From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.
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@pluralistic it's always been striking to me how little FB and Zuckerberg seem to understand about actual friendship. For example, no one with genuine friendships would think that "AI" friend substitutes could replace real, sentient friends. It seems psychopathic and solipsistic.
@jamesmarshall @pluralistic It makes sense as soon as you realize they see friendship and other social phenomena between their users the way a farmer sees interactions between their livestock.
@jamesmarshall @pluralistic The book "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams is an interesting social study about Zuckerberg & the people working for him. She also mentions the book "Lean In", written by Sheryl Sandberg, senior staff at FB. It was bullshit then, as it is bullshit now. But back then it got quite the hype and I believed that when I just worked hard enough, I could also make it. Somehow. By their standards. Not realizing that their standards are, right: bullshit.
@pluralistic "Corporate Social Media" is just "Corporate Media" nothing else. As you said the social component is not wanted as it doesn't generate dollars.
With the rise of AI even the last human element - the content creators - have been replaced.
I strongly believe that social media/web/connections can only truly exist when people - not corporations - with the interest in it own and host it. Like the discussion boards of the past or the fediverse of now. .
A fraction of a population, conditioned by bots, trolls and spamouflage to express less empathy, conditioned to be belligerently anti-vaccine and anti-mask, conditioned to be conspiratorial (but still respond to calls to action) is the greatest threat the human species has faced since 1971. X and Meta are disinformation weapons that are being maneuvered swiftly and deliberately toward a very terrible outcome.
We may have no idea what people saw on their feeds to make them crazy.
It was ever thus. The founder of Friendster decreed that people could only form friendship bonds with each other, but could not declare themselves to be "friends" of everyone with a common interest. You and I could be friends, but you couldn't be "friends" with a group called "bloggers." Each member of that group would have to create a reciprocal friendship link to see one another's feeds.
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Way back in 1999, Larry Lessig taught us that "code is law." By encoding these restrictions into the feed, Friendster's programmers were putting limits on the kinds of relationships that could be formed using the service. But Lessig's law (code?) is often overidden by an even older principle: William Gibson's 1982 maxim that "the street finds its own uses for things."
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Friendster told its users how to be friends with one another, and Friendster's users treated Friendster's management as damage and routed around it. They created accounts with names like "New York City" and whenever anyone friended that account, it friended them back. Users hacked their own way to form "illegitimate" friendships based on affinity into the system:
https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2003/08/17/the_fakester_manifesto.html
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As social media turned into a billion- (and then trillion-) dollar affair, the urgency of the struggle between how social bosses demanded that we socialize and how we wanted to socialize grew sharper. Mark Zuckerberg doubtless thought he was covering all his bases when he tossed a casual "It's complicated" to the pulldown menu for defining your relationship status, but that's because he doesn't understand how complicated *all* our relationships are:
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/07/10/facebook-complicated-relationship-status/
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For Zuck, crisply defined relationships were things that he could do simple math on in order to target ads, make recommendations, and sort users into categories. When you need to treat relationships as elements in a series of discrete mathematical operations, the fact that relationships are intrinsically, irreducibly qualitative is a serious bug.
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So Zuck did what computer scientists usually do when they want to do math on qualitative variables: he incinerated all the qualitative elements by quantizing them, and then did math on the dubious residue that remained:
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/
Zuck's biggest problem isn't the ambiguity of your social connections, though - it's that they exist at all.
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So Zuck did what computer scientists usually do when they want to do math on qualitative variables: he incinerated all the qualitative elements by quantizing them, and then did math on the dubious residue that remained:
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/
Zuck's biggest problem isn't the ambiguity of your social connections, though - it's that they exist at all.
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