I am of the opinion that the finest philosopher of science of the past 100 years is T.S. Kuhn. Sure, an argument could be made for Feyerabend, and I’m sure even Popper has his adherents, but this is a firmly anti-Popperian Substack, so we’ll give kudos to Kuhn.
Kuhn described the structure of scientific revolutions as being ultimately non-scientific. Paradigm shifts occur during periods where people are doing revolutionary things in science that do not quite gel with the way things have been traditionally done.
And we have reached that point in our social media webisphere.
I have been around for this before: the proto- forms of social media, like BBS boards and Livejournal and whatnot, defined much of my online life for the early 2000s. As an older millennial, these replaced, in a lot of ways, in-person socialization. I met most of my current circle of friends online, and we had frequent ways of staying in touch and hanging out that did not involve being in person.
So it was that I saw the rise of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and what not during my law school and early adulthood years. And now that second generation of social media seems to be drawing to a close.
At base, social media’s purpose is to bring people together in new ways, to enable them to share things about themselves, build communities, stay in touch, and in general be, well, social.
Early second-generation social media did this very well. Facebook was a great way to let friends and family see curated snippets of your life. Twitter was a good way to join in on big conversations or just shoot the shit, in 140/280 characters or less.
Each of them enabled, in a major way, new ways of finding a community and interacting with it.
But then came the ever-present spectre of capitalism. All of these social media companies became big business, and subject to the societal laws which govern that. Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world, now empowered by funds beyond our ken, became aware of the power of their social media sites as platforms to pursue their own ends and shape public discourse.
This isn’t new; there’s little difference between a Zuckberg or a Dorsey or a William Randolph Hearst. The wealthy who control media access have always had the ability to shape discourse by determining what makes it on the airwaves.
The promise of the Internet, however, especially to those of us who helped create it in the 90s and 2000s, was that we would, could even, finally free communication from access gatekeepers. With our webrings and weblogs and bulletin boards and even social media, now we had a way to reach our audience that depended only on our ability to keep a web server afloat.
And in 1995, boy that was all you needed, a spare Linux box running Apache and some rudimentary computer knowledge. Now, of course, commercial services exist to take care of that for us, with cloud-based data storage and better uptimes than we could have imagined in the days of 14400 baud. And with those services come the attendant ills of commerce, but for the most part, this is an acceptable trade-off for the majority of users who want an easy way to share photos with Aunt Maude and discuss tv shows involving elves and dragons with their friends.
As Zuckerberg’s greed and Musk’s craven need to be liked, even if it is by the worst people deepens, existing social media platforms will wither and die, run into the ground by “visionaries” whose vision stops at “I want everyone to like me.”
The sad truth is that the first person who puts together a competent social media platform that “just works” will be an overnight success, much like Apple’s iPhone. Is the iPhone the best smartphone on the market, feature or hardware-wise? No, not even close. But Apple boasts something Android has never quite nailed, which is that everyone from toddlers to toddling grannies can pick it up and be somewhat proficient. In Jobs-speak, it “just works.”
I have tried many of the successors to Twitter out there looking for something to recreate the Twitter experience. Mastodon’s federated server system will be too confusing for the majority of users. Hive is run by idiot children. Instagram still falls under Zuckberg’s umbrella. TikTok is… well it’s TikTok.
Post.news probably comes the closest, but right now it has too much of an inside-baseball feel, meant for the typing intelligentsia. Which is great, that’s like 90% of my online friends, but there’s a reason the New Yorker doesn’t have the subscription base of Time or People. To truly be the next ubiquitous social media platform, we need a place that will let us create profiles, find our friends, share pictures, video, and text, and laugh and cut up and be serious and get help and link to other places and be a social hub.
What I am afraid of is that this is too obvious. Everyone knows that writing such software would not be terribly difficult; it’s in the running of the place, refereeing all our disputes and generally trying to keep the worst internet citizens from acting like they always do, that difficulty arises. And no one wants to sign up for the thankless job of trying to impose order on an online community without serious compensation, and the model I envision, maximally free; deceptively simple; and without the sorts of intense data-tracking and privacy-invading advertising we normally see, cannot make enough money to justify that.
We would all love a full-featured, ad-free social media service that ran on secure servers with great response speed and fantastic uptime. I also want a unicorn I can ride into battle. Some necessary compromises must be made to ensure a usable experience, the same as we must accept some degree of moderation before any Internet forum becomes a cesspit of CSAM, the n-word, and trolling.
But there will be some new platform to arise from Twitter’s ashes. And we will flock there, and rebuild our communities, and meet old friends, and everything old will be new again until the next time we iterate this cycle.
In the meantime, try not to lose sight of the fact that Internet eschatology happens at ever-increasing frequency. This is not the end of the world. It is the beginning many new ones. Find me, if you must, at Post.news.