Contentment

"social media" has always been oxymoronic

In his recent book Superbloom, Nicholas Carr mentions a bit of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony during a congressional hearing in 2018: “I consider us to be a technology company,” he said of what was then called Facebook, “because the primary thing we do is have engineers who write code and build products and services.” That hearing was in the wake of scandals involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s role in spreading political propaganda and abetting foreign interference in U.S. elections, something most tech companies no longer pretend to care about.

Carr cites this statement to illustrate his point that tech companies approach media as a form of engineering, as information processing, in which the meaning of whatever content they circulate is irrelevant to their mission of circulating it efficiently and profitably. He traces this approach to Claude Shannon’s theory of information, which regards it as nothing more than binary code and therefore fungible, entirely quantitative. Messages, in this view, can’t have hidden or multivalent meanings; they don’t have nuances or require interpretations. They don’t depend on any vagaries or subtleties in the a relationship between a sender and a receiver; any subjectivity in the process is treated as noise.

Once this perspective is adopted, all the different forms of analog media can be reduced to digital media. This includes the recipients: They are just digital information too, and technology companies set about building the interfaces that would convert their behavior into digital information commensurate with the other ones and zeroes. “The convergence of media technology … blurred the distinctions between media businesses,” Carr writes. “It has blurred the distinctions between categories of information — distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance — that the epistemic architecture of the analog era preserved and even accentuated.”

This blurring makes one kind of problem irrelevant: How do people understand one another? What difference does that make? People are just information processors and emitters. There is nothing to “understand” — just ones and zeros to record. A different problem opens up, one that engineering can address: How can different information flows be monitored, controlled, and harmonized, brought together to make new forms of value? How to reproduce human behavior and interaction as nothing more than code, as no more than pattern matching?

Hence Facebook was not in a “social” business at all — deliberately connecting people in meaningful ways — but instead implemented a control system in which people can be collectively managed as information. Whether people incidentally experience feelings of connection is immaterial to the business of configuring them as data flows — of using certain configurations of data to elicit certain other configurations. For Carr, the advent of the News Feed concretized this: After its implementation, “each member now saw a continuous, customized stream of posts and updates,” but also was themselves no more than that, a data flow to be integrated with other data flows.

Though there were some vocal protests to the surveillance and privacy implications of the News Feed at first, the company discovered that optimizing users as information flows didn’t alienate them but instead locked them in — that people presumably felt something pleasing, something convenient and clarifying perhaps, in being cut off from analog experience, from the ineffabilities of human interaction and sensory stimuli, and from the burden of actively making meaning. Instead one could be effortlessly rendered as content, as part and parcel of the same substance that everyone else was eagerly consuming. To use “social media” was to feel what it was like to be turned into manna.

By simply consuming content one became content, which was tantamount to becoming a self, having an identity (a discrete flow of ones and zeroes), within the structure of automated distribution and feedback. Platforms and feeds allow users to be programmed by a flow a content into exhibiting certain anticipated and measurable responses. As a consequence, people no longer use “social media” to be social but to escape sociality and become more like a robot. You can sense what is like to have data efficiently and efficaciously flow through you, become transformed by your circuitry and algorithms, and emerge on the other side as a new kind of data set.

In 2018, Zuckerberg was reluctant to concede that Facebook was a “media company” because he didn’t to face liability for the editorial decisions implicit in producing algorithmic feeds. He didn’t want to have to invest more resources in content moderation. But now his company faces a different threat, an antitrust suit from the Federal Trade Commission stemming from its buying rivals Instagram and Whatsapp, undermining competition in the social media sector. So now, as Kyle Chayka details here, Zuckerberg claims Meta is not a social media company but an entertainment platform for “the digital consumption of all kinds of content.”

To put that in the terms Carr’s discussion suggests, Meta can’t be a social media company because there are no such things as people or society, just kinds of digital content, and even “consumption” is misleading because it presumes a consciousness to consume it, implying something more than signal exchanging and decoding is going on. “Digital consumption” is apt, though, because one can interpret that as another phrase for information processing, for “consuming” things by digitizing them.

“Social media is dead” is now the official tech ideology because “social media” successfully served its purpose as an alibi for the complete digitization of experience, promulgating the idea that everything is information, everything can be quantified, and that human beings can enjoy themselves in a system that doesn’t register anything qualitative — from which “quality” itself has been eliminated. Humans, it turns out, can happily persist amid a universe made of undifferentiated slop, and aren’t necessarily repelled by being processed and circulated as slop themselves — an ad hoc configuration of data produced algorithmically depending on what the other flows of data make statistically probable, or what kinds of data have been prompted farther up the chain.

Now tech companies are less shy about dichotomizing sociality and entertainment. Connecting with friends always was a dubious and unmanageable business, difficult to directly monetize. It involves having people turn their friendships and their family relations into pretenses for generating more ad space. We had this baby to help clear some ad inventory. It entails convincing people to live their lives as advertisements, as with influencers, and it depends on users’ deliberately producing content instead of merely being content.

Moreover, it depends on people actually wanting to consume their friendships rather than participate in them. For “friends” on social media to be profitable for tech companies, they must not be boring to each other, they must not engender a sense of reciprocal duty or obligation (the algorithmic feed precludes a balanced sense of attentiveness to one another), and they must not encourage each other to do anything other than consume more content on the platform.

But friends, viewed as entertainment sources rather than peers, are generally boring. They can’t consistently make content that outperforms with professionally made material, or compares favorably with all the content that all the world’s amateurs make available to algorithms. A platform of just friend-level content can’t survive in competition with content made expressly to be marketable as entertainment, or content revealed as attention-grabbing through algorithmic selection and feedback.

Social media platforms don’t try to rebalance this but exploit it, encouraging users to further enjoy entertainment more than interacting with friends. Platforms demonstrate that while friends’ attention is fickle, entertainment is always available on demand, and thanks to portable screens and ubiquitous network connections, consumable at all times, in times and places that were inconceivable before. The innovation of social media is not its surpassing TV in its interactivity and its supposed promise of reciprocal communication, but that it replicates and extends the experience of TV consumption and injects it into every crevice of waking life. It makes the comfort of TV, such as it is, a constant temptation.

There used to be some concern about tech companies owning what Facebook liked to call users’ “social graph” — who was connected to whom and how often did they interact and so on. Critics assumed it would be weaponized in some way against us, used to target people more efficiently or categorize them in various ways against their will and without their knowledge. It was feared that people would become dependent on tech companies for sociality, that the companies will have embedded themselves as “social infrastructure” — another description of Facebook’s business that has now fallen by the wayside.

But it turns out tech companies built social infrastructure only to undermine it, to help with dismantling it as a site of resistance to commercialization, commodification, