The Case for Social Media

in which I explore the benefits (yes, they do exist) that social media has brought to society; (I still hate it though)

My recent articles have been less-than-kind to the digital sphere, and particularly social media. While some of this is because I have become personally disillusioned with the fraudulent LARP-worlds of Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and the like, it’s also because I sense a plague deep within the bones of society, perhaps in part caused—and certainly exacerbated—by these build-a-celebrity platforms.

They’re toxic. Categorically.

And yet.

Although the damage to humanity—and to imagination—has been enormous, there is no reversing the march of the technological machine. At least, not in any nice, pleasant, non-apocalyptic way that I can see. No, social media is here to stay, and frankly, there is something good about this.

Consider for a moment the pre-digital world. Not the idyllic communities where people knew each other’s names; not the ink-and-coffee scented home libraries from a time when people actually read books in their spare time; not the books that actually had something worthwhile and honest to say about the human condition without distorting it all in woke bullshit. No, I’m talking about the media.

Think about what the media was. TV. Newspapers. Radio. Centralized. It was centralized. Dissident voices were rarely, if ever heard, because they couldn’t exist. Social media changed that.

Now, everyone and their cat has an account. While this has its obvious downsides—namely, the sporous, soul-sucking static connection it makes with your brain—the upside is this: we are the media now.

With the rapid development and technological advancements of social media—much of which was designed to create a Big Brother-style surveillance machine—something happened that the regime Operators did not intend. Citizen journalists began to put cracks in the illusion. Legacy media personalities began to appear as they really were: disingenuous, stiff, manipulated; their marionette strings were starting to show. Humpty Dumpty (or Brian Stelter, as it were) had a great fall. Meanwhile, thanks to social media, truth-tellers and question-askers began to find themselves with a voice for the first time, really, in history.

And see, question-asking (let alone truth-telling) is a bit of a problem—or shall we say, existential crisis—for a regime in which everything is fake and ghey.

Thus, censorship is vital. Deep in its griding, screaming mechanical bones, the regime knows that it cannot survive without it. As El Gato Malo writes in this article: “They are so decrepit, corrupt, and dependent after decades of being allowed to play ‘guardians of the narrative’ that they cannot possibly live on a free and fair field of discourse.” In other words, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

And so, the silver lining of the digital longhouse does exist.

It’s a knife’s edge, this walk between the liberation of dissident voices and the mind-numbing mountain of packing peanut posts that the algorithms desperately pump into your brain to keep you from hearing them—or even, God forbid, your own unfiltered thoughts. Social media is a sword, and it’s double-edged. There is something to be said for wielding it wisely, and, hopefully, in a manner which prevents your creative engine from corroding. We’re on a battlefield, after all.

This balancing act is, I think, the million/billion/trillion(?) dollar question. I don’t have the answer, and I don’t think anybody really does right now as it’s all too new, but I do think there are a lot of us looking for one, and that gives me reason for optimism.