Social Media is Humanity’s Great Big Ugly Brain on a Platter
Social media is the monolithic dumpster fire of human thought
I’m nauseatingly tired of seeing this massive conglomeration of humanity’s thoughts all bloody and piled up on a platter. We call it social media.
Over the past three decades, humankind has built a myriad of mesmerizing machines. We’ve got calculators capable of computing numbers at superhuman speeds.
We’ve built supercomputers that can process incalculable amounts of data in a stunningly short period. Our machines can recognize patterns that even the best code breakers once puzzled over.
They can simulate vast and incomprehensible structures too intricate and expansive for the human brain even to begin to ponder.
And we’ve also created the World Wide Web, a massive network of sprawling interconnected devices that we, pesky humans, use to share information at nearly light speed.
Atop that web rests the crown jewels of internet communication — social media sites and apps that allow individual users themselves to indiscriminately pour chunks of themselves onto the internet.
They allow us to share every joyful, anxious, enthusiastic, ecstatic, nostalgic, dejected, manic, sad, guilty, bored, incensed, confused, enraged, violent, aggressive, melancholic, and downright ugly thought, feeling, or perception we’ve ever had—without a tinge of vacillation.
Whether we’re posting pictures of our cats, showing off our half-eaten lunches, or confessing our deepest, darkest fears, we do so gleefully with no qualms and no trepidation.
It’s a strange form of voyeurism for fetishists of popular vulgarity.
They say the stock market is the physical manifestation of all the decisions and desires of the entire human race organized into a giant, dynamic, oscillating digital entity. It’s a giant and dazzling machine, a superorganismbuilt from the ground up from nothing more than the intangible mud brick of human choices and the desires they divulge.
If the stock market is a giant machine, elegant — sophisticated, bold, and finely tuned to reflect the vast totality of human choices — social media is a raw brain rotting on a wooden board. It represents all of our thoughts, even the most reprehensible.
Wait, it does more than just represent our thoughts—it is our thoughts.
Each one of humanity’s worst, most unflattering traits can be found on the social media carnival. Our cardinal sins are converted into new currencies: gamified notifications, top-user badges, shares, and retweets.
Behind the cover of distance and the veil of anonymity, the ugliest, nastiest, pettiest, and creepiest sides of humanity come out to play like nocturnal predators at dusk. A whole host of deranged characters finally get to say and do the vile things they’ve been suppressing their entire lives.
There’s the lonely man who can’t get over his ex-girlfriend who recently dumped him, sad posting endlessly into the void in the secret hopes that it will provide some form of cathartic resolution he’s yet unaware of.
There’s the bully who’s looking for his next target, an insecure introvert who’s just trying to make it through the day without being swallowed into the black abyss of their own depressing thoughts.
There’s the troll, frolicking through cyberspace and sprinkling hate and negativity wherever they go — like the nihilistic Johnny Appleseed of human misery. To them, social media is like a game of dodgeball with slurs.
There are the status chasers, fishing for compliments, thriving on your feelings of FOMO as measured by any and every form of engagement they can induce from you.
There’s the scammer trying to cheat people out of their very last hard-earned dollar. Next to the scammer, you’ll find the catfish, pretending to be the voluptuous brunette (whose photos they stole from the status chasers) so they can deceive people for laughs or profits.
There are the stalkers, the nefarious oglers, onlookers, and scopophiliacs, lurking in the shadows, watching and waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike (and harass). Armed with dick pics and feeble taunts, they’re ready to pummel your inbox with unwelcome attention of the creepy variety.
And let’s not forget the keyboard warriors, that maddened bundle of vulnerable narcissists who hide behind their screens, spewing insults and threats with impunity.
All of these unsavory characters can be found lurking on social media platforms, ready to unleash their perniciousness on unsuspecting victims.
Dante’s Hell for the 21st century.
It’s a collection of catastrophes.
The worst of the bunch are the vigilantes. These are the overly aggressive, high-strung neurotics boiling over with loathing and screaming in inaudible text. They’re convinced they’re saving the world.
