I was scrolling through some news articles published by Primal.net/flash on my phone —Bitcoin up, Trump said this or that, accompanied by a screenshot of Twitter. I asked myself: why does social media exist? Is it to fulfill our need for social connection? Is it to show off our thoughts? Is it validation? It wasn’t like this long ago. It was a part of life now it is Life.
Quite some time ago, I was baffled to see a woman being prosecuted in a court of law based on what she had posted on Facebook! Facebook? Seriously, an internet post landing a person in jail? Since when? No one notified me. I thought the internet was just a thing—a toy for us to play with, have fun, and then return to our real life. I remember using Pidgin and IRC; back then, the internet was just a tool. One sudden day, all of that turned into serious business. Early internet, and by extension social media, was a fun place, but now it is a place where real money is spent and real lives are built. I mean, some of the richest companies are software companies—an industry titan propelled by intangible property. It is hard not to miss the early days when one could say absolutely anything in a forum post and leave forever, detached from the filth they spewed. Now we all know censorship, data mining, AI training, and laws getting involved. I cannot even take part in a cultural movement without being tracked and attacked. At some point, the internet attached itself to human consciousness so deeply that it has now become inseparable from the human experience and experience of life. Just like reading and writing, to live a modern life, one must have an internet connection and a social media account. It’s disheartening to think that our worth is often measured by the number of people who ‘follow’ us.
This attachment meant that there were powers who needed to control the internet. Laws were hopeless on the internet—one could break a list of laws of a particular country sitting from a boat in a faraway land where no jurisdictional police could touch a single fleck of their hair. This cross-border nature made it very necessary for law enforcement to up their game, and so they did. Now, posting something and forgetting it being associated with you is a dream of the past.
To achieve this, they went into a Hail Mary attempt to break human rights written in the declaration they all signed. The right to privacy needed to go first. You see, on the internet, you are not a human—just a fat, Mountain Dew-drinking piece of meat, a data generation machine. Rights mean very little for you if you are a keyboard warrior. No clause in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights said that an account on the internet is a human! So you lose privacy. Since law enforcers break privacy, it looks like it really is not a crime to break it. So, service providers break it too. Who is to stop them now? Law enforcers?
That is just the tip, perhaps even a necessary evil. Breaking privacy only allows enforcement of laws that have been written. There needs to be some mechanism to enforce laws that are not written—the so-called “soft laws” (a term used in international law). If illegal activity is to be curbed, instead of chasing after criminals, why not be proactive and get to the root of the evil: human thought? Here enters censorship. If you don’t know about something you won’t act on it. If you do not know about guns, you will not pick up a gun. Censorship allows law enforcers to enforce laws that may be written in the future, potential laws. Maybe one day, being on a particular political side will be deemed illegal, so let’s stop it now. Ever heard of a cat chasing a mouse? Censorship is just a mouse chasing a cat. A reversal of cause and effect.
These two factors, coupled with the internet’s revenue stream—your attention—ruined the internet. Ads by God are one of the most human things humans have created: “Let us show you what you could be a part of. As you are right now, you seem unfulfilled; let us show you what you want.” The economy of attention is best tapped by creators working on our primal urge for reproduction. The porn industry is a mega titan for this reason. I do not have any bad words against the innovators working in that industry. They are the true and perhaps only industry that uses the internet to its maximum and has great respect for technology and technological innovation.
When I think more deeply about the purpose of social media, I realize I have no clear answer. Why should one show what their lunch looks like? What is the goal of sharing such trivial experiences? Perhaps the dopamine rush of likes and engagement is strong enough to motivate such actions. The definition of an individual gets blurred here. What is an individual person? A collection of social media posts? Or should we emphasize more on your offline version the flawed acne and angst filled individual who subscribes to the weird, concorted philosophy of Proudhon, Locke, and Marx? The algorithms have been determining the future of people on social media. People are worried about losing jobs to a computer now. Since YouTube and Instagram started utilizing attention to pay people, algorithms began to determine who should be paid and what should be paid. The ship of us being under a computer has long sailed.
To answer why social media exists, here is one study that identified ten uses and gratifications for using social media: social interaction, information seeking, passing time, entertainment, relaxation, communicatory utility, convenience utility, expression of opinion, information sharing, and surveillance/knowledge about others (reference ISSN: 1352-2752). Most studies you find will be in line with these. I will not expound more on this; you all know why you use social media, and you all also know why people use social media.
To end it, Nostr gives you certain things that traditional social media and the ‘internet’ fail to provide. You know what those are since you are here.
P.S.—This is written exclusively for the eyes in the Nostr ecosystem. I will not publish it anywhere else. Link people to this post even from outside; I don’t care.