…and not for the reasons you might suggest. The issue itself isn’t the phone, it’s the internet that the phone has forced it to be shaped into that is a significant reason as to why now, more than ever, the time to pull back from the social internet has never been sooner.
In my honest opinion, and not to sound like a chronically-lecturing hipster-esque dickhead, but social media at large has been a detriment to the psyches of the world’s population at large. It has made us more informed than ever, it has made us more connected than ever, but it has also made us ironically enough, more vulnerable to misinformation and lonelier as a result.
Our brains crave instant gratification. The social internet is the fentanyl of communication, and it’s making some of the nastiest, meanest people alive extremely rich off of your, yes, your emotional labor. If you want to give these oligarchs the middle finger? If you wanna say “no” to the rise of tech-bro fascism, you need to put the damn phone down.
After all, nothing is free in this capitalist world. A free service implies that you are the product being sold.
This makes your attention extremely valuable, and extremely powerful. As a society we need to be increasingly able to focus. Focus is the entire reason how I managed to turn myself around over the course of a decade. From being down in the dumps, to being halfway paid off on my first home, owning the car of my dreams and being with the woman I love. I did this because i was able to put the phone down for a few hours, step away from the happenings of what’s going on around me, and focus on what was actually important in my life. My career, my partner, my work.
Social media is a drug. A panacea for social interaction.
It numbs the pain of loneliness. It makes us feel like we are well-informed, worldly citizens. It allows us to interact through pixels on a screen, with the entire world and its various opinions. Part of the reason why people like Punter’s Politics, PurplePingers and Swollen Pickles can even exist, is entirely because the internet can show you what could be, whilst stripping away the decades of work it took to get countries like Norway, Singapore and so on to the points where they could actively have the utopias in which they speak of, if they’re even considered that.
Online politics especially is a pastiche of the real thing. Real politics is dirty, messy, complicated. You’re dealing with the needs and desires of an ever more rabid voterbase, who grows hungrier and angrier in a world that is being deliberately designed to antagonise them, and it’s in these angry upheavals, in the midst of a new medium, that we see some of the most violent political movements rise up.
After all, Marshall McLuhan himself stated that the medium is the message.
If your medium is based entirely on attention-seeking, rampant disagreement, violent rhetoric and hatred towards others, it’s little wonder that the world’s most powerful man is an 80-odd year old Internet Troll. Think about it for a second. Given the state of modern America, and the American-owned social media platforms at large, do you think it’s not at all surprising, given the widening class divide, that a man who makes big promises, talks a big game, boasts, flexes and ridicules others, is the leader of the free world? 4Chan created this monster, or rather, 4Chan created the environment that allowed the monster to bare its teeth and rip the world to shreds.
We’re talking about a man who used AI Generated content to make a song about how he’s going to call the Gaza Strip “Trump Gaza”, where he’s going to flush out the tunnels, bury people under a pile of rubble, and build a golf course on top. It’s something that’s deliberately designed to make you feel mad. That’s literally what they want. Instead of you going out and protesting, or donating to pro-Gaza groups, instead, he’d rather you waste your energy on a panacea. Scream your anger into the digital void, what the hell is that gonna do?
Luigi Mangione was a unifying moment for the ‘net. He represented what so many of us feel we want to do. Many of us wish we had the power, the connections and the fearlessness to be able to just go do a Brian Thompson. We, as a collective, feel this violence because of the capital violence we face every day. Many Americans have had their lives shattered because some AI told them that grandpa deserved to die. When Americans pine for even a fraction of what us Australians have, they’re told it’s “Socialism” and that “It would never work” and whilst I don’t think an American single-payer system would work exactly like Medicare does here, and whilst i don’t think it would happen overnight, I think Americans, at least for the price of living in one of the most violent, hateful countries on the planet, at least deserve to have a scrap of their tax dollars spent on healthcare, as opposed to giving Gazans the “American special” on Israel’s and therefore their, dime.
In some ways, I feel happy that we’re about to see age verification come into play here in Australia. The social internet needs to die out. Instead it needs to be replaced with the old-school internet. Sure, people might not ever see my page, nor they might not ever read it, but they can at least get fully constructed statements from myself, statements that I’ve at least spent some time constructing. Instead of a Panacea, this website is a way for me to at least be able to whisper into the void to people who are willing to follow it by, idk, bookmarking it.
The fact that so much of our curation is now being handled for us by Algorithms that we do not even get an inkling to as to how they work, is entirely why the social media bans are coming. These tech bros do not want you to know how their recommendation algorithms work, for fear of both losing business to a competitor, and fear of having the competition for ideas on their platform suddenly skew one way or another. It’s a cop-out argument if you ask me. If the sole driver for these algorithms is pure engagement, we can finally see why our lives are becoming more and more hostile.
AI driven slop that’s designed to poke right at the part of your brain that controls you the most is the scariest thing to ever come out of social media, to be honest. The amount of times i’ve had to tell my parents that something is AI is insane. AI Video generators are getting so good that Deepfakes are literally just around the corner. Recently an AI generated video of Obama being arrested made the rounds on social media. AI generated videos of puppies and kittens praising Trump are making the rounds, and infecting your parent’s minds with this idea that “No, this man is the good guy, how can a puppy that’s adorable be evil?”
Conservatives and Fascists love the idea of AI Art as it gives them the ability to bypass a layer of Critique that has always stopped them from creating engaging and compelling content, the Artists themselves. Imagine trying to convince a talented CGI Artist to create an animation of Trump arresting Obama, for the purpose of spreading conspiracy theories about him creating the Epstein List, despite the absolute MOUNTAIN of evidence, photos, recordings, interviews that all show that Trump is complicit in sex trafficking of minors, and even complicit in sexual acts with minors.
There is a literal Paedophile in the White House, and your damn phone is telling you it’s okay, because look, he’s arresting all the people you’re afraid of, how can a man who arrests Mexicans be evil?
2025 needs to be the year we stop engaging with social media. 2025 is the year we need to literally go outside and touch grass. Idk, go walk your dog instead of spending time on social media with people who do not care about you, or with people who have themselves been infected by the AI slop virus.
Beano out.