Also: Zuckercrime
Yeah, the it was just techno-anarchists on Usenet discussing Neal Stephenson-inspired dystopian fantasies about how the world would be when ‘smart people’ ruled like kings; loons spreading conspiracy theories about lizard people running the government, UN/FEMA armies bunkered in salt mines in Michigan waiting for an inciting incident to take over the USA and impose a “New World Order”, a bunch of people arguing pedantic points about fictional narrative universes and trying to outdo one another with quasi-obscure pop culture references, and a whole lot of porn. About the same as it is now, actually, except with a higher standard of computer literacy, not as many pop-ups or autogenerated slop content, and at dial-up speeds. The raging dumpster fire of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al was really due to smartphones and other mobile devices which made obsessive, spastic posting, ‘retweeting’, and ‘like’-ing a seductive and addictive thing, so we should really blame Steve Sakoman (“Who?”) for introducing the concept in the Apple Newton (“What?”)
Well, children are the future? Addicting middle-aged adults has limited runway but if you can sick in 5 and 6 year olds you’ll own them for a life of quasi-voluntary serfdom in your electronic kindgom.
I think I said that the first time someone showed me Twitter and I’ve received no end of disparagement, opprobrium, and vitriol for suggesting that it was having a deleterious impact upon the civil discourse society as a whole and particularly in journalism where it was and continues to be used as a short cut and crutch to fill space and reference unsubstantiated ‘facts’ and ‘expertise’ instead of doing the difficult and valuable work of actual investigation and developing depth of understanding in an area of knowledge. I’ve never actually used Facebook (although someone pranked me by creating a page in. y name and personal information that has caused no end of trouble) and have only used LinkedIn reluctantly and with little value.
I’m sure there are real value-added uses for interactive ‘social media’ beyond blogging and tutorial sites like StackExchange but they come with such propensity for misuse and manipulation of basic facts and ideas that I’m not sure any of it is really justified. But I’d really like to see Mark Zuckerberg in the dock answering for his particular offenses to humanity and ‘Meta’ reduced to a cloud of charged particles drifting aimlessly through the universe until it comes across a small world of pleasant, pacifistic people that it can turn into a genocidal war empire, because that’s what villains do.
Stranger