Are they serious? The idea that strangers could GUESS your @... and the chilling truth that this may indeed be the point. Discord, a CHAT service, adding social media “discoverability” shit into their app…maybe a timeline? doesn’t it make you mad?? Doesnt it piss you off??When are we going to start making bombs?
Imagining a moment in Demolition Man where stallone gets unfrozen and is handed like, a cell phone. It has a list of phone numbers like he expects, but also a "discover tab" where you can just call a random person whose phone number is trending today.
I love how ‘Social Media’ as an industry has been taking the project of the Internet, IE "All people should be able to connect to each other and have access to goods and services they want/need" (itself a notion with a few red flags, but hey fuck it why not) and advancing it into "all people should be MADE to connect to ALL other people, and the goods and services should have constant access to them at all times" just flattening everything from an at-will community into a philosopher's stone from Fullmetal Alchemist of roiling conflict and anguish, all while Brands hurl bull SHIT down at us from the top of the pit.
I remember something Twitter's “Jack” said somewhere about how his dream was always to make twitter ‘a global conversation’, like a GLOBAL…CONVERSATION. He was talking about some policy they implemented like the discover tab or not blocking nazis, and something clicked in my head like... these tech people really do think that they can annihilate the very concept of Context. As if these little doodads on the internet can actually Solve human interaction to a permanent end. Turns out the solution to our growing sense of alienation in the 21st century was just that we weren’t all in the same bucket.
This is why social media is so profitable. Its like the crux of neoliberal thought made manifest in every person's pocket all the time. It’s founded on utopian egalitarian principles but is actually really stupid and doesn't really democratize anything as much as it makes strangers fight (which IS fun to watch tbh) and actively resists the formation of resilient communities. Social Media only gets so far as a product because it's a perfect for investors: Nothing means anything and you have no privacy, but don't worry because we’re turning the wasteland into an ad space killing field.
And every system that starts out okay has to eventually be molded into this formula. Even DISCORD. Nothing can exist unless more value can be extracted from it and replaced with cardboard. Netflix Battlepass. And the guys running it always think it will really add to our user experience! Its like if the manhattan project got started because Oppenheimer believed that nukes would help people scrub barnacles off the bottoms of their boats.
