.
After all, it stops any of the noticing.
Monkey see, monkey doo fling.