A few years ago when I was a fairly regular speaker at lectures and conferences, I’d kick off my talks on digital culture or cultural entrepreneurship by sharing my earliest memories of the internet.
Like, I remember my old friend Heath Bunting (who along with Ivan Pope was an early advocate and activist in the net community) opening his wardrobe to show me, quite proudly, a whirring pc sat on the floor, surrounded by a mass of cables. It was a “web server” he told me, hooked up to “the World Wide Web” with a 24k dial up modem. A friend of his had another in a cupboard in some other part of town, and there were hundreds of amateur servers just like it popping up all around the world. It was (I think) 1993.
I remember not long after, my girlfriend and I watched in amazement as Laurie Anderson live streamed a performance direct from New York City to the Mac in our little bedroom office. Still on dial up, I’m not sure that anyone today would consider it a live stream, more a slow rendering of images, about 1 every second. But we were both hypnotised.
I remember Res Rocket Server, an ingenious piece of middleware that allowed musicians from all around the world to jam together in real time (well, most of the time), using a midi signal. People who had never met before, who lived thousands of miles apart, came together to make music.
Back then, the web was full of visionaries and dreamers. Sure, the p*rn industry jumped into the mix pretty quick and there were a few bad guys making viruses and other nasties, but most people involved in the internet at that time were there to marvel at — and take big gulps of — the power of collective, conscious and democratic progress. It was a new dawn. This, we thought, was going to change everything. How right we were, and yet so utterly wrong.
There are hundreds of seminal, first of a kind projects born from that spirit (please share your memories in the comments, I’d love to hear about them). IMDB, Wikipedia, MySpace, Friends Reunited and Second Life were perhaps among the last to carry that torch, before the money came along and everything changed. Not overnight, but within a few years.
Before the dot com bubble that grew in the late 1990s and exploded so spectacularly in 2001, there might’ve been a few business plans knocking around, but cap tables and return on investment (ROI) just didn’t seem (to me at least) to be front and centre. When Dean Whitbread (my then business partner, mentor and a pioneer in his own right) and I were developing UKDJ.org at the tail end of the millennium, bandwidth was the resource most people wanted, not money. Positive social change was the reward most net pioneers were looking for, not net worth.
But even the huge dot com losses at the beginning of the millennium didn’t stop the creation of the monster that is the internet entrepreneur. Investors and entrepreneurs learned their financial lessons (debatable I know), but not their social lessons. Perhaps because the social cost hadn’t hurt them as much, that was yet to come, but perhaps because it was never their focus in the first place. Let’s not forget that Mark Zuckerberg’s first project — Facemash — was rating the attractiveness of teenagers. How good that must feel, to be bottom of the pile for all to see, or precariously balanced at the top. All from one photo.
We had lost something along the way. I’ve been thinking for a while about what it might be, this quality that the commercialisation of the World Wide Web pushed away, and — having mulled over authenticity and integrity — I think it’s purity*. But whatever it was, as the money came in we lost it in equal amounts. Pound for pound, dollar for dollar. That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t noble intentions at the core of many contemporary online commercial projects, but more often than not they get pushed aside by the insidious desire to get rich, scale up, or make sufficient returns on the often eye-watering sums put up by investors.
All of which is why, by and large, I don’t do much with social media anymore, despite being an early adopter and advocate of almost every platform. It’s not that social media companies are the only ones chasing a profit, of course they’re not, look at the huge revenues (and undeniable social advancement) generated by Google (Alphabet) and others from ‘search’. But social media platforms occupy a very particular place in our collective psyche, in part because of their almost universal adoption, but equally because of their spectral like mediation.
The deep, unseen interventions have always bothered me. From the influence of the software development teams (whose remit is function and performance, not truth and wellbeing), to bias data sets, to the slow creep of image filters, the whims of owners and governments, the commercialisation (and increasing weaponisation) of cultural exchange. All of this is in the middle of the conversations we’re having on social platforms. It’s like trying to talk through a soaking sponge. Trying to form relationships in the spotlights of a peep show booth.
