I understand that for many of us, social media was a haven where we could escape our families, schools, what have you. I do not think, on the net, that it has been a good thing for us, or that any liberatory potential of packet-switched networks depends on untrammeled access to instagram, facebook, tiktok, or whatever. What liberatory potential social media has had has been a byproduct of the people who use it, who will not disappear if teenagers, for example, are barred from using them.
Let's remember what social media is these days: an advertising and surveillance system, and a system for compiling data sets that feed into neural networks which are intended to replace you at work and in life. In what world is it even ethical to use these things at all? The fact that social media has become so central to our collective life at all is a travesty.
The latest trend of social media, becoming algorithmic purveyors of short-form video, has wreaked havoc on our attention spans, subjected us to more and more advertising, and has the potential to be used as a propaganda vector just like TV, which (in comparison to radio and newspapers, which are relatively less capital intensive to get into) serves nearly exclusively as a propaganda dissemination machine.
The old web is dead. The new web is bot-ridden and subject to the vagaries of the capitalists who control it. Future revolutionaries will not be born online.
areudirty
2087
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
snowghoul
