2024—Google is twenty-five years old, and social media, most days, is a swirling cauldron of fiery retrogression. We contend with mis-and-dis- information, cyberbullying and hate speech, but it’s not just about politics. You, the unsuspecting Twitter/X user, can get blocked at the drop of a cat photo.
Today I ask: how could three decades of Internet have brought us to the current climate in social media, where memes plead with us to “Make Orwell Fiction Again” and someone is making money off the tee-shirts and coffee mugs?
Instead of Brave New World, we got something suspiciously similar to 1984. Although if memory serves, John the Savage does end up hanging himself. I also remember that the ‘World State’ was a civilization whose only goals were ‘stability and productivity’. In order to achieve these goals, the ‘Controllers’ who rule the World State tried to make sure their citizens were always happy.
Sound familiar?
Let’s get into Mr. Peabody’s WayBack machine. It was in the year 1984, that William Gibson’s Cyber-punk classic, Neuromancer, was published. He’d coined the word, ‘Cyberspace’.
"A consensual hallucination that felt and looked like a physical space but actually was a computer-generated construct representing abstract data."1
A discrete world, but not our world. No one described the Internet before it went into general use better than Gibson did. This is exactly what we were primed for. Cyberspace, that sleek and futuristic world, was a dream, a playground, and we fell in love with it. It was far more sophisticated than the slow, clunky computers we used to access it, but it didn’t take long for all of this to improve.
If the World Wide Web 1.0 was a place, we could all leave the real world and go to, games like Half-life (1998) were where the party was. We had a way to make Kansas go bye-bye to rival soma2. But a year later, Matrix (1999) was already telling us to mistrust this cyberworld that envelops minds, even as World Wide Web 2.0 of that same year fed us promises of infinite free sources of information and entertainment. We were all like Trinity, intoning together, “I’m in.”
That’s technology for you, optimistic, and always far ahead of our ability to extrapolate its effects on society. By 2000, the novelty of being ‘online’ was wearing off, but its pull was getting stronger. In 2002, people thronged to the now quaint chat salons, while forward-thinking writers were also investing their time in WordPress, followed by MySpace (May and August 2003, respectively), writing in ‘web logs’. 9/11, the Dot-com crash, and the war in Iraq were having their impact on us; political and social malaise were setting in. The smartphone was no longer a brick, but a Blackberry was now a ‘crackberry’, as executives realized it was not just a business tool; it was also a millstone around their necks. The Internet disrupted many sectors and gobbled up our real world time. Anxiety surged. People needed it, wanted it, and hated it.
Why? Because we actually did not go with that Neuromancer concept of the Internet, the refuge and alternative wonderland world. Instead, we brought it to us, meaning we imported our bad manners, poor business practices, dirty politics and the entire Pandora’s Box of shit that is the human condition. More irony: no one seemed to mind that the fabric of our hyper-proprietary culture and individualistic society was wearing perilously thin. Not even after Columbine (1999).
This new interconnectedness felt amazing. The reach of cell phones and sms messages created new social situations we’d never seen before. Connectedness was supposed to be a good thing. 2004; Facebook and the innocent-seeming ‘Like’ were born, and half the planet got on board. Yet, we still did not know what to do with ourselves. We had excellent means to connect to each other, but we, as people, had been spiraling out of control the whole time.
Fast forward to around 2015. Social media is Trump damaging the collective emotional plane, whose locus is the Internet. It degraded in ways the inventors of the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol did not envision, not even William Gibson saw this coming. The virtual world we had learned to need was turned on us. And right now, we have social media platforms that wheedle us for money, annoy us with all kinds of intrusive content you need a machete to cut through, and the refuge it offers is some societal proxy function for those who are all but disenfranchised in the analog world, isolated, angry, and lonely. In a study from 2021, the McCallions wrote:
“They [social media] seemed to assume, blithely and conveniently, that the marketplace of ideas would take care of itself. This isn’t what happened. Instead, with shocking speed, social media decimated professional media, abraded our civic life, coaxed us into unhealthy relationships with our phones and with one another, harvested and monetized our personal data, warped our brains and our politics, and made us brittle and twitchy and frail, all while a few entrepreneurs and investors continued to profit from our addiction and confusion.”3
Even eleven years ago, in his article for Salon, We are All Addicts Now, Damien Johnson wrote:
“It’s not obvious to us now, but the most far-reaching social development of the early 21st century is our increasingly insistent habit of rewarding ourselves whenever we feel the need to lift our moods.” (italics mine)
The so-called dopamine rush. It explains so much of the way people behave online.
Addictions, which like cupcakes, or “cronuts” if you prefer, come in a variety of flavors—and of course, there is crime. Identity theft, fraud and predatory behavior are real. User experience being uppermost in the agendas of platform creators, there’s no question that security measures are key to maintaining a space that is safe for everyone, although this is not immune to controversy. In 2023, we witnessed Elon Musk’s purported support of free speech, only to see him ban journalists, bloggers and podcasters critical of him or the Isr**li regime.
