The entire story of social media, and specifically Facebook, is the story of humanity’s relationship with relationships.
What fascinates me is not that it went from a hormonal teenager’s side project to a way of staying in touch with friends and family that were geographically separated to stalking your ex to a celebrity platform to a news source to a political arena to whatever you can call this shitfest it has now become.
What fascinates me is the inevitability of it all. Put more than one human together in a room, and whatever their education, age, background, gender, profession, language, culture, or any other differences, there is one thing that is certain, and that is that it goes to shit very quickly.
Look at WhatsApp, for example. Would you have believed, say 5 years ago, if I told you that this beautiful, efficient, transparent system that was fast replacing plain old text messaging would one day become this instrument of vice and bigotry you see today? Ditto Tik-Tok (though I am not sure it was not designed for what it had become by the time it was banned), Telegram, Snapchat, Twitter, you name it. Every system designed to connect humans to each other is a multi-car pileup in slow motion, with the passengers in the cars cheering, jeering, applauding, abusing, and taunting each other as they participate in mass suicide.
I’d say there is no other metaphor so perfectly apt for humanity’s journey as a civilisation(?) as the (d)evolution of social media.
Like the mythical Matrix, created by a benevolent Architect to be benign, even perfect, every system designed for human happiness suffers a major obstacle to human happiness: humans.
Somehow, humans always find a way to mess things up to a point where the entire system must be rebooted. So, the entropy at Facebook (and every other dominant social media today) will keep increasing until it burns up completely and is replaced by something built by someone who claims they have learnt lessons from Facebook’s death.
My prediction: they haven’t. Because humans are very ingenious creatures and can fuck things up in ways not even imagined to have been imagined by the creators of a system.
That is because, regardless of where we find ourselves, and with however much knowledge about life and the system we find ourselves in, we will always take the red pill. We seem to be wired not to be satisfied with status quo, especially if that status quo is a happy, peaceful, predictable life under a benevolent dictator.
We claim to, but actually do not in reality, want to live in an equilibrium. We want conflict, uncertainty, and doubt, even while fighting, as individuals and as a collective society to denounce, decimate, and diminish these with every action and speech of ours. We talk of caution, but want reckless speed. We advise against impulsiveness, but take rash decisions ourselves. We want constant change, even if we are uncertain of whether it is for the better or worst. And we want, above all, to keep moving, mutating, and shape-shifting. Nothing and no one is ever perfect or has attained perfection.
Nirvana, moksha, heaven, and all the talk of breaking the cycle of rebirth or resting in peace (depending on what specific superstition you believe in) is just bullshit. No human wants to rest in peace, even as we all speak of that as the ultimate goal. No one wants to complete the journey, even while each one of us talks of how tired we are of it. No one wants to stop walking, though we love to complain of the pain.
So, ladies & gentlemen of Facebook: After a short hiatus, lots of whinging about social media and design, and much efficient work (because of the lack of silly distractions like debates on Kangana’s security detail), I am back. But not refreshed. Just fatigued. I will keep posting once in a while, and keep lurking. Do humour me as I play my part in taking this platform on social media to complete destruction. To my co-passengers in this vehicle headed for certain death: Hello again!
