I came to social media to stay in touch with friends and family when I lived overseas. I stayed for its cornucopia of character development opportunities. As this last week has shown, they are on limitless offer.
We all know by now that should you wish to improve your resilience to harassment and abuse, be a woman, express a nuanced political opinion on the internet and – little lady – just you wait.
Having been on Twitter since one million years BC, I am as wizened from my beatings as Rooster freakin’ Cogburn. Yet this week’s internet lesson suggests for all the years I’ve been on social media, I’m not so wise.
Yesterday, unusually, I was not distracted from my work by Twitter because I was distracted by the launch of Mark Zuckerberg’s new Twitter alternative, Threads.
Is Elon Musk, new owner of Twitter, a genius? Yes, at creating opportunities for his rivals. Having bought Twitter at an eye-wateringly over-inflated US$44bn – seemingly because his ex-wife sent him a text message reading “Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please!?” – Musk’s decisions since have resulted in six in 10 US adult site users choosing to spend less time on the platform.
Briefly, Twitter has become unbearably janky to operate, verification systems are meaningless and it’s full of Nazis. If history and social media can agree on one fact alone, it’s that the only people who like Nazis are Nazis. 61% of Twitter’s power users lean left.
So the search for somewhere people might chat macroeconomic policy, pineapple on pizzas and Taylor Swift tickets without sly threats of genocide has been on since “free speech” champion and aspiring internet comedian Musk hailed his own arrival at the company with a weak meme.
That search turbo-charged this last week when Musk decided to limit how much content Twitter users were allowed to physically see. Questions on the theme of “Dude, isn’t advertising already one of your last income streams?” were responded to with – I shit you not – a poop emoji.
Never one to miss an opportunity to slap Musk in a cage fight – well, until Elon’s mum intervenes – Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was bragging by first day’s end Threads had signed up 30 million new users.
I was one of them, posting out the jokes no one pays me to write, engaging pleasantries with strangers I will never actually meet and hitting the block button on the obsessed weirdoes whose deranged projections of me have them harass me anywhere I appear. Just like I do on Twitter. And on its grumpy anarchist variation, Mastodon. And Bluesky. And Facebook. Instagram. TikTok. It occurred to me that I am on so many platforms now, I have little time left to make content to platform.
There is an adjustment period as a culture confronts and psychologically adapts to new media and technology, and it’s longer than we realise. This last 24 hours of staring at my phone asking “what am I doing this for?” has me thinking that for all the sassy talk about “digital natives” and the “extremely online”, we are still so in awe of what the internet can do we outsize our deference to it – the way we once dipped our heads before thunder, believing the rumbles came from Thor.
Watch us ritualistically refresh feeds. Observe the human sacrifices performed when a marketing department decides five catty comments constitute “brand damage”. What I find most disturbing about AI language models like ChatGPT is not the app’s capacity to construct plausible sentences, it’s the human capacity to believe if a machine’s sentence sounds plausible, it must be true as holy writ. As someone who got ChatGPT to write their obituary, please extend your sincere condolences to my imaginary widowed wife Emma, if not to my actual husband, Ben.
The technological awe shown towards our new media reminded me of early audiences for motion pictures – apparently unable to discern a projection of an oncoming train from the real thing, they were said to flee the cinemas in terror. A little research revealed that while there were isolated incidents of individuals freaked out by unfamiliar images, rushing overwrought audience-members into ambulances was “the best possible publicity for the picture”.
The real “train effect” was the promoters’ cynical construction of this “unsophisticated other”. It allowed them to create an audience of people culturally aligned to the new technology, united in a smug conviction they possessed a superior understanding of it. When the authoritarian movements of the early 20th century pumped out propaganda through their new media, a generation of minds over whom the cinema had this cultural power were the ones who believed it.
Disinformation and propaganda saturate the internet now. And we’re all here.
The billions burned by Musk on Twitter, the Zuckerberg investment in Threads, the venture capital splashed on the new platforms – they all speak to the awesome power that internet tech and its media has on the powerful and, through them, to the rest of us.
The dire lesson offered now is of the critical cultural danger we are in – until we can rightsize the internet in our heads, and in our lives.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
