The odd-man-out argument for social media, maybe

Substack-ers have social media on life support; the rest of the world is still drowning in the algorithm

I hope you’ll allow me to ponder here; let’s go over some quick and incomplete thoughts, that is to say Questions. Questions being the meat of Miscellanea, mayhaps.

Without getting too insular here, let’s talk again about social media and its ways and its means.

There is a proliferation of content, here on Substack and in newsletters abounding, about leaving the confines of Musk, Meta, etcetera. But while all is fair in love and war, it’s sort of become the locker-room-talk of this town.

To be perfectly clear, this post does not intend to reduce the very fair criticisms of said platforms and their discriminatory algorithms and flavor-of-the-day ethics.

I only intend to impose a questioning I’ve been turning over in my own hands, diddling its stress through my knuckles, and outward now to the heavens of the forever-net.

What if the good outweighs the bad, for me? What if these millions of tiny connections do hold something fundamental together? What if – the reduced friction and the gofundme of it all – it is forming in the public an alliance? What if, after all, we do come together, in spite of the red and the blue and the power plays and the absolute reluctance to censor what ought to be censored? What about subversion, from within?

Could the tech monopolies, in seeking to disrupt, have given us just the tools and strategies to disrupt right back?

Just a question or two or five. Not counting.

At the end of the day, I think we’re all a little tired of it all. And that’s more than valid, and probably actually baked into the design. Again — I do not spray doubt on the skeptics or the mourners or the exodus. But I do believe that most of us stick around for more than just the dopamine hit. I think we do find value here, Actual Connection, though subdued since social’s inception.

These are the things I’m thinking about.

And aside from the philosophical and the partisan (that perhaps cannot be separated anyway), what of the brilliant information systems and community resources we’ve come to know and appreciate — that thrive and exist sometimes exclusively through big-bad-tech’s social empire?

I do not write to dissuade an exodus or the building of our own ecosystems, of course. By all means, go your own way. We love you for it.

I write this here today because if not for the internet, my thoughts might be left to my own devices — and something great about being here™ is that decent Questions might spread far and wide.

Here is to hoping.