Artless 12 - The end of the social network  18th January 2025

A web that works

This last week, Meta Platforms, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, bent over backwards to accomodate the incoming politics of Donald Trump. They got rid of protections for marginalised groups on their platforms and they got rid of protections against fake news. This all is bad of course, but part of me is happy because it marks a point of no return for some of the most toxic social media practices ever.

This is the death of the social network as we know it. It is the birth of something else. Perhaps this is where the entertainment network begins. Perhaps this is how we return to the age of TV, where the screen was not interacting with us and gave us what someone else wanted. I shared in the last issue about how Instagram is soon going to be full of AI bots. We are already seeing the beginning of a network that is anything but 'social'.

But there is also hope, because the Internet was never meant to be TV. Its primary appeal was socialising and meeting people and hanging out and building community and speaking out. Mark Zuckerberg has decided he is going somewhere else. That doesn't mean the rest of us have to follow him there. With each passing year, evidence mounts that social media is ruining us on a personal as well as a social level. The addictive and attention-destroying nature of digital devices is also getting a second look. More people are abandoning Twitter and Instagram and reclaiming their minds.

Of course, there are going to be false starts. Those in power are going to try to take advantage of this. Social media has never been something they have been able to control completely, so they have sought to disrupt it by controlling or otherwise incentivising the billionaires who run it. But overall, we are very much at a tipping point. Hopefully, 2025 will see us going past it.

Vimoh