For ten years now I've said that if Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and Apple disappeared from the face of the earth, and left nothing in their wake, the rest of us would be just fine. More than that, we'd acclimate to our new hubless digital world with surprising aplomb.

George Gilder wrote a great book that nobody on the left read because Gilder is an arch-Reaganite who basically created Intelligent Design and nobody on the right read because it said "no actually the hippies are right this whole technological artifice is about to collapse." His fundamental point is that the past 40 years about technological innovation have been about bottlenecking the spread of information and that blockchain technology just fuckin' straight-up sidesteps that shit. Full stop. All your heavily-moted drawbridges are fucking doomed, best figure out what's next.

I bring all this up because social media is dying, and it's dying quickly. Even the WSJ agrees. I wrote this just yesterday to some friends:

As the Wall Street Journal points out, social media is dying. In the early days there was a lot of pride about being a go-to answer man or the guy who made cool sketches or even someone with timely memes. I was one of the people who got SolInvictus banned. We started /r/IAma because it was clogging up /r/AskReddit and within two weeks we had Israeli whistleblowers from Dimona. It was crazy. But now, as my receptionist puts it, “never be a main character on the Internet.” Everyone who can find something better to do with their time has, leaving social media for shut-ins, autists and attention whores. It’s horseshoe theory incarnate - you’ve got the MAGA ‘boomers on Facebook, you’ve got the tankie zoomers on TikTok and in between you’ve got the normies who recognize that Twitter is basically cigarettes that shout at you.

I think you have to look at it through the sclerotic eye of pragmatism: what are kids getting out of social media? That answer didn't used to be "a giant phatty net negative." But that's all it is now. Both TikTok and Facebook have demonstrated that we're all just grist for the mill and they aren't making half as much money as they used to. TikTok pushed hard into "ackshully Jews should be exterminated" and there are enough people who remember when Nazis were bad that the end result is it ground the precise surgical weapon of social media into a blunt stick.

I do use social media, and have done, at a high level, since it was usenet through a VT100 terminal. I think it's important to note that the early days where there was discovery and things to learn and friends to make and all the rest? That shit's over. What's left is a place where loners don't feel so alone. Not that it's helping them - it's not. But it's making them feel like they're being helped. It's any other addiction - the dopamine hit distracts you from the problem you aren't solving. This is why, in my assessment, it mostly belongs to people on the spectrum. Those with no object permanence and an inability to parse facial expressions do much better online, and they've all found each other. Unfortunately they're no better at interacting with humanity online than they are in person so it just drives them deeper.

That, if anything, is where I think Haidt et. al.'s data is coming from: the simple fact that we've created another channel for addiction but we haven't regulated it in the slightest. Meta knows Instagram is bad for kids the same way RJR-Nabisco knows Lunchables are toxic. it makes them money tho so don't expect that to change without an external force. And I don't think there will be an external force. Do you know what a usage plateau means? it means that young people aren't adopting something.

My daughter is 11. She has yet to ask for a phone. Her principle wants were a rabbit and a hamster. Is she online? She's online AF. That kid will be sitting on the couch with a laptop open to Roblox, a Switch open to Animal Crossing, an iPad open to Facetime and the projector screen playing Okami because she's farming customers in Restaurant Simulator, doing some vegetable picking or some shit in Animal Crossing and the iPad is showing her friend how to get through a tricky part in Okami. This is how she uses "social media" - she and two or three of her friends log into some server and play Sky or Roblox or Minecraft or whatever. I've asked her if she wants a Twitch account because it would simplify things - she can't be sussed. The Internet is where you meet your friends when you aren't at school, and there are Youtube videos that are only useful if they teach you shit about Minecraft otherwise why bother.

But then, she was never likely to be particularly vulnerable to social media - she's good in person.

I feel like we need controls on social media for the same reason we need controls on alcohol - it's a great servant and a terrible master. Most people don't get hooked to cigarettes by never smoking them. Most people have no problems with alcohol but some do. And there are people whose lives are being torn apart by social media. Doesn't mean social media exists solely to tear lives apart.

But as time goes on, it becomes more and more like cigarettes and less and less like alcohol - you can party sometimes with champagne or tequila and have a good time but with cigarettes? If you aren't addicted to them why would you even pick up a pack?