A decade ago, just before the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidential victory over Hillary Clinton started the febrile era we are still stuck in, there was a common understanding of the main way social media messed with our minds – by presenting absurdly idealised versions of people’s lives, and thereby making other human beings miserable.
“We see wild parties, holidays, weddings, family outings and close-knit friendship groups,” wrote one Guardian journalist in 2015. She went on: “Apart from commemorating a deceased person’s life, you’ll be hard pushed to find a really bad moment in your feed.” Here, it seemed, was a modern iteration of the opium always purveyed by free-market capitalism, resulting in a constant stream of personal happiness and precious little recognition of life’s more difficult aspects: social strife, inequality, disagreement.