Then there’s the algorithms. There are plenty of places to read about the timeline manipulations and content delivery biases we hear so much about, but for now it’s enough to flag up the pressure they create to produce ever more clickable and ever more polarising content at the expense of our own happiness; and the illusion that with a few hundred followers we’re talking to a room, whilst the algorithms deliver our message to no one (a perverse and horribly toxic reality).
It’s not just the conflict between revenue and wellbeing, it’s the control. Social media has overt policies, some undeniably noble like restrictions on hate speech, bullying and anti-social behaviour, whilst others are more debatable, like the censoring of alternative views, ‘misinformation’ and ultimately who gets to decide what’s true and what’s false.
These days my eyes are wide open to the ethical conflict that bedrocks social media platforms, and the harm that’s perpetuated because the toxic desires of creators and users are too powerful and too deep now. They - and by this I mean mainstream, for profit, centralised social media - are the revolutionary potential of the World Wide Web, with the desire to do good subjugated by the insatiable need to accrue wealth. Whilst astonishing in its potential, it’s become a dark mediator of our social interactions, communication and knowledge. The commodification of experience. The ultimate mutation of ‘being human’ by the downforce of capitalism. In other words they’re f*cking with us, whether we know it or not. Whether they know it or not. Whether we like it or not.
There are thousands of articles, podcasts and academic papers on the growing negative impacts of social media, on people and communities large and small. You can go find them, but you probably don’t need to. Look around you. Look at the growing polarisation and intolerance. Look at the rage smouldering and often engulfing (sometimes bafflingly obscure) ideas and choices. Look at anxiety rates. Look at loneliness. Look at train carriages and dinner tables. Look at intimacy. Look at downtime. Look at daydreaming. Look in a mirror.
There’s something else I need to say here too, that social networks and indeed the internet as a whole are born from and speak to a very earthly and physical part of reality. As a result, it’s possible that they distract us from the myriad of other networks — some common place and others harder to access, some ancient and some momentary — that exist all around us, are our birthright, and are free.
So what can we do about it? Well, I’m not about to suggest we ban social networks. That box is well and truly open now, and anyhow we can’t ban the urges and desires that make social networks so addictive and so profitable. Better legislation is long overdue though, shamefully held up by powerful lobbyists and a squeamish reluctance amongst policy makers and those in control to acknowledge that social media companies are the product of a very broken set of values. We have legislation that protects us from a whole range of compulsive and destructive but very human behaviours, like gambling, driving too fast, fraud. There’s no reason we can’t better legislate here.
But beyond that, it really does come down to us. In the same way that we make choices about our alcohol, tobacco and sugar consumption, we need to acknowledge that the psychological drivers and emotional effects at play with social media engagement need similar control. A treat once in a while is no great shakes, but breakfast, lunch and dinner is going to take its toll.
We need to shed a few platforms, explode a few myths about success and influence, be more vocal about the drag on our communities, be more confident in guiding and protecting our children, be more demanding about how we (as a global community) should be treated, we should protect one another even if it’s at first rejected.
We must recognise that social media and the culture it springs from is not who we are, but how we are most easily exploited, and make new places to come together — perhaps carrying the torch of a simpler time — that are not founded on the principles of owners, products and consumers but instead on the power of collective, conscious and democratic progress.
Social media is not your friend, but the World Wide Web will take you back in a heartbeat.
This post is dedicated to my daughters Elsa (21), Annie (18) and all their friends and followers.
#socialmediaisnotyourfriend
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*purity
(noun)
the state of not being mixed with anything else
the fact of being clean or free from harmful substances
from Cambridge Dictionary
Good history of Res Rocket Surfer here
Images
‘Woman, Alone’, Grae Dickason from Pixabay
’Flying in Second Life’, San Diego State University image archive
Still from ‘O Superman’, Laurie Anderson, 1981