They pretend that if they can just muster up enough emotional energy and unadulterated rage, they can control the whole world.
They’re the Facebook moms championing the anti-vax movement, shamelessly boasting about risking their child’s life because a group of strangers — represented by pseudonyms and avatars — told them it was a good idea. Linda is ready to sell you essential oils if you need any, by the way.
They’re the enraged dads deep-throating antisocial, anti-government propaganda that they’re ready to burn the earth to cinders over a fake news story they read, even after 203 commenters have told them that the story was phony (as was evidenced by the site’s disclaimer that it’s for entertainment purposes only).
They’re the fake news propagators: liars, but with a machine gun.
They’re the furious males so pathetically threatened by women’s mere existence they cower and hiss at the sight of anything feminine. A woman’s mere presence in the same space represents a direct threat to his sense of power, pride, and masculinity. His singular purpose is to hate stuff.
The overzealous activists are hellbent on interpreting every…single…word into its worst possible rendering, framing it in whichever uncharitable light makes the speaker look the worst and them the most dignified. There is no shortcut to the gluttonous self-indulgence of smug, megalomaniacal, self-congratulatory vanity quite like pretend moral indignation — looking down on others to lift themselves up.
Thanks to the vigilantes, social media is like a public street corner where every single crackpot street protestor in America has gathered for the big crackpot street protestor convention, where they’ll all battle for your attention, so they can douse you with fanatical litanies you never asked for.
All of this has swallowed our minds and our time.
Many people spend more time talking to strangers on social media than friends and family (I’ve been guilty of this many moons ago). I’m pretty sure we’ll eventually have to change the definition of “productive” to include everyone who didn’t mindlessly scroll for over an hour that day.
The argumentativeness is out of control.
You say the wrong thing to someone on social media and, within minutes, you have thirty-seven new sworn enemies who are all terrible spellers.Arguers, rhetoricians, dogmatists, and debaters are spawned like the infinity of enemy soldiers in a first-person shooter game.
Social media is a place where everybody shouts, and nobody listens.
Social media is a digital freak show where everyone’s a self-appointed star, and nobody cares.
Social media is a virtual Colosseum, a disorienting Petri dish of human squalor.
Social media is Pandora’s box of frights, a poisoned chalice of the world’s worst behaviors.
It’s the grand carcass of humanity’s dying ideas and antiquated impulses. It’s a queasy conglomeration of all of our personal failures.
But here’s the thing — social media isn’t what’s to blame. Social media didn’t turn us all into narcissistic zombies. It merely unveiled what was there all along. It gave us the most powerful tools of self-expression ever.
And, now that we’ve erected a colossal mirror for us to see ourselves as we truly are, ungirded by the self-adulatory fables that we tell ourselves about how wonderful we are—we don’t like what we see.
We’re terrified at our own sight.
On social media, we’re forced to see ourselves, constituents of humanity, as we really are. But social media didn’t manufacture who we are. We did.
Sure, social media might prompt and prod us along, telling us to imbibe every flavor of the crazy rainbow like we were simultaneously guzzling the essence of life and eating from the tree of knowledge.
It might escort us down labyrinthine filter bubbles until reality itself, the real one, not the online one, distorts into a hall of mirrors so disorienting it’s like surfing on quantum foam.
But it didn’t make us.
We made ourselves.
And just like that, we can change ourselves. Perhaps the social media sphere is nothing more than one great, big serendipitous sign telling humanity to get it together.
Perhaps providence’s way of telling us that it’s time to turn the lens inward and work on what’s inside of us rather than what’s outside.
It’s our cue to nurture ourselves, the best parts of ourselves, while we put the worst parts of ourselves back into Pandora’s box.
"Perhaps the social media sphere is nothing more than one great, big serendipitous sign telling humanity to get it together."
I think this is a beautifully positive way to interpret social media at its ugliest. If only humanity will follow through....