Re: <nettime> social media critique: next steps?

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

The first step would be to stop calling it 'social media'. It's as much 
social media as fairgrounds merry go round. Don't legitimize it by 
implying it is a medium of the society. Call it some.

It's important to understand the mechanics of how machine-fed deluge of 
stimuli affects victims. When driving car very fast, one focuses on the 
road in the front, because it's essential for the survival - not on the 
horizon, not on the scenery on the side, and certainly not reflecting on 
the past mile. The machine-pumped information has similar effects, 
reducing the attention to the present in the very narrow sense. While 
driving fast, if someone asks you a serious question ("can you lend me 
$100K?"), you may easily say yes or no without much thinking, depending 
on how the question was phrased, because you are focused on the road.

The sole purpose of 'social media' is to DoS (or DDoS) victim's 
cognitive abilities. 'Social media' is a gimmick, a one trick pony, a 
crude method to saturate inputs to the point of target's malleability. 
There is no deep theory behind it, there is no grand strategy, no 
ideology, there is no system, except for the obvious.

Attempts to replace corporate-owned pumps by democratic, distributed, 
open-source pumps, seems like using methadone as a cure for the heroin 
addiction. It has its own issues, plus heroin is better. It doesn't 
work, it never worked (see the demise of Usenet.) It's barking up the 
wrong tree.

Perhaps the most effective approach is to treat it as a drug problem, 
and 'social media' purveyors as the next stage of the business (after 
South American cartels and then Big Pharma, becoming not only 'legal' 
but tightly integrated into the governing structures.) There is nothing 
unusual about this, heroin itself was perfectly legal and reputable 
business less than 100 years ago.

As the addiction industry evolves, the relative number of junkies 
increases. A tiny percentage of population (< 0.3%) uses cartels' 
products. About half use Big Pharma products, and 'social media' has 
already surpassed this, successful even in places where Big Pharma failed.

The key question is: can we abstain, or are we going to look for a 
'better' fix, to overcome the crudeness of some ?




On 1/13/18, 06:36, Geert Lovink wrote:
> moral appeal a la Tim Berners-Lee the only one on offer? Going offline
> is one thing, (and in fact an option only elites can afford).
> Self-mastering a la Sloterdijk is a marginal reform effort from a
> hyper-individualistic perspective. I still believe in vital methods to
> mass delete Facebook accounts. This is in the end what Silicon Valley
> tries to prevent at all cost: resistance and exodus. How can such a
> momentum be unleashed?

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