6.b Social Media and Anti-Culture

With he launch of Facebook's (sorry, Meta's) so-called "Twitter-killer" in Threads there's been a lot of discourse online about the role of a site like Twitter, and how various competitors in the space do things.

So far, Threads has been a wildly popular. Within its first week on the app store, it's been downloaded over 100 million times. That's like, bonkers! And according to a very narrow metric of "success" it is undeniably the most successful app ever.

Only, as people have been pointing out, it's yet another example of large corporations in the tech sector influencing the culture outside of its borders. This article captures the essence of what I'm talking about very well; the whole point of Meta's obsession with user growth and engagement is to build a platform that brands and advertisers will pay access for, and maintain accounts on.

A term I like from that article: Meta's Algorithms Are Automated Digital Gentrification. In other words, there are a particular group of "haves" with an agenda to make a place that, outwardly, appears to be for all; however, their actions and desires manifest in creating a culture or environment that benefits them to the exclusion of the other "have-nots". We have been sorted into different groups, and your blue check mark signifies you as a member of one group or another.

"Vaporposting" is another thing that is endemic to the modern internet, and in my opinion a particular "engine" for this type of anti-culture.

Brands and influencers essentially are posting "digital ephemera," materials that aren't meant to have any lasting power; they are incredibly and inexorably tied to a particular moment and idea, meant to serve a specific external purpose. I think that, while def.Ephemera has been around for a long time, digital ephemera hits a little differently.

There are certain markers that we've learned to understand when it comes to ephemera in life; things like low quality materials, or have certain "names" ("mailers," "programs," "handouts," etc.). But digital "objects" don't have nearly as much differentiating qualities, and that's largely because of the "bounded" nature of digital systems; that is, one's access isn't limited by one's imagination, but rather limited by the imagination of the engineers of the system.

By way of comparison, a sheet of paper and a pen is only limited by a few things:

1. the availability of resources (space on paper, ink in pen);
2. the skill of the person with the pen to render their ideas (either with pictures or symbols);
3. the constraints of a two dimensional universe (using only X and Y axes);

However, a digital system has many more constraints:

1. availability of resources, but there are more of them to take into account (an often expensive device like a phone or laptop, electrical power, digital input systems like a mouse and keyboard, or touchscreen, etc. in addition to "space" like memory and processing power)
2. skill of the person to navigate that system (familiarity with the device, knowledge of the operating system, understanding of the application in use, etc.)
3. constraints of a designed universe, rather than one we can "intuit" or "see" in other things

This is a slightly tangential topic, but an important one. I think that it's key to realize how important we take these "imaginary chains" for granted. It's almost like, we're at a stage in digital development reminiscent of visual art before the Renaissance.

Artists were trying to "render" their ideas in 2 dimensional space, and were having a really hard time because techniques and understanding of how to use that space wasn't yet developed. As such, many compositions are "flat" and, while beautiful, relatively "primitive." It wasn't until painters and sketch artists "discovered" perspective, the way of tricking the eye into seeing a 3 dimensional illusion on a 2 dimensional plane, that we were able to more adequately take advantage of what we had.

Similarly, digital objects and devices are bottlenecked at their input methods and avenues for output.

Before the keyboard, computer used punch cards and gates. When we learned how to encode bits and create operating systems, we developed the keyboard to interface.

Before the mouse, a GUI wasn't the same as it is today; computers weren't "spacial" but strictly one dimensional. YOu