The following are some short thoughts on social medias’ effects on society. It recently occurred to me the dulling, addiction-based black hole of time social media can be.

Like an idling engine, our precious time on earth is expended in the useless process of scrolling through a digital soup. This soup is filled with meaningless sound and video, designed not to enlighten, to which end should be the promise of the Internet, but instead to docilise the population. An opium transmitted through changing RGB values, Tiktok, Facebook and many more of the diaspora of companies exploit a unique brain hack, racking billions in profit for the bourgeois. Social media represents another form of class war, the most brutal thus far, sapping the attention spans of the youth and adults before them. Despite its infancy in human society, as much content as a thousand libraries of Alexandria has been created for the sole purpose of profit generation. Social media has not been realised as an collaborative art project, instead a soulless plane of profit and popularity continue to poison young, aged and naive peoples’ around the globe.

We should expect to find the next generation of individuals coming to the same executive standoff; to go with social media or not. One is the offer of conformity and further commodification. The other, a rejection of an entire dimension of the collective human communication. In reality, it will likely become impossible to avoid using the Internet (by extension social media/’the metaverse’) whilst still participating in modern society. Taxes, finance and voting may all become digitised, the universality possible through the Internet is not yet fully explored.

This grandness of the metaverse, a second shadow of the universe, will fail to guide humanity into gilded innovation for as long as its creators remain so desperately dedicated to capital. Until Zuckerberg among others can admit that capital and its interest is not the best for humanity, especially in a realm built on accelerating communication, the metaverse (and the actual world) will suffer capitalism’s flaws pertaining to corruption, lack of selflessness and a failure to create community. The Internet and capitalism has already made the west unprecedentedly lonely. This loneliness is a result of the simulating nature of social media. Why go outside, risking ego, when one can communicate with individuals – that reflect your own views, feelings and sentiments? Social media proves again to be detrimental for this reason: echo chambers form, allowing for radicalism to prosper.

The incel community for example, prospers from this plague of echo chambered messages of hate. We should as an entire human race, re-asses our relationship with the internet. Social media overuse should be more widely recognised as an illness; a social media addiction. TikTok is on average taking 2.3 years of an users life in screen time, showing the terrifying drain. Quite possibly the worse part of this plight, children are being exploited most. Without the discipline or self reflection that comes with age and maturity; children are being half raised by the internet. You can see the phenomenon for yourself. I have failed to find someone above the age of 7 who doesn’t engage with social media of some kind.

Whether that be Youtube, Tiktok or Instagram (sometimes all of them at once) more time, precious for our youths development is slowly being sapped away from under our noses. Worshipping false gods will return false blessings.