Social Control Media as a Rapid Race to the Bottom - Part II - Think Before You Talk
The 'socmed' nonsense does not exist in our home
In Part I I spoke about my personal experience with Social Control Media and some of Ryan's experiences (or his husband's observations). It seems like an undisputed consensus that over time Social Control Media is only getting worse and more dangerous, not only because of its owners but also its objectives, features, and net effect on "users" (a term usually chosen to describe drug addicts).
This series seems to have come at the right time, more so given Daniel Pocock's latest commentary on the Social Control Media phenomenon, in particular its toxic effect on society at large.
"I was reading a book about millionaires a few months ago," Ryan says. "It mentioned that few millionaires use "social media". It's an unproductive use of the time. They don't like that. It grabs your attention, but it doesn't enrich you in any way. Financially, intellectually, it does not enrich you."
But life isn't about money. The question is, does that improve people's lives? In my experience, it wasted a lot of time. It just wasn't worth the time. At best, it only wasted time. Sometimes it was worse than that.
"It gets you like my mother," Ryan adds, "having "fence wars" with people she doesn't even know. It has people inadvertently broadcasting their weirdness to others."
That makes them more vulnerable. Many of them do not even recognise it.
That has been my experience too, more so in the last years of me being "on" it (which is why I left or first quit participating). People were getting very toxic and dishonest. Worse yet, some people leveraged it for nefarious purposes, like commanding attack dogs. Pocock mentions how MElon leverages "X" in this way.
"Employers comb through it," Ryan says. "It's not just the government. If nothing else it robs you of your chance to make a controlled first impression. It used to be that nobody knew anything about you really. You could present yourself any way you wanted to. But now when you go to meet someone, you pull up their LinkedIn, their Facebook, etc. You see what they do with themselves. Who their associates are."
Ryan also gives an example. "My former landlord Joy," he says. "Her husband took a picture of her and then used one of those incompetent iPhone photo tools to try to delete the cane she's using. It created a cane-shaped blur in a couch behind her and then her hand is gripping something, but half her hand is missing. So it can also draw attention to things you were trying to hide, and draw attention to the fact you try to hide them. Airbrush fail."
"You know, there should be a mystery about you, there should be a mystery about everyone. It makes it easier to discriminate when you broadcast everything. I thought MySpace was sort of neat. It had nothing on Facebook when it came to the sophistication of the spying. It was fairly static. Years after I deleted my Facebook account, I was still receiving money from them for ways they broke the law. I have not had a Facebook account since like 2019 I think, and they were still having to send me checks last year."
In the past, in public/press interviews, Richard Stallman would casually say that Social Control Media (or 'socmed') was used by people to curate/create a fictional image of themselves. In sites like Instagram people also manipulate their own photos, under the guise of mere "filters". But who are they trying to actually impress? If Social Control Media is like "dating sites", then it's certainly not used that way. Moreover, dating online is a bad idea.
Social Control Media isn't going to help you find a job or a partner. It's more likely to cause problems with both. █