Social media is the biggest con-trick played on the human race since organised religion. It's gone beyond just writing on walls and worshipping cats, now it's like a proper highly organised mega-cult. It purports to inform us about stuff whilst feeding us disinformation. It involves massive peer pressure about how we should react to stuff if we don't want to be ostracised by our friends or trolled to hell by people who believe in the efficacy of tin foil hats but not vaccines. It claims to be virtually omnipresent and the people promoting it make it sound omnipotent...
Frankly, the only difference between social media and a religious cult is Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk definitely exist. It's not "social" media, it's sociopathic media.
Telling Facebook what sort of films you like, or what sort of music or food you like, is like walking into McDonald's and saying "Hi, I'd like to become a big mac and fries please"! It's like admitting that your idea of a nice day is being taken into the "back room", diced, minced up, reshaped, cooked alive, and served up as 4 ounce pattie of advertising leads, sandwiched in freshly baked bun of demographic data to whoever will bid the most for you. They will eat you, digest you, consume every last ounce of what makes you tick in order to sell you stuff you don't need, and then they'll shit you out.
So allowing farcebook to access the contacts in your phone is like saying "I'd like to sell out all my friends to a faceless, heartless mega corporation that's gonna strip mine their lives and exploit the fuck out of them". Nice way to treat your friends.
They created echo chambers where the loudest, angriest voices dominate
Platforms like Facebook and X/twitter are designed to exploit rather than empower. They turn every swipe, click, and post into a data point for the advertising machine. They created echo chambers where the loudest, angriest voices dominate, leaving little or no room for meaningful dialogue. What started as a promise to connect us has left us feeling more disconnected than ever, and yet, for many, so dependent on our abusers for our daily fix.
But here’s the thing: we don’t have to accept this. We don’t have to keep feeding the beast. We can break the habit. Thankfully there are spaces emerging where the rules are different, where the users hold the power rather than the corporate abusers.
Thankfully, alternatives are beginning to emerge. Some, like Bluesky and Mastodon, are built on open protocols that give users more control over their identity, their data, and what appears in their feeds. Importantly they make it possible to transfer your profile, content and even followers to a different platform if you decide to move on. Your stuff stays in your ownership - not the platform's. Others, like independent blogs, newsletters, forums, and newer publishing platforms such as Pagecord, are rediscovering an older idea: that the internet works best when people talk to each other rather than being herded by algorithms.
We don't have to accept algorithmic manipulation as the price of participating online.
One of the reasons you're reading this on Pagecord rather than Facebook, X, or any number of other platforms is that Pagecord is basically just a publishing engine. It doesn't have the means to manipulate my behaviour or yours. It puts the words on the page and gets out of the way. That's become a surprisingly rare quality on t'interweb.
The important point isn't which platform wins. It's that alternatives exist. We don't have to accept algorithmic manipulation as the price of participating online. We can choose spaces that value conversation over engagement metrics, ideas over outrage, and communities over advertising inventories.
If you're as sick as I am of the enshittification* of your digital life, why not try something different? The web doesn't have to be a place where every click is monetised, every opinion weaponised, and every interaction harvested for profit. Social media became sociopathic because we allowed a handful of corporations to dominate and harvest our attention. Perhaps it's time we started taking it back.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
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