Turning Points
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about where we’re at as a society as we approach the new year. It feels like we’ve lost the plot on shared principles, values, telling right from wrong, and not giving into our vices.
The question is why.
At the end of last summer I did some work for scroll happy which is building good-for-you social media and got a chance to see how detrimental current social platforms are to our wellbeing, but the more deeply I analyze it the more I realize how deeply these interactions are impacting the fabric of society (beyond the 100 teen suicides / day that happen because of TikTok and Instagram)
Social media is an addiction when you use it the way most young people do today
To qualify, you must not be able to stop for any considerable period of time without going back to it with the same intensity that you had prior. I personally had some version of this problem. It’s almost always fear driven (in socials case FOMO of the next thing, being left out). The key to breaking it is breaking away from the fear which is especially difficult for young people.
Worse, it’s become socially acceptable, sort of like alcohol and cigarettes before research came out about the negative effects of those substances.
Short form content impacts your ability to reason so dramatically that your belief becomes a slave to the specific subspace of the algorithm you exist in
When you hammer a young persons brain with low-fidelity short form video over time that impacts their attention span. Where things like books get people to focus on important topics for long periods, social media does the opposite where it trains you to believe little bites that aren’t nearly long enough for form coherent arguments. When you’re dosing that 100s of time a day you lose your freedom of thought, which is great for advertisers but bad for society.
What happens to the world when this impacts us in-aggregate?
Young people and avid users start believing things that are irrational (as mainstream)
Those opinions make it into the national conscious more broadly, promoting extremism
This causes broad instability and destabilizes social systems
Combined with our current debt situation I’m a little concerned. We’re in a downward spiral but don’t have a strong way to reverse it as a society. For a brief while I thought about leaving because of this burden on young people, but what I’m realizing is that this country and place is one of the only places in the world where freedoms are built in such a way to allow innovation to thrive and so that’s where I’d like to build.
With this challenge though there’s an opportunity to fix it and hopefully into the next few years some young technologists can find their way to being part of the solution. I know I’d like to be part of it.