Can Social Media Be Redeemed?

A closed game of engagement that plays us

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Dear Living Dark readers,

If we take social media to represent, in essence, a big game, is it winnable? I am increasingly inclined to think the answer is no. And by winning I don’t mean getting more engagement in the form of things like outperforming others, gaming algorithms, or finding smarter ways to increase your reach. In fact, flipping the script on such “engagement” can wake us up to what’s really going on and what’s at stake in this mass experiment in behavior modification.

These thoughts are inspired by two things, one new and the other old. The new factor is my recent acquisition of Jaron Lanier’s 2017 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. The second is my approximately two-decade personal relationship with social media, which has had both positive and negative aspects.

For the first factor, Lanier’s book is an entry in the same venerable genre represented by such books as Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. In fact, Lanier explains in his acknowledgments that he was directly inspired by Mander’s 1978 classic. Mander claimed television didn’t need to be reformed or improved, but rather completely gotten rid of, because it was essentially—that is, in its very essence—destructive on multiple levels (personal, environmental, and societal) and was therefore not reformable. Lanier takes the same approach with social media, declaring them rotten at their core.

On the off chance that you aren’t aware of Lanier’s rhetorical ethos for writing this book, he’s not a culture critic peering in from the sidelines. He’s a computer scientist, technologist, and one of the original pioneers of virtual reality. He has spent decades working at the highest levels of Silicon Valley research and development, including roles at companies like Microsoft and Google, and has been deeply involved in shaping the digital world from the inside. His critique of social media is thus not anti-technology as such, but the considered judgment of someone who helped build the very systems he’s now warning us about.

Currently, I have made it through his book’s introduction and first few chapters, and I’m finding it deeply riveting, as I knew I would. “Algorithms gorge on data about you every second,” he says in the first chapter, which argues that social media are causing us to lose our free will. He points out that these platforms are fundamentally underwritten by advertisers whose ultimate identities and motivations the social media companies themselves don’t even know, so our attention is sold in a titanic behavior modification experiment that’s specifically engineered to exploit certain features of human psychology for the purpose of what the industry euphemistically calls engagement, but which Lanier says can be more obviously and accurately understood as addiction. And as we all remember from the spate of books and journalism that appeared in the 2010s, many of the founders of the whole industry gained a conscience a few years ago and frankly admitted all this with many mea culpas, though this didn’t really do anything to stop or even slow the juggernaut.

Lanier has a knack for framing arguments and information in compelling ways, for coming up with figures of speech and turns of phrase that drive home with new and startling force the kinds of things we think we already know. For example:

What started as advertising morphed into what would better be called “empires of behavior modification for rent.”

And:

Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.

And:

So the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms. Hypnosis might be therapeutic so long as you trust your hypnotist, but who would trust a hypnotist who is working for unknown third parties? Who? Apparently billions of people.

I’m currently strapped in for reading the remainder of the book. It remains to be seen whether I will be persuaded to delete all my social media accounts. This wouldn’t be a major chore, as I only currently have three, or four if you count Goodreads, which I don’t.

That brings me to the second thing that inspired me to write these words: my aforementioned long relationship with social media. The story of me and Facebook, and me and Twitter, and me and LinkedIn, probably isn’t all that different from your own in its general outline. What may be somewhat different, or maybe not, is the level of skittishness and repeated reversals of course that I have pursued. I currently have a Facebook account where I’m minimally active. It has only existed for the past couple of years. And it’s my third incarnation over there. I created my first FB account in the late aughts. A few years later I deleted it and swore I’d never go back. Then in the mid/late teens I created another one in connection with my doctoral work and the simultaneous imminent publication of one of my books. I ended up destroying that one as well. My current third presence at Facebook is only a couple of years old, and its ultimate fate is likewise uncertain.

The same thing happened with Twitter. I created my first account circa 2009, used it for a few years, and then deleted it when I realized it had begun to colonize my mind, causing me to unconsciously evaluate my everyday experience through its own lens by filtering and framing everything in terms of potentially tweetable moments. The same realization lay behind my decision to delete that first Facebook account around the same time. But a few years later, as with Facebook, I returned to Twitter with a new account. This was a couple of years before Elon Musk bought it and transformed it into X. I “got serious” with that account and figured I might as well learn how to use it for the most effective communication I could possibly carry out. My thinking was: Why not see if I could use it as it “wanted” to be used, in the ways most suited for its particular form and function, with a knowledge of how best to connect with people through it, but keeping this all subsumed under my own purposes?

