The tech bro era of social media is in flames. That, more than anything, seems crystal clear here at the end of 2022.
Facebook, despite still being widely used, has seen the writing on the wall; CEO Mark Zuckerberg has all his attention set on virtual reality. Instagram is losing cultural relevance as it is also struggling to compete with TikTok, in part because that latter app isn’t social media, but more akin to TV.
Meanwhile, Twitter seems to be careering about like a toddler just learning to walk, with new CEO Elon Musk lurching from one ill-considered new policy to another.
It’s not that billions won’t continue to use these platforms, at least for now.
Rather, it’s that the future of how we connect, discover, and communicate online has to now move away from these massive global platforms, and the aggressive Californian ideology behind them.
In a sense, social media has been a global experiment: let’s unleash an entirely new mode of disseminating information, socializing, and consuming media and see what happens!
Consider what happened recently with the release of the ChatGPT chatbot, an artificial intelligence project that can produce convincing bits of text, even song lyrics or poetry, but can also spit out wrong or biased information.
How, in light of this new tool, do you now trust what you are reading? It’s a question the makers of the ChatGPT either never considered, or simply didn’t care to think about.
Attempts to now rein in or somehow moderate that technology are being called “censorship” by AI proponents, such as prominent tech investor Marc Andreessen.
As this is happening, Elon Musk and a broad cadre of Silicon Valley power figures including David Sacks and Peter Theil, have taken on a mission to destroy what they call “the woke mind virus,” a sort of right-wing, catch-all term for any politics concerned with the vulnerable or marginalized.
This is the version of tech whose death we cheer on or encourage.
When the platforms of modern digital life are run by people increasingly radicalized and hostile to ordinary human decency and kindness, it’s time to move on.
A difficult question, though: if we are to move on, where will we go?
Social media are dominated by what are called network effects: you go or stay where the people in your network are, which encourages a sort of stickiness. That’s why it’s so hard to leave them — and why I, too, am struggling to quit Twitter, even though I think I should.
But these network effects come with disadvantages. The bigger a network gets, the more difficult it becomes to find community. And moderation becomes more difficult, whether in controlling spam or bots, or in clamping down on hate and harassment.
Perhaps, then, it is the very centralization that’s the problem … when people like Elon Musk say they want something like Twitter to be a global town square.
Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, seems to believe this is true. In a post he put up this week, he tried to address the problems social networks face in moderating content, such as in the botched handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story (links to the New York Post story were briefly hidden for a day).
He suggested that the only way forward was for social media to offer more user control, more transparency about how content is moderated, and that, instead of one central network, you should get to choose from a variety of smaller of ones, all of which would be able to plug in to each other.
Dorsey’s basic idea that enormous global networks would be better replaced by smaller, more niche creations, holds promise.
Twitter alternative Mastodon, which has seen significant growth since the Musk takeover, works on what’s called a federated model; instead of one worldwide network, Mastodon is made up of many small networks, all of which can talk to one another.
It is, however, intimidating to novices, and also clunkier and more confusing than its mainstream rivals.
What is necessary is a midpoint between the ease-of-use of the incumbents, and the independent, more local ethos of newer alternatives.
The future of social networks will be smaller, less centralized.
For that to occur, a lot needs to happen: agitation by users for change, perhaps state regulation, and broad social change.
But maybe more than anything, it’s time for the tired tech bro approach — arrogant; devil-may-care; inured to the concerns of the marginalized — to be put to rest.
The ash after a brush fire is said to be very fertile. As we head into a new year, it may well be time to consider fanning the flames burning social media. From the burnt-out embers, something new and better may grow.
