Social Media Evolution

What’s happening outside your window is real; a feed of the people and subjects algorithmically determined to validate or anger you is not. I look out mine and see my neighbor on his roof. I see him there often, like he is today, watering his plants. We can do more than touch grass—we can get outside and help something, anything, grow.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not... See more

Large parasocial platforms transformed the internet into a hostile and impersonal place. They feed our FOMO to keep us clicking. They exaggerate our differences for "engagement". They create engines for stardom to keep us creeping. They bait us into nutritionless and sensationalist content. Humanity cannot subsist on hype alone.

Small and sincere... See more

When TikTok was briefly shut down last month, the app’s more than 150 million American users had the same sudden realization. The platform’s centrality to human connection was made explicit and intolerable. Billions of social ties were erased by forces unseen and beyond our control. We had built this online world only to find that it did not belong... See more

Content creator, yes. Influencer, no. I mean, all these terms are being defined in real time. I love consuming content—short form, long form. I love people who use social media to be creative, to teach or explore or share their passions. Where I start to draw the line is people whose content basically revolves around brand deals and they're... See more

TikTok—one of the biggest repositories of AI slime—is exploring the possibility of releasing virtual influencers to compete for brand deals against its human influencers. Instead of a brand paying a human influencer five or six figures to flog its clothes or cars (a sum TikTok doesn’t get a cut of) the platform wants to offer brands the option of... See more

Algorithms, or at least the ones used by social media platforms, were supposed to be about discovery. But now they’re operating more like those daytime HGTV home decorating shows. “Oh, you like horses? We turned your house into a fake stable. Your dinner table is now bales of hay.”

But with AI, it’s now possible that such a thing may happen, that AI could come to generate the majority of the content we humans see on the web. Indeed, a 2022 report from European law enforcement agency Europol pointed out that experts believe that as much as 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026—90%!

If that’s the case, humans who want to engage with other humans and their creations may, for the first time in decades, have to avoid the internet and— gasp —return to the real world for authenticity. Sure, you won’t find shrimp Jesus there, but at least you’ll find some genuine human connection.