Let's talk about Social Media.

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I've seen quite a few people lately talking about how they hate how Social Media has affected them and how several of the sites and services have been twisted and used to our detriment over the years. While I am somewhat heartened to see that people are beginning to turn against the Beast, I thought it might be pertinent to step back for a bit and really look at how all of this unfolded.

It was back in the early 2000's (over 100 years ago now) that I was a student in high school. Ah yes... the Internet 1.0 days... Windows XP, 56K Dial-up Internet provided by AOL where a 1mb image took over two minutes to load on screen. I was a sophomore in High school in 2003 when Facebook came out. Almost immediately, it seemed there was a lot more drama and fights breaking out. I was in an inner-city school with a bunch of other rejects, so I really didn't think much of it at the time. I graduated in 2005 and it wasn't until 2010 that I actually went to college. In that interim, Twitter had become a thing (2006) and a fancy new thing called the iPhone ushered-in the SmartPhone era (2008).

When I started college in 2010, I'd watch people as the classes changed. Students would talk in the hallways, stop outside and chat, and there was a lot of eye contact. Student organizations thrived, and people had lively parties and events in the dorms and apartments and in open spaces on campus. This seemed to be the norm until about 2012. More and more people started carrying smartphones and were looking at those rather than other people (and where they were going) between classes. By 2014, our campus WiFi had to be overhauled because there had been such a sudden influx of mobile devices, it was getting completely overwhelmed. Around the same time, I noticed that almost nobody talked in the hallways anymore... when I looked around, nobody made eye contact. Everybody was looking down at a phone, on autopilot, as they walked to their next class. Student organizations fell apart, and there didn't seem to be any parties or anything going on much anymore.

At this point, people were routinely on edge. Politics seemed to be invading everything, and people were dividing themselves into in- and out-groups. Friendships were falling apart, and social anxieties began to become much more commonplace. Internet 2.0 had taken over. Facebook, Twitter, and others had consumed much of the attention of people in general, and all the bad things in the world that people had previously not noticed or cared about were now living rent free in everyone's heads. We were not evolutionarily prepared to handle this sort of thing.

Did anyone else notice this? To what extent do older folks like me understand that this is the only world that some of our younger peers know? What has this been doing to us, collectively? Put that aside for a moment, and let us take a quick diversion into something else.

One day, I was walking back to my apartment from campus, and I came upon the caterpillar of the Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly scurrying across the parking lot for some reason. I picked it up and took it home, found its preferred plants and set it up in a safe viewing setup, where it soon began to go into Chrysalis. I was thrilled! Eastern Swallowtails are beautiful creatures. That caterpillar had no business out in the open; thanks to my saving it, I'd be rewarded with witnessing the process of its transformation and would be able to safely release it into the wild.

Oh how naïve I was...

You see, it had been out in the open when I found it--probably on purpose. A predatory Ichneumon wasp had attacked and laid an egg in this caterpillar, and it had been acting strangely. In retrospect, if it had managed to be eaten by a bird on purpose, it would have ended the reproduction of its predator. But I didn't know that.... not until what emerged from the Chrysalis wasn't a butterfly, but the offspring of that wasp. This was a frustrating experience... so much so, that shortly after, I apparently wrote down this quote that I just found lying around in my archives:

<< When terror and trauma eats away at what's beautiful inside, all that's left is the shell of what once could have been... and a corrupted predator to perpetuate the heartache in others emerges. >>

When we do art, we are expressing ourselves... for some, it's experiences and feelings, for others, the essence of some internal spirit animal or fanciful being. Sometimes it's us trying to figure ourselves out by removing ourselves from our bodies and examining the self through the eyes of others. I'd be a fool if I thought I could mention everything it could possibly be in this paragraph. My point here, is that it's a healthy outlet for our minds and souls, much like a physical walk in the woods or a park on a nice day is for our bodies.

And at some point in the last decade, a lot of us somehow got convinced to do it not for our own enjoyment and mental health... but to satiate an algorithm.

Social Media didn't always have the algorithm. But, the large companies that ran them, in the effort to maximize their cash flow and compete with the others, hired industrial and human factors psychologists to tell them how to make their services more addictive. You see, if they can keep your eyes glued to the screen, they can show more ads. At first, it was benign enough... find and show things to a user based on their interests. Initially, this was good for getting our work out there and getting reactions and impressions... these things fueled our egos and made us want to double and triple-down on it to keep getting those delicious dopamine hits. But that wasn't enough. So the Social Media companies and news outlets relying on these strategies turned to anxiety. Things that get people riled up and pissed off; politics, injustices, jealousy, the fear of missing out--all of it has been leveraged to exploit our emotions and keep us on the doom scroll like an addictive drug. At some point, something that we did to bring out our inner beauty and creativity got hijacked by politics and money and has made us mentally drained and exhausted... and we're just now realizing that it's allowing us to be manipulated and used by the powers that be in society, and in the process, turning us into angry, socially exhausted monsters?

Need I say anything at all about how AI is going to be used to try to magnify this effect exponentially?

If you're still reading this, I appreciate your perseverance. It's not a topic for the faint of heart. Like Neo waking up from the Matrix to see how ugly the real world actually is, it's a bit unnerving, to say the least. But we've got to stop feeding this machine to whatever extent we can. And part of that is to do art for YOU first. There is something uniquely satisfying about appreciating art that genuinely comes from the heart, and even more so when others appreciate your art the same way.

I believe that is what this site is about. But it is up to us to keep it that way.

--PRD/SentientAberration

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