by NICK DOWSON
Nick Dowson imagines a different world of online communities that puts our needs first.
My first interaction with online social platforms – other than email – was on MSN Messenger. My memories of it sit alongside the unforgettable tones of dial-up internet and the bonsai kittens hoax.
The program had an unadorned interface and text-based, mostly one-on-one, chats. There was no public posting, or algorithms (mathematical rulesets) determining who read what.
When MySpace, and later Facebook, came along we mistook their novelty for fun. But, fast forward not so many years and the love affair with social media has quickly soured – save for a brief interlude where, having copied from tools developed by social movements, Twitter took credit for a swathe of revolutions and protests.
It shouldn’t have taken Elon Musk’s ego to prove that having the world’s digital public spheres – core sites for democracy and social life in our age – controlled by a handful of rich men was untenable.
From service providers to the fibre optic cables, the internet has been handed over wholesale to corporations.
Its ills flow from that: social media’s monetization through the attention economy means data mining and the nurturing of users’ insecurities; advertising fuels consumerism; and platforms are incentivized to favour the spreading of far right messages – after all, outrage is seductive.
So, what would it look like if we called time on Big Tech’s failed experiment?
A better social media would need to be decentralized – away from the US stock markets and men like Mark Zuckerberg, on whose watch images of breastfeeding have been banned as misogyny spreads. As well as avoiding a single point of failure (or censorship), this would help with other goals: community ownership, and democratic control, would be facilitated by having many smaller, perhaps more local, sites.
Existing social media giants must be brought into public (and transnational) ownership – in a way that hands power to citizens, not governments. But they should also be broken up, using existing anti-monopoly rules.
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