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I Think I Understand Why Social Media Are Evil [1]

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Date: 2023-04-12  

It occurred to me the other day that the reason we don’t seem to be able to get out of the climate change trap is that human beings are very poor at collective reasoning. As individuals, we are the most intelligent creatures ever to walk the earth, but as a species, we’re not very smart at all. We consume resources as thoughtlessly as any other animal, even if as individuals we know that we’re doing so. We can’t help ourselves, because only by thinking and acting collectively can we escape the trap… and we can’t do that. If we recognize that the root of the problem is that there are too many of us on the planet, in the very next breath we complain that people aren’t having enough children to support us in our old age.

What does that have to do with social media, you ask? Well, as much as we seem to be incapable of thinking collectively, our species is very cable of collective feeling. Fear and anger, in particular, are very infectious, and can quickly turn a crowd into an angry mob. Social media facilitate that; they are conduits for the propagation of violent emotion. While they can be used for many other things, they are ill suited to intelligent discussions or decision-making. People coo over cat videos or pictures of newborn nieces and nephews one moment, and then instantly become outraged at some horror propagating across the network, a horror that need not even be real. Political decisions seem increasingly driven not by careful consideration of fact or reasoned analysis, but by blind emotion. They’re coming to get us! We have to stop them, or it’s the end of the world!

In the days of Usenet, it used to be said that all discussions eventually lead to someone comparing something to Hitler and the Nazis, at which point the discussion is effectively over. A friend of mine invented a Usenet-themed variant of Monopoly where if you drew the Hitler card from Chance or Community Chest, the game instantly ended, unless someone else held a card that converted Hitler into a food thread, in which case the game could keep going.

But nowadays Hitler is often the first point of comparison. Putin is Hitler; DeSantis is Hitler; Trump is Hitler; Republicans are Nazis, and this is 1933. These aren’t rational statements, but reflect pure fear, fear too easily passing from one heart to another in cyberspace in the blink of an eye. Reason says that Trump is only a con artist surfing a wave of fear and hatred, and that it is the wave, and not the surfer, that is the real threat. FDR put it best: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. And nothing amplifies and propagates our fears better than these social media we have created.

Remember the Borg from “Star Trek”? The emotionless hive-mind that sought to “improve ourselves” by assimilating species after species into its collective may be an excellent metaphor for western culture, but it is the antithesis of what humanity becomes when people’s minds are networked. Emotions run wild, and no logical thought seems to be possible. A real-life Borg would be a seething mass of ill will and indiscipline, incapable of acting on anything but its worst instincts. It would be enough to make Mr. Spock flee the galaxy.

The answer, it seems to me, is to shut social media down. Older media were based on curation; an editor or program director stood in the center, imposing some order on the flow of information, filtering out the noise, and giving prominence to ideas and thoughts that were based on reason. This is what we need, particularly as we face difficult challenges such as climate change. Twitter, Facebook, and Tiktok should all go away. Even sites such as this one tend to bring out the worst in us, I think.

What do you think?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/12/2163573/-I-Think-I-Understand-Why-Social-Media-Are-Evil

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