I hate the injection of personality into technological instances or common hiccups in modern Internet culture. My heart monitor watch shows me a smiley face while booting up, Github buttons spam "Buy me a coffee!", Reddit says shit like, "Don't panic" when a webpage doesn't load. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I am so tired of being surrounded by these pale imitations of reality, like I need to be pacified with pseudo-emotions or meme culture every step of my day.
Not unexpected or odd but I've been thinking about this recently and this thread is a pretense to dump it here
The vast majority of people who despise social media often can't articulate precisely why they think it's bad, just some nebulous gut feeling that something is wrong with its proliferation.
Here's why it's bad. It involves millions of people - all of whom are alienated from and suffering under the regime of neoliberal capitalist society - turning the spectacle of their lives, experiences, and opinions into commodities for mass consumption by others. These spectacles are not even necessarily real or organic, as many are outright staged or manipulate the consumer in some way. People are commodifying their very lives and identities, and they are doing it for free, and then they are handing it over to a massive tech corporation so that the corporation can monetize and earn profit from it. If you are very lucky, you can perhaps actually get a share of this profit, if you are on a platform such as YouTube or Twitch, but the vast majority of people who participate on these platforms see nothing, and are in fact further exploited as a resource by the advertising these platforms use to earn their money. And then, the mass consumption of these spectacular commodities are used by the same people as a substitute for real, genuine social interaction, lived experiences, and personal relationships with other human beings.
Like we make jokes about living in the Matrix or a simulation all the time, this is that simulation. We pretend to have lives on social media, pretend to care about the pretend experiences of others, and form pretend friendships with pretend personas under totally false pretenses. In even worse cases, it is used by tons of people with untreated mental illness to self-medicate instead of seeking out actual medical help or human interaction (that includes this very web site); or, it allows mentally ill people, social rejects with malformed personal habits, political extremists, and others ostracized IRL for good reasons to connect with each other over long distances, potentially get organized, and exacerbate their worst tendencies (incels, Nazis, conspiracy theorists). It often causes people who have been engineered to retreat into isolation to further retreat into delusion and self-pity (see: QAnon boomers who have cut off ties with actual family members over a conspiratorial cult). It just causes further alienation, apathy, lethargy, and psychological damage to snowball exponentially.
comrade, I found this very profound and beautiful. I am also drunk. After writing what follows, it occurs to me that I am not addressing large parts of your post.
You may be giving too much importance to the relationship between pretending and social media. It's completely possible that inauthenticity is a necessary social characteristic that is maybe even pre-mammalian. Plus, people were pretty inauthentic before social media too (source: old). The obsession of the 90s punk kids with who was a poser, who wasn't, as though there is such a thing among fourteen-year old kids. But everyone poses, no? only some do it better? Everyone makes decisions about who they want to be, including about how they want to be, and all of that is inauthentic initially. A chemistry student isn't a chemist, just like some kid who decided they want to be punk isn't going to be very punk for a while.
People need and crave validation. This also predates social media. Social media gives a less meaningful inlet for validation, but it does give it. I feel validated when people like my posts here. I feel validated when people laugh at my jokes in real life. It makes me feel good. Before Facebook, people would just bring in photoalbums to show you pictures of their kids, or their trip to fucking London or Dallas or whatever, and they wanted to show you that because they wanted to share with you, and that you would like what they shared. Facebook just anonymizes that process, but people share it and people look at it for the same reasons they did before.
Instead of an in/authenticity dynamic, what your initial concerns made me think about was a prison where inmates could communicate for only a few minutes every day, but that communication would be unrestricted and nonviolent. I imagined how their communications would change to try to short-circuit that chemical rush you get from social validation, what that would actually look like, how incredibly sad but heartfelt it would be, and how social media is more of a pale reflection of that world, the one of the broken and isolated, accelerating a process that - with its built-in inauthenticity - makes it ugly, sad, but somehow so sweet and heartbreaking. People communicate best in person, with their bodies and faces, and social media is just a sort of hollowed-out and maximally-commodified version of how that specific communication mode resembles the person themselves, to be sold to advertisers.
I perhaps am emphasizing the inauthenticity of social media, I'm fairly heavily influenced in my perceptions of these kinds of relationships by what I know about prominent Twitch streamers or YouTube creators who essentially have to maintain an on-camera persona at all times when they're creating content (I need to re-watch Lindsay Ellis's video on Manufacturing Authenticity, it seems directly relevant) that is often forced to be permanently optimistic, if not to merely keep up the spirits of the audience but also because they have an immense weight placed upon them by their own followers (I have watched a lot of a streamer named Ohmwrecker who does a shitload of Dead by Daylight content, and one of the most shocking aspects of them is just how many viewer messages get sent to them that are effectively mentally ill/deeply alienated and disillusioned people using him as a personal therapist. That's so much to put upon someone who is essentially a stranger who is good at a video game you like).
Certainly there is a level of authenticity to social media. But at its core these are commodities of spectacle. People gravitate toward the dramatic, like screaming matches posted to Facebook. The vast majority of things like TikTok, Vine, or YouTube are heavily edited even if they're not outright staged, even as something as simple as clip from a popular pop song or a filter. Here, on this very website, we engage in "bits" to entertain each other that are influenced by stuff we consumed elsewhere, like the podcast itself. Hell, regarding the podcast there's even times where the fact they are forced to maintain certain personas and sometimes reach the limit, like when Felix tries to force a bit and it falls flat, or Amber goes out of her way to be a contrarian.
I don't know. To get a little weird for a moment, if neoliberalism is a social engineering project aimed at the fragmentation and commodification of identity (ie forcing the working person to don the mask of worker, manager, commodity, salesperson, and consumer all at once, changing depending on the context), social media is its apotheosis in that the producers reconstruct their fragmented identities as commodities. Your sense of self is so shattered by the neoliberal way of life that there's just a void eating away inside of yourself? No problem, we've got an app for that. Just build an inauthentic self designed for consumption by the masses.
A funny video that emphasizes this point in regard to content creators: https://youtu.be/rPHK494AUxE
Also, that kinda exists in real life as well. My grandmother once bought a ceramic chicken, cue her now having 30+ ceramic and glass chickens around her house because people decided that was her thing. She has told me before she doesn't turn them down or throw them away because it might upset the person that gave it to her, thinking it was a good and thoughtful gift.
The fundamental goal of modern advertising is to have you define yourself through your consumption, to form a "Brand". My partner's mom literally has a "signature scent" and she's a goddamn manager, but has been sold on needing to have things like that.
Human's need to be individuals within a community (to borrow a problematic term: snowflakes) isn't something I'm ready to blame on capitalism, but holy hell is it exploited constantly, and social media allows companies to do it more effectively than ever. Hell, I'm wearing a fucking siracha shirt right now that someone bought for me cause I put siracha in my ramen.
Could you get even weirder ?
Good post