Life After This Social Media Dystopia
A favourite trope of science fiction is dystopian future worlds for humanity. When it comes to the world of social media, it’s not a future. It’s very much reality today. It’s not all dystopia in social media land though. Overall, social media platforms can and have been very valuable to humanity. Fixes are needed. Eventually, the current dystopia phase will be gone. So what will the future behold for social media and human cultures? Is some kind of massive schismogenesis underway?
Who’s to blame for the current dystopia?
If we want to blame the tech companies that built social media platforms and services for this mess, we might as well blame the neandertals for inventing fire and whoever invented the wheel for todays car culture and those from the iron age who invented the iron sword for all of today’s modern weaponry. Humans have been inventing technologies without really considering the consequences ever since we fell out trees, stumbled around and figured out how to make tools.
All technologies have unintended consequences. We make and use them anyway. Zuckerberg and the twins could not have known they’d end up being front stage for global politics and sociocultural disasters. Nor did Dorsey think that eventually he’d have to ban a sitting American president from his platform. Where these platforms have failed, is in taking responsibility fast enough. But at the same time, these are seriously complex problems with no single answer that require a whole of society approach to resolving. This current dystopian state of affairs with social media rests on the shoulders of the tech companies leadership, lawmakers and civil society.
Why Did Social Media Become So Dystopian?
Throughout history, when humans have invented mass communication technologies, conflicts have often followed. The more of humanity the communication technology reaches, the more it reduces friction and enables organisation, the more intense and wider the conflicts that arise.
This is in large part because of cultures colliding. As culture is the knowledge we use to navigate our daily lives, when we can communicate it at scale to other cultures, inter-cultural frictions arise. In geopolitics this is soft power. Such as Western European countries during the “enlightenment” (I’m not sure many people really felt more enlightened when they were forcibly colonized), cultural elements of colonizers acted as a projection of soft power. This continues today.
Social media, via the platform technology of the internet, enabled everyone to jump on board. It was very messy. It still is and it will be for a while yet. Social groups, cultures, they all crashed together. In the early days, democracies predicted the end of autocracies. Until autocracies figured out how to weaponize it against democracies and also use it as a tool of oppression. And the crazies all came out too. The trolls, the cyberbullies, the scammers, the conspiracy theorists. These have always been present in human societies. It’s just that it became as easy for them as it did the good folks who do wonderful things on social media.
We Now Know Better
Through the travails of social media and other technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and cryptocurrency however, we do, across industry, government and society, now better understand that all these technologies are neutral, but can and will be used by human societies for good and bad. While it is impossible to predict at the starting stages of a new technology or platform, all the unintended consequences, we can build a framework to do some form of forward thinking about possibilities. We have enough tools to anticipate where we may need regulatory oversight, to at least be aware and prepare.
Will This Dystopia End?
The short answer is yes. What we can’t know is when, for how long will this go on and how we’ll resolve it. It likely won’t be one singular event where we wake up one day and social media is all cats, puppies and unicorns. Social media is now the warp and woof of the fabric of human global society. But it will and is, changing, for good and bad.
We like, as humans, to imaging that big changes happen suddenly. Like we thought happened with agriculture. One day we were humming along, plucking berries from bushes and the next day we were toiling in the fields. Turns out, agriculture came and went with hundreds of cultures over many thousands of years. It became what it is today, slowly.
It is unlikely that all the trolls will go away, that the crypto scams and social engineering hacks will entirely end. Already we are seeing various attempts to address the dark issues of social media. The EU privacy laws and competition rules, the hearings in U.S. Congress and the Canadian and British parliaments. Lawmakers are always slow, but they’re waking up.
Citizen watchdog groups and helpers are starting to pop-up. Consumers are changing how they use social media, especially as they increasingly distrust the major platforms like Meta, TikTok and others for surveillance capitalism. Civil litigations for things like defamation are increasing. Everyday folks are learning to tune out and disregard trolls, teaching each other how to be resilient. As quickly as new scams pop up, we’re sharing them to defeat them.
It’s not going to be perfect. Social media is a global phenomenon affecting so many cultures. Each culture addressing it in different ways as much as governments will have different approaches. What is interesting however, is that we are seeing the evolution of sociocultural norms at a global scale being evolved. A sort of collaborative schismogenesis, that hopefully becomes complementary on the good side and depletes the bad influences on the system.
Social media platforms and tools are going to change and evolve in the coming years. This will be driven less by the technologists themselves than civil societies, cultures and governments who will excerpt their pressures. Business models will have to evolve. Advertising models on social media platforms are already suffering. Change is afoot.
