the prophets of social media's demise

Social media doomers are thinking of what will replace big platforms as they fail. They may be jumping the gun on that...

Here’s an unexpectedly important question of our times. What would it take for you to stop using social media? Not everything that falls under the umbrella, of course, some form of social interaction online always existed and will continue to exist. Just any big, globe-spanning platform, the kind currently trying to take over the web to completely dominate all online traffic with the Zero Click Internet project.

That’s what James O’Sullivan, an academic studying how modern technology affects us and our culture, wants to know. His argument is that Big Tech platforms are lost to the exponential explosion of AI slop, out of control influencers farming engagement by any means necessary, purposefully driving outrage and toxicity to all our feeds to keep us angry and posting, and seem very unlikely to ever be reformed. Our opinion of it is plummeting, our annoyance is rising, so at some point, we’ll just quit.

But here’s the great paradox of social media. He’s right, we’re starting to very actively hate what social media has become and we are exhausted from the incessant trolling, rage farming, spam, scams, hoaxes, and lies trillion dollar conglomerates are shoving in our faces every day. There’s not much more they can offer us, and the engagement stats reflect that. We’re exhausted and I’d say that it’s all blending into mind-numbing background noise which is bad, but even that is being actively monetized.

However, what’s the alternative? O’Sullivan constructs several possibilities which are all nods back to the early days of the web, or see social media as hyper-focused and highly fragmented clusters that could talk to each other when needed, or completely isolate themselves from the outside world, or even as public utilities.

Yet, all of these ideas have been tried, but none of them got any real traction beyond lofty discussions or public releases that almost immediately went out with a whimper, scattered to the digital winds or leaving virtual ghost towns promising a better social experience, yet failing to attract anyone past a few thousand early adopters at best as users refuse to give learn new platforms for not that much return.

We do have a love-hate relationship with social media, and it while it makes a good distraction in our increasingly frustrating lives, it also makes us angry. We’re aware at all times that we’re being exploited and dehumanized by the apps to which we give so much time, but we also kind of surrendered to the algorithms, since we seem to have no power to change them, and no compelling alternative offering real payoff.

At this point, I think that any attempt to cast the death of big social media platforms as either in progress or imminent is an exercise in wishful thinking, and the only way I could plausibly see it happening is if AI-supercharged enshittification, which is now killing the web as we know it, explodes exponentially as predicted, and makes social media literally unusable to the average person in ways the platforms can’t fix.

Unless our Facebook, or Xitter, or TikTok, or Instagram explode when we try to click on every other link or icon, that’s where we can find all our favorite celebrities, and politicians, and content creators, and friends. The network effects of having virtually anything we want all in one place cannot be underestimated, and willfully quitting all this convenience is just not something we’re wired to do.

As intoxicating as it may be to think that the toxic social media monster is about to collapse into the stupid faces of the smug tech bros who both created and ruined it just to become monstrously rich and increasingly unhinged, and what much needed fix to the evils they’ve spread comes next, the reality is that social media is not on its deathbed yet, it’s far from certain that its days are numbered, and to insist otherwise is the digital equivalent of wearing a “the end is near” sandwich board.