The Atlantic on Social Media

I usually couldn’t care less about the topic of what Meta do or don’t do with their time and money, but found the interview by Lora Kelley to Charlie Warzel on The Atlantic entertaining and a bit baffling.

Here’s the bit I enjoyed the most:

It blows my mind, because I think about all the hostility toward Meta since 2016 — privacy, Cambridge Analytica, politics, Myanmar, the bungling of the metaverse. Then there’s this notion that Mark Zuckerberg is uncool, and Facebook is uncool and bad. And then they dropped this product, and people are like, Oh, thank God, finally I have a place to go to post my thoughts!

I strongly advise people to read Zuck’s New Threads Are Lame by Matthew Graybosch.

Most of the people who use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, etc. aren’t interested in computers or the internet or the world wide web.

[…]

They just want appliances that they can use while remaining ignorant of how they work. They want to be Eloi and that’s fine.

[…]

They’d rather have something “easy”, even if it’s run by people who can only be distinguished from honest crooks by virtue of having not been indicted, tried, or convicted on criminal charges yet.

As a fan of Wells’ book, I absolutely loved the Eloi analogy, and am grateful to Matthew to once again debate an argument with a direct approach, whether people likes that or not (I do).

Related topics

INTERNET

PERSONAL

SOCIAL MEDIA