Zuckerborg, The Musk Ox & Me

Social Meditations

Twitter has been trashed and it is utterly useless. It's fully pay-to-play ... no one sees anything you post unless you pay Musk's tolls. That, in turn, has supercharged the worst elements of social media in a mad scramble to "differentiate" in his bargain basement "marketplace," meaning more scumbaggery equals more clicks and, of course, more tolls from more trolls. I guess that's fair enough. It's not like it was a paragon of virtue before Musk. It was, though, an effective way for a struggling indie journo to find an audience and promote good journalism. That's gone forever.

But let's be honest, the Zuckerborg hasn't been much better than the Musk Ox. Facebook went all-in on news and media during the two Trumped-up election cycles and during the thirst for pandemic-related information, basically printing ad money thanks to the traffic people like me generated. But then other people on Capitol Hill started to question the veracity of social media business models and the Zuckerborg quickly abandoned news content, downgrading it in favor of pictures of dinner so as to inoculate it from future critiques of its seemingly unfiltered trafficking of people's political bullshit for money.

The Zuckerborg was ostensibly "recalibrating" back to its original "mission" of people sharing personal content with people they once knew in high school, although the actual "original mission" was to allow college incels an opportunity to publicly rate the f*ckability of often unsuspecting women they'd seen on campus. Oh yeah, the "good ol' days" of Facebook. Sadly, the mission recalibration has kinda worked ... the platform is basically useless to all but the most successful journalists (meaning those who've grabbed the brass ring of "celebrity") and what's left in my feed are some of my increasingly lonely efforts to share quality journalism, which is mostly lost in a tidal wave of smarmy ads, anodyne recommendations coughed-up like hairballs by the algorithmic overlord of this realm and by a bit more than my fill of emotional streaking.

The sliver lining of this epitaph would be that, taken together, the trashing of Twitter and the neutering of Facebook may mean the spell is breaking and people might actually watch a concert or event they are attending in real-time instead of holding up a phone, or they might actually look for news ... for quality journalism ... themselves. But then I see someone share something they saw on TikTok and realize that the herd has simply stampeded away from me. And I am way too tired to catch up.