Are we Post-Social Media Yet?
Midjourney. Prompt: “beer twitter.”
Twitter just won’t die. It entered hospice care the better part of a year ago, and its vitals have only grown weaker. Many companies, anticipating its demise, have jumped into the breach—and you may have accounts now on Mastadon, Bluesky, Post, Spoutible, or yesterday’s latest entrant, Meta’s Threads. The problem is that, even while Twitter gets demonstrably worse by the month, it’s still better than its ostensible replacements. The reason can be reduced to a single word, scale, and that explanation may also foretell a future, post-social media world. Indeed, I think we may already be there.
A post-social world is going to have unexpected downstream effects on the media, and as someone who lives in that space, I’m filled with conflicting the emotions of relief and dread. Culture is in a vastly different place than it was at the dawn of the Obama administration, about the moment social media matured into a ubiquitous fixture of our lives, and I suspect we’re going to retreat from unfettered connectivity into something more selective and protective. That will have an unforseen impact on my writing life. All of this is peripheral to beer, but also not. I don’t think most people have noticed how profoundly social media has reshaped our lives and society, and how a retreat from the old model will re-reshape our lives. Which of course also includes beer. All of which means it’s time to think about where we are and where we may be headed, communications-wise.
Hell is other people
It was only fifteen years ago that we combined the little computers in our pockets, 24/7 wireless connectivity, and simple websites that connected us to each other. Facebook almost immediately became watershed in human consciousness, as we could be connected to everyone in the world by simply searching their name. High school crushes, lost family members, work colleagues, celebrities—we had a direct connection to them. Zuckerberg’s “genius” was timing: he created a simple website (an ugly and I’d argue flawed one) first. This was not a polio vaccine—he made a very small tweak to the function of websites that already existed. But because Facebook started on college campuses, it achieved scale almost instantly. If you were in college in 2006, you had a Facebook account. When it went public, that scale spiked society-wide. It didn’t matter if the site was ugly or poorly designed—no one visited for the information architecture. They set up accounts because it was quickly becoming a public utility, a database of humanity.
Subsequent social media sites offered slightly different ways to connect, and built their own massive followings. (It’s true that Twitter was never as popular as Facebook, but way more people were using it than, say, tuning into HBO’s Succession finale. That so many folks are now trying to reinvent it shows that it’s both a useful tool and, run properly, financially viable. I mean, it’s not making electric vehicles or anything, and it had, pre-Elon, annual revenues of $5b!) When social media platforms worked, it was because they achieved that scale.
To personalize it, these sites have been exceptionally helpful to my writing life. It’s nice that I can post links to this blog and get a bump in traffic, but so much more valuable as a human resource. I can instantly find dozens of experts who will help me write a story or offer their opinions. Facebook connected me more to people in the Pac NW, which was also invaluable. Without scale, I couldn’t find those same folks, and when that happens, I’m going to lose my direct access to the wisdom of hive mind.
The problem that developed was that very connectivity. Humans are wonderful, creative, loving beings, but they’re also malignant, criminal, and bigoted (sometimes all in the same being!). So of course social media was going to reflect all these dimensions. We’ve also learned, to home in on Sartre’s quote at the top, that not only did we not like the pathologies we saw online, we also didn’t like what they were doing to us.
Twitter is dying, but it’s just the first patient to go. In a strange irony, Facebook is no longer the college student’s hang—it is mainly for the AARP set and youngs never go near it. Instagram is a fading power, enshittified like every other free service. (Not familiar with that verb? Follow the link for an enlightening description of how platforms degenerate.) TikTok is having its moment—or was, a year ago—but it’s a performance-based service that may be great for killing time, but is certainly no good as a tool for connection or communication. Even Reddit, really just a modern message board, seems like a relic. And it’s dying, too. People may still be clicking their social media apps, but engagement is declining. Most of us could easily live without it.
After Social
My sense is that social media has run its course—at least in the sense that it was a scale-model tool to connect people. The latest evolutions are taking us into smaller bubbles, sometimes closed off worlds. Covid sparked group texting as a meatspace replacement, and a lot of people never stopped. I spend too much time texting my friends about silly nonsense. (In that way, it’s a largely-pleasurable replacement for social media of old—it’s actually fun.)
Twitter won’t die because it continues to have the scale that makes it worthwhile. When breaking news happens, you can find links and commentary there. We still visit Twitter because that’s where the people are. When enough people leave, however, that kind of utility may vanish for good. The fragmented world of Twitter clones will doom them all to being tiny little affairs, unreliable as info sources. And anyway, people will probably just drift away from those, too. If you’re talking to a tenth the people, it is going to be hard to get excited about spending a lot of time on social. I suspect we’ll continue to post videos on TikTok and and photos on Insta and family and personal announcements on Facebook, and that will be enough. Hours spent scrolling (even doomscrolling)? No way.
(Threads is certainly not going to save the day.* Based on what I’ve seen, it combines everything that’s wrong with Instagram with everything that’s wrong with Twitter. You’re only going to be able to see what Zuckerberg’s algorithm lets you see, and the whole thing will have that skeezy Meta quality of a Nigerian prince email. Facebook is quickly descending into a creaky old garbage scow of spammy messages and obvious come-ons, while Insta seems lifeless and sad, like a dad trying to imitate what the kids are doing over on TikTok. Threads seems to broadcast its own lack of inspiration from the moment you see that lame logo.)
In the short run, what replaces social will be, amazingly, something resembling the blogosphere of 2005. We’re already well on our way, with our inboxes full of Substack newsletters or digest emails with links to actual blogs. (Speaking of—have you signed up for my free weekly email?? It includes a beer recommendation, links to other good content, and of course, links to posts like this one. There are no ads.) The violence of social media and the fracturing of society have left us wanting to retreat to trusted sources. The hydrant of dreck spewing into social media is sort of like childhood—once incredibly fun and magnetizing, but exhausting to think about returning. A tidy collection of trusted sources seems so much more sane and grown-up.
If I’m right, that means it’s going to fall to individuals to curate their own information stream. It’s going to be more isolated and less immediate than social media, but safer and possibly more fulfilling. And, if you’re reading the work of single individuals, you might consider offering them cash for their work. With fewer and fewer jobs with legacy media, fewer ways to promote their work post-social, they’ll be depending on readers. (You can support this site, too, but let me call out my sponsors now—they really make this site and my work possible.)
Finally—and here I’d love your opinions—I think all of this is going to affect society as a whole. Retreating into our private corners is probably mentally healthy, but it will surely have some downsides. In fifteen more years, we’ll almost certainly be communicating and interacting in very different ways. If I’m right about an era after the Wild West of social media, what do you expect it to look like? You can use that comment feature below and chat like it’s 2005 all over again.
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* Given my track record with predictions, this should make for amusing fodder in a year or two.