Cruel optimism, social media and big tech
Exploring the intersection how big tech uses cruel optimism to respond to criticism re social media and mobile tech stealing our attention — and including the perspective of people who rely on social media for a living. Do they truly believe in it?
In the beginning there was the internet.
This is such a huge topic that’s so difficul to summarise in a few words so when I saw this, it was like, wow, that’s it. That’s the problem!
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
― Jeff Hammerbacher
+ spend as much time as possible staring at their phone/app + collect as much data as humanly possible
Which is exactly the same sentiment a senior Silicon Valley employee at Apple, Google, and co. is likely to have about their products.
one marketer alone can claim that their work, the content they put out won’t have any meaningful impact on social media addition and the fact that we’re all losing focus. But 100-10.000 marketers?
Why do we do this though? Most of us marketers are smart and perspicacious, how did we fall for this trap? Or are we here just because we had to carry on with the times?
Exactly what I went through when I said enough social media marketing work. No thank you.
Ah, the joys of earning a pay check so you can spend time away from work enjoying all that life has to offer (or not, and you just end up spending more time on your phone or recovering from the content you consumed)