Social Media: Human Commodifier Par Excellence

Social Media encourages the homogenisation of human sentiment, reducing individual emotional nuances to shallow clickable responses. Our capacity for rich and individual responses to our fellow human’s expressions, has been disgracefully crushed into a box the size of a like button, (or the marginally more ‘nuanced’ emoji). Is it not tragic that perhaps the majority of humans appreciate other humans' creations through the clicking of generic buttons?

Facebook introduced the like button in 2009, enabling users to ‘very quickly express a positive emotion or sentiment’¹ and perhaps not accidentally, with the ‘added bonus’ of enabling human data to very quickly be collected. Thus Social Media became an excellent tool, not to enrich our humanity, but to enrich those who profit from the flattening of our humanity. Human sentiment, attention, and character is captured through its expression on social media, quantified and measured, and sold to the profit-driven machine. 

It was perhaps inevitable that social media, the online space where humans interact with each other, became just another tool of mammon. Inevitable because our current economic system cannot function without the increasing conversion of ‘non-monetary’ exchanges into ‘monetised exchanges’. Money is created with interest payments, which impel debtors to source productive means beyond what is already in circulation. Hence an inherent drive to sell-off what was once free, or seek new ways to make money from what presently happens outside of money exchange. 

And so our economy turns from the now unsustainable monetisation of the free and natural resources of earth (forests, oil etc.), and seeks human avenues of the free and natural to turn into money. For example, child and elderly care (daycare centres, care homes), entertainment (Netflix), physical exercise (gym membership), community (retreats, co-working, paywall online groups) and so on. These were previously available ‘for free²’ as features of human to human interactions and networks. Social Media is just one more such cog in this global force of monetising what is unmonestised. 

And it is a potent force because it taps into our core desire to feel that we are worthy and of value. People look to maximise likes, views and followers because it gives them a feeling of ‘increased value’. I know I have felt this when posting on instagram or youtube, or when disregarding others' content that has ‘only a few views’, or vice versa. It is embedded in the collective that somehow ‘more views/likes/followers/subscribers’ = ‘more valuable/better/preferable/higher’ etc. 

When one’s sense of self and value is heavily bound up in ‘digital content’, the more social media ‘numbers’ have the power to encroach upon a person’s being, and therefore obscure one’s inherent, immeasurable value.

The fundamental error is that the human - its value, soul and beauty, is eternally impervious to conversion into anything finite, because it is of the infinite. This error leads to a conflation of our true value and selves with so called representations of our value and selves. 

It is a tragedy for both those who derive inflated self-confidence from ‘having millions of followers’ and for those who experience anxiety or lack of self worth through ‘disappointing numbers’. Both are suffering from an ignorance of trusting and knowing that their value is independent of any number, or even any event or experience. 

Of course people have always looked for ways to compare their value with others, or to launch dubious campaigns to increase self-worth, but today there are several mephitic differences. Firstly, all this online activity is fed into streams of data that have a single motive - profit. This motive feeds into the fundamental design and function of social media, in turn effecting and deeply influencing human behaviour. A whole generation of young people have a massive portion of their interactions intermediated by profit driven companies, this is a quite disturbing fact. 

Even if companies claim altruistic motives with ‘their customers interests at heart’, and ‘features that support online safety’ etc. there is no avoiding the fundamental brickwork - the company must provide profit for their shareholders and investors. Thus decisions such as introducing the like button, view counters, subscriber counters, infinite scrolling, autoplay, recommendations and many other ‘features’ (some yet to come), are not designed to support our humanity, or create a culture of kindness and cooperation. They are there to increase user engagement, and to gather data to sell to advertisers, data brokers and so on. Sadly it also just happens to impel a toxic sense of competitiveness and comparison, a slinking away of our focusing power, as well as further entrenchment of the conflation of our immeasurable value and self, with quantified representations of our value, our digital reflections.

So what am I saying? On the individual level, to realise our inherent worth, and be awake to how gamified towards profit our attention is increasingly becoming, to the detriment of our minds. Or in other words, listen to the worth your heart knows, don’t mix that up with how many people respond to your latest lifestyle vlog. 

And on the collective level, that Social Media should be de-coupled from profit motives. Perhaps it could be converted into a common public space - after all, it is the digital reflection of our social interactions. If you enter a park, you may sit under a tree with a friend, have a picnic, and enjoy your time without your mind being hijacked. Public funds go towards keeping the place clean and safe, the managing body of the public space is under duty to provide well-being, to be supportive of our humanity. What if we had publicly governed social media, that had our humanity and well-being as its brickwork? That wasn’t beholden to shareholders, whose developers could ask ‘what features can we introduce that help our users focus their minds, encourage healthy mental habits? How can we foster understanding and kindness? Without the strait-jacket of profit snuffing out these life-affirming intentions.

I am not saying the solution is to ‘quit social media’, we all still derive many benefits, and perhaps they still outweigh the negatives - if we maximise our vigilance. However, I do seek to underscore a toxic trend of monetisation, that has firmly sunk its teeth into social media. And that there is yet hope to steer this pivotal digital space towards being an ally of our humanity. 

On another note, openai (chatGPT) is as yet not a publicly traded company. Google, facebook and instagram grew first, then added ads. The personal data available on chatgpt far exceeds that of any of its predecessors - can we imagine that the jaws of our economic system’s imperative for monetary growth will hold off indefinitely? Unless we can implement a de-growth economic system, based on negative interest³, it seems highly unlikely. 

Now please, I beg you, ‘like’ this post, subscribe to my channel, post a ‘fire’ emoji, tell all your friends to view my videos, enhance me please! 

Footnotes

¹ https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/11/ask-zuck-anything/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

²  Technically speaking they were not completely ‘free’, they exist within non-monetary exchanges, networks of gift that obligate returns.

³ For a detailed explanation of such a system, please read ‘Sacred Economics’ by Charles Eisenstein.