The platform stipulates the following rules of behavior:
“We recognize that if anyone, regardless of background, experiences harassment on X, it can jeopardize their ability to express themselves and cause harm. To facilitate healthy dialogue on the platform, and empower individuals to express diverse opinions and beliefs, we prohibit behavior and content that harasses, shames, or degrades others. In addition to posing risks to people’s safety, these types of behavior may also lead to physical and emotional hardship for those affected.”4
Whereas in 2003—and for younger readers, this might be hard to believe—no one equated what went on in the “world wide web” with real life. Now, the two worlds have merged. A post from the right person will send stocks soaring or crashing. Social media use has a verified correlation with suicide. Our ever-expanding range of devices is not delivering a consensual hallucination; they are more like conduits between two realities with equal capability to affect each other for better or worse.
This brings me to blocking. Unquestionably, there are things online you don’t want to see or read, and people you would rather not interact with. For this, you know the choices: scroll on by, unfollow, mute, or block. If you’re being harassed repeatedly by someone, or threatened that causes stress or fear, you block them. It’s the only way to be sure they cannot contact you again. But what about blocking people simply because you don’t like them or are in a bad mood? What if you are falling prey to your own unconscious bias or simply giving yourself a license to act unfairly? There is nothing to say you can’t, and apparently, people don’t seem to feel that they shouldn’t do it. There’s even an expression I’ve seen in X, “Block early and often”. A recent Substack article I came across repeated this internet aphorism and states the attitude clearly:
“I typically block rather than mute. Some people prefer to mute and let those they muted scream into the void, unaware that they’ve been silence [sic]. I’d prefer that people know I’ve barred them for [sic] engaging with me and from missing my glorious Twitter wisdoms, whose value is precisely the cost of what you pay for them. I want them to know they aren’t welcome in any space that I have any amount of control over. To hell with them.”5
Ugh. So control is the issue. Sure, people want to feel in control. Our platforms are always going on about how much control you can have, as if that really means anything. I think it goes a lot deeper though, and I don’t know that the intended use of blocking was to do away with people whose opinions we don’t share or understand. Impeding discourse, echo chambers, discrimination and unfairness are some of the undesirable consequences of what I’ll call petty blocking because it seems to me a trivial use of the feature. Resolving a death threat and an idiotic comment should involve different approaches. Nowhere is this trend more prevalent than on Twitter/X.
In social media terms, if a Like is a hug, then unfollowing or muting is a snub, and blocking is a kill. Moscrop is not alone; in online convos I’ve seen, the kill is preferred to other solutions. I made a poll to test this:
I admit this is a small data set since the engagement rate with the post was only around 8%. Still. I had a feeling the results would skew this way: harassment only got 6%. Clearly, something else is happening here.
There is such a thing as blocking in bad faith. The more indiscriminate the choice to block, the more violent an act it is. With online interpersonal conflicts, blocking means there is no growth for either party. What flourishes is frustration and irresponsibility. A blocker may temporarily soothe an irritation, but at a cost to themselves as well as the other person, and they are giving way to intolerance and selfishness; the blocked is barred from explaining, apologizing, or reconciling. The blocker exchanges another’s distress for a sense of power, if you want to look at it transactionally. It’s like other abusive tactics, like canceling, withholding, and gas-lighting, meant to shut out the victim, make them feel unimportant, isolated, ignored or disempowered. It’s like killing a mosquito with a cannon. No wonder we are losing the capacity for rational discourse online.
There are other means of controlling one’s feed. For example, rather than banning people, you can ban words and hashtags. This will eliminate whole swaths of subjects you don’t want on your timeline, and with those muted words, go the posts, not to mention the invective and human silliness. You can mute the ‘offender’ and delete the comments they put on your posts. You will never see them again.
You might think: people in real life ignore each other, fight and abuse each other, even kill each other, so why should their social media behavior be any different? Those who don’t see social media as a lost cause are trying to use X/Twitter in the spirit of real-world community living and civility.
My worry is that since the Internet is training us to want the dopamine hits to keep coming, the aggressive antisocial behavior online could be unconsciously warping our offline social interactions. After all, it becomes a habit. There might be a tendency, especially among people in their formative years, to cut others off, instead of resolving conflicts the old-fashioned way. (Talking/actually connecting.) I hope I’m wrong.
Luckily, across all platforms, there are social media accounts that are a joy to follow. These are people who put in an amazing amount of uncompensated work just to educate and entertain us. That is in line with our best online selves, and I salute those people.
And finally, I’m going to state the obvious: perhaps the happiest people in the world are those who have reality checks, not to mention actual real-world communities, friends and family to talk to. It’s not that we can’t cultivate these things, most of us, but somehow, as a collective, we are failing at this, and it shows.
Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984
The tiny drug is called soma, Brave New World's way of mood-altering.
McCallion, M., McCallion, K. (2021). Reflections on Social Media. Academia Letters, Article 329. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL329.¡
Twitter/X Security and Privacy section
A Short, Definitive Guide to Blocking People on Social Media, David Moscrop, 2023