Imaging waking up one day, opening Facebook, and seeing that people hadn’t felt it necessary to share the most mundane aspects of their lives?

I know, it’s virtually impossible to believe, but maybe one day future generations will look back on our odd need for online validation and shake their heads.

Maybe they’ll wonder aloud why we all seemed to be infatuated with these platforms, when there’s “mounting evidence that they [are] tearing society apart”.

That last bit comes from a Vanity Fair piece, “The end of the social era can’t come soon enough”, and they substantiate their argument by saying that social media is “being used as terrorist recruitment tools, facilitating bullying, driving up anxiety, and undermining our elections”.

More on why the writer, Nick Bilton, is so over the hunt for likes:

One of the problems is that these platforms act, in many ways, like drugs. Facebook, and every other social-media outlet, knows that all too well. Your phone vibrates a dozen times an hour with alerts about likes and comments and retweets and faves. The combined effect is one of just trying to suck you back in, so their numbers look better for their next quarterly earnings report.

Sean Parker [above], one of Facebook’s earliest investors and the company’s first president, came right out and said what we all know: the whole intention of Facebook is to act like a drug, by “[giving] you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.” That, Parker said, was by design.

These companies are “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya has echoed this, too. “Do I feel guilty?” he asked rhetorically on CNN about the role Facebook is playing in society. “Absolutely I feel guilt.”

Now and again you will see people lament, mostly on Twitter, about how social media used to be such a fun place. Here at home there is much political wrangling online (not to mention the Gupta Bots that continuously troll anyone who seeks to expose the depths of State Capture), and over in the US it is just as toxic:

We’ve all watched the way Donald J. Trump used social media to drive a wedge between us all, the way he tweets his sad and pathetic insecurities out to the world, without a care for how calling an equally insecure rogue leader a childish name might put us all on the brink of nuclear war.

There’s a point that watching it all happen in real time makes you question what you’re doing with your life. As for conversing with our fellow Americans, we’ve all tried, unsuccessfully, to have a conversation on these platforms, which has so quickly devolved into a shouting match, or pile-on from perfect strangers because your belief isn’t the same as theirs.

Years ago, a Facebook executive told me that the biggest reason people unfriend each other is because they disagree on an issue. The executive jokingly said, “Who knows, if this keeps up, maybe we’ll end up with people only having a few friends on Facebook.” Perhaps, worse of all, we’ve all watched as Russia has taken these platforms and used them against us in ways no one could have comprehended a decade ago.

It’s that last bit, and the results of some incredibly effective manipulatiom from Putin and his pals, that for many has really sunk the ship:

As one government official told me recently, “Putin’s surreptitious propaganda campaign has been one of the most successful in modern history.” All he needed, the official said, was social media. For the first time since I signed up for these platforms, I’m now in the camp of people wondering what the hell were we thinking?

There might be a movement to delete apps off phones and ensure some down time away from social media, but we all know that society would erupt into anarchy if Facebook dissolved and Mike who you knew from 12 years ago couldn’t share those hilarious prank videos with his pals.

They’re not funny, Mike, and you look like a tosser for sharing them.

Unfriend.

[source:vanityfair]