A strange feeling came over me the other day. There I was, on Instagram, touching up my social life for the benefit of the algorithm. Like every 42-year-old, middle-class white person in London, I had been to Wembley to watch Blur’s reunion shows. Like every person in that stadium, I had held up my phone camera for the meaningful refrains, mindful with the passage of time that such moments are rare.
But as I paused between filters (Clarendon or Ludwig?), and hesitated over which song would best advertise my superior taste (‘This is a Low’ or ‘Under the Westway’?), a feeling of overwhelming futility came over me. Why am I doing this? Who am I impressing? And also: who am I upsetting and who am I irritating? What, in short, do I hope to achieve by flinging my little bit of content into the void?
Not so long ago, I would have taken these queries to Twitter. But Twitter is basically misogynists, self-promoters and people libelling BBC presenters these days. I haven’t really bothered with it since Elon Musk took over and amped up everything that was obnoxious about it. Do I join TikTok? At my age, that would feel vaguely paedophilic. Linkedin? Only psychopaths use Linkedin. And so I realised that the last bits of mental circuitry linking my thoughts to these buttons had corroded. RIP my social media addiction, c.2006-2023. I phoned my friend Layla who had also been at the Blur gig and we had a nice chat about it instead.
Is social media... over? I’m aware that I’m a sample of one and a not-very-representative one at that. And, admittedly, the numbers are against me: an area the size of Belgium is still retweeted every day; 1.7 aeons of human consciousness were lost to TikTok in the time it took you to read this sentence; and thanks to Instagram, the species is becoming 1.3 per cent more trivial each month. Or to use some actual numbers from Ofcom, 88 per cent of British internet users are on social media in some form and among 16-24-year-olds, 90 per cent use Instagram, 83 per cent use Snapchat and 74 per cent use TikTok. So, no, we’re not going to go back to print and landlines any time soon.
An area the size of Belgium is still retweeted every day
However, social media as we have known it over the past, what, 15 years — I mean as the internet common room, the mass addiction event, the place the brain goes first — well, there’s no reason to think that it will go on as it has. Literally everyone I have spoken to says they’re using it less or actively trying to use it less.
The post-Musk hellscape of Twitter is the most obvious casualty. The list of celebrities who are absenting themselves from the platform grows: Elton John, Gigi Hadid and Jameela Jamil are among the 32 million users who will have left by the end of the year — ‘One good thing about Elon buying Twitter is that I will FINALLY leave and stop being a complete menace to society on here. So it’s win-win for you all really,’ wrote Jamil back in April before deleting her account. Advertisers are fleeing, too — the CEO of Bottega Veneta cited the ‘playground bullying atmosphere’ on social media. If you’re selling luxury hand-bags, you don’t really want to do so on a site with a CEO who amplifies Russian propagandists and suspected rapists. Bottega, by the way, deleted both its Instagram and Twitter accounts in 2021.
But Twitter is not the only platform with problems. TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has the fastest-growing user base among under-30s — and yet its triumph is far from inevitable. It’s already banned on British government devices and the Joe Biden administration is talking about banning it outright in the US. And Snapchat lost $80 billion from its valuation last year.
And there’s Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and now Threads), no longer the implacable behemoth it once was. Apple’s new privacy settings have eaten into its advertising revenues. Anti-trust regulators in the EU may yet force the business to sell its key assets. Mark Zuckerberg’s move into virtual reality looks disastrous. Facebook itself resembles a shopping mall following a particularly nasty zombie apocalypse.
And there is an ever-wider appreciation of the social harms these apps cause. Facebook has been accused of inflaming ethnic violence in Ethiopia and helping facilitate genocide in Myanmar. Instagram was judged to have likely contributed ‘in a more than minimal way’ to the suicide of British teenager, Molly Russell, who was continually fed images of self-harm on the site. And the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found that 57 per cent of American teenage girls felt ‘persistently sad or hopeless’ in 2021, compared with 36 per cent in 2011. What accounts for that change? There’s significant evidence pointing to the wide adoption of smartphones with internet capability and front-facing cameras. These stories may not change behaviour in themselves. But cumulatively, they have an effect. The secondary schools in my area are one-by-one enforcing phone bans in school, which generally seem to come as a great relief to parents who desperately want their children off social media.
Which brings me to Threads, launched by Meta earlier this month as a ‘nice’ alternative to Twitter. The place has a vague first-day-at-uni vibe. ‘Where are you from? What A-levels did you do?’ But come on. This is Mark Zuckerberg. There comes a time in an abusive relationship when you no longer believe the partner is capable of change. Threads will inevitably descend and if you don’t believe me, I would urge you to look up the essay on ‘enshittification’ by long- standing web commentator Cory Doctorow. It precisely describes the process by which all successful web platforms — including Google and Amazon, by the way — gradually devolve into toxic uselessness. Have you noticed that Google results are way less good than they used to be? Or how TikTok no longer shows you the videos you want to see? That’s enshittification.
I don’t expect mass deletions any time soon. We are addicted to this stuff — it’s designed to be addictive. I’m sure many people will announce they are leaving, then return to speculate about Huw Edwards or post their lunch. But the thing about giving things up is that it takes practice. It took me about five years to give up smoking, for example. I would announce that I was giving up only to find myself outside the newsagent 37 minutes later sparking up a Lucky Strike. But over those five years of giving up, I smoked less and less and my brain gradually rewired itself. Soon, not smoking was no effort at all.
I can feel something like that happening with social media. I’m not saying you won’t find me on there ever. It really gets me when I am ill or depressed or tired or bored, I find. And there are, sporadically, beautiful and funny things that happen when millions of strangers share the same space. If it wasn’t intermittently rewarding, we wouldn’t go there. But with each underwhelming tweet, with each over-composed picture, I can feel it loosening its grip. And when you go without this stuff for a few days, and then return to it? It simply looks insane. Everyone formatted into the same angry, lonely shapes. Everyone butting into each other’s conversations. Millions of people going, ‘I’m alive!’ ‘Me too!’ ‘Don’t forget me!’
And in the grand span of geological time, there’s no reason to think it will endure. According to the Copernican Principle, a theory first expounded by astrophysicist J Richard Gott III that has since been shown to be remarkably accurate, the best predictor of how long any given phenomenon will endure in the future is how long it has already been around. So, St Paul’s Cathedral is likely to stand longer than the O2 Arena. Les MiseÌrables will probably stay open longer than Back to the Future: The Musical. Worms are likely to stick around longer than humans. This too shall pass.
