Originally posted on JamieMcSloy.co.uk on 6th July, 2023.
World Without Sin
Today, Zuckerberg launched Threads. (Shameless plug. Follow me on Threads here for links to all the stuff I’m going to put on the blog first anyway.)
Now, it’s unlikely you’re getting the news about that from this little blog, (all twelve of you who currently read this,) but just to get everyone up to speed:
Threads is a Twitter clone by Zuckerberg. You get an account based on your Instagram handles and once you login, basically everything is the same as Twitter.
I wouldn’t say it’s a Twitter-killer like the hype-machines are doing. It’s got some decent features, it looks nice on mobile, (there’s no desktop login,) and the fact that it’s going to have Instagram integration probably means that it’s going to be something.
And seeing as Elon Musk seems to be doing his best to destroy Twitter at record speed, you might not need a Twitter-killer so much as a Twitter scavenger to pick up the remaining pieces of flesh after the implosion.
(That’s you and I, my fellow little fleshlings.)
I played around with Threads for about an hour, and it’s worth grabbing whatever handles you can in case it’s the next Big Thing™, but let’s talk about the flaw I found immediately, because that’s interesting, (and the topic of the day.)
What Social Media Sites Want
I wrote years ago that social media giants would create deliberately walled-gardens. This was based on the data that across all the various social media sites I owned, anything that linked out to an external site, (for example, this one,) would receive far fewer impressions than posts which linked to nothing, or, if you wanted a bonus in the opposite direction, posts which linked internally.
The above makes sense; the social media site benefits the more time you spend within its ecosystem. It loses whenever you leave the ecosystem.
Increasingly, I was correct. (This should be no surprise to the old readers, but to anyone new; I tend to be correct and this comes with a little bit of the old-healthy-ego.)
Social media sites became ecosystems where you were very much inside an unintentional, (and later intentional,) MMORPG where the more time you spend interacting within the game, the better you do in terms of stats.
And it’s an addictive game.
Over time, we find that the platforms converge; Instagram copies Snapchat with stories and Twitter takes away the character limit and Facebook somehow continues to limp along despite being useless for everything.
None of this makes the platforms better at what they’re supposed to be at. Instagram, the photo-sharing app, is far worse for allowing TikTok videos and screenshots of Twitter threads.
But that doesn’t matter, because all that matters is that you stay on the platform and it’s easy to get all of that content in a useless alphabet soup of things that allow your attention to slip from one post to the next.
An experience without friction.
A World Without Friction
Personal growth comes from exposure to and adaptation to new challenges.
Now, not everything has to be some microcosm of the Hero’s Journey; trying a new type of pasta isn’t one step on the way to divinity. Well, arguably it is, but it’s an aside for another day. However, your brain is designed to seek out challenges.
Scientists will say “the brain seeks out novelty” and it’s true in the sense that your brain wants new things. But imagine your primitive ancestors scrambling around in the Primaeval Savannah; there was no novelty without challenge. The new waterhole could lead to dysentery, the bug on the leaf could be poisonous, contact with the tribe on the horizon could lead to strength or death.
Your brain inherited both novelty-seeking and challenge-seeking in tandem. It’s the cognitive equivalent to how you would have only gotten sugar in tandem with the correct fibre from the fruit until modernity; once sugar could be refined and divorced from fibre, suddenly we have diabetes and obesity en masse. (Pun intended.)
This then is what’s now happening to your brain.
Novelty without challenge is sugar without fibre; fibre being the digestive friction your body needs to limit sugar absorption and challenge being the cognitive friction your brain needs to limit those novelty-sensors firing off the next time you see a bikini-twerk video.
Social media walled gardens strip away the search engine, browser window, the clicking and the consideration of what you’re going to view next. All of that’s decided for you by a set of algorithms based on your prior usage, which, funnily enough, has been rendered down into the quasi-mystical idea of a single, overarching ALGORITHM.
Which doesn’t exist. There’s nobody in control, no one person steering the ship we’re on.
But I know where it’s going.
World Without Sin
During the old blog run, I’d occasionally write about old Cold War psychological experiments, because it’s in that Post-War period where most of our psychological understanding comes from. (Largely through Paperclip, I’d guess. And Roswell, maybe.)
One famous experiment involved superstitious pigeons; give them food at a random interval, they’ll start making up rituals like spinning on the spot or dancing because they know that something causes them to get food, but they don’t know what it is.
That experiment showed not only do we attribute meaning to randomness; but it also showed the potential for how to easily steer the ship.
Conspiracy nutcases are eager to believe that everything can be parsed-down to The Great Conspiracy™ and that all of history is engineered to get us to this point so that the bad guys can reveal themselves and enact the Mark of the Beast or whatever their dastardly plan is.
Sometimes, this all comes with The Good Guys foiling the dastardly plan and then we all sing happy songs under the eternal sunshine.
However…
It’s much easier in reality to take the inherently chaotic and unpredictable nature of reality and then alter the narrative after the fact.
It’s very easy to do that when you have what amounts to a 24/7 newsfeed cycle delivered directly to everyone’s eyeballs by their own choice which looks absolutely unique to said eyeballs’ conception of reality.
From Web 1.0; a disorganised collection of sites with no overseer or purpose, we’re now entering the opposite; the average internet user has zero control over what they see, when they see it or how they see it.
And whoever does get to decide that gets to control the imaginal space of the future.
P.S. Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll continue from this abruptly-ended piece and talk about what I’m sure you’re all asking.
What do I do about this?