To effect this, I took an online course that laid out the inner workings of the whole thing. It covered everything from how to optimize your profile, create magnetic content, use third-party tools, and time your posts to how to collaborate with other users for maximizing engagement. And on the last count, oh, didn’t you know? All those mega-popular Twitter (now X) accounts, and also Instagram accounts and so on—the super-users with tens or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers, the ones who regularly garner thousands of likes and comments with their posts—vanishingly few of these achieve that level or status “organically.” Instead, they game the system. There is an entire back-end world of collaborative “engagement groups” made up of people who have agreed to cross-promote each other’s content. There’s also a widespread practice of buying followers, of paying people to follow you in order to jack up your numbers, look impressive, and game the algorithm.

If this is news to you, and if it hits you with a big feeling of “What the ever-loving hell?”, just know that it hit me that way, too. But in the end, it all makes total sense, as measured by the internal logic of the social media universe itself, where growth and engagement are the meta-principles underlying everything. Everyone, it seems, wants more engagement. “Success” and “failure” are measured in terms of clicks, likes, comments, and shares, cross-referenced with the size of one’s audience and the rate of its growth. This tends to be true whether you’re an individual or an organization. Consciously or unconsciously, success or failure in the social media realm for any given account is generally measured by those symbols of attention and approval.

But, as emphasized by Lanier (among others), on the back end the real engagement is what the social media companies get from you: the fact that you’re chasing these symbols of attention on their platforms. They have you totally engaged. It’s an all-encompassing wraparound, like water to a fish. It’s like the casino always winning, no matter how many little “wins” you may get on a given day. Our very act of seeking and responding to social media engagement is itself a meta-game of engagement via a behavior modification protocol that’s deployed by the social media companies. And it’s one that they, as the casino, are always winning. The sheer fact that we’re playing the game is their win. Sure, we can have truly meaningful conversations with other people through these media, and these can sidestep the addictive engagement effect to a degree. I have certainly had my share of such interactions, and I have appreciated them. But this positive benefit doesn’t alter the deeper manipulative and extractive structure of the system itself, which still benefits from our attention, participation, and emotional investment.

And as the social media companies are winning, we’re all losing, as evident in the central contributing role that this technology plays in our proliferating mass insanity. Such insanity is reciprocal to our proliferating individual unhappiness as dopamine addicts who get their fix from interactions with electronic screens. I’m sure I will be reading more about this as I make my way through Lanier’s book, but it is also something that I, like you, have known for a long time. And isn’t it strange that, even as we know this, we find it so very difficult to abandon our accounts?

I have often thought of digital technologies in terms of Thoreau’s famous metaphor of the railroad in Walden. “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us,” he wrote in the mid-1800s, expressing his view that modern technology and industrialization had become things that we serve instead of things that serve us. Inspired by his famous words, I have often thought the challenge of social media, and more widely of the internet itself, is to learn to “ride it,” to maximize our conscious use of it for positive purposes while learning to minimize or eliminate its clear potential to enslave us to its own logic and purposes. And yes, all technologies do have an inbuilt purpose or program for how they metaphorically “want” to be used, such as the reshaping of cities and how we inhabit the landscape that was brought about by the automobile. This is the chief insight of the field of media ecology.

But over time I am becoming more convinced that such positive use of social media may be impossible. This is even without the provocation of Lanier’s book. Social media may, I suspect, be irredeemable, even if companies were to redesign them to remove their deliberately addictive features. Some systems, some technologies, may simply be bound to these impulses too tightly and too fundamentally to ever be effectively disentangled from them. There may be a bug in our human makeup that will always find and exploit the egoic, destructive possibilities of technologies like this, ones that emerge out of our dual inbuilt desire for connection/communication and attention/esteem, and that inflame this desire at scale. If this is true, then the problem isn’t how we use them, but that we use them at all, because using them and being used by them are impossible to separate.

It may be that social media—and maybe elements of the internet as a whole?—were best characterized more than 40 years ago by a famous fictional artificial intelligence: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Warm regards,

PS. The book links in this post are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through and buy something.

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