Social Media Is Dead

“Social media” isn’t so broken because of a few bad men.

It’s not just that each layer and component of how our digital goods and services are imagined, funded, designed, and deployed is hostile to anything but the anti-social arrangements we were tricked into calling social media. It’s also that our politics are hostile to it, our economics are hostile to it, our legal codes are hostile to it, and our culture is hostile to it.

This is a brilliant article because it historicises the problems we have with social media (a misnomer, Ongweso argues) – figures like Musk are a symptom, not a cause. What we have is the natural result of a passive, atomised culture that would rather leave thought, development and creativity to someone else to commodify for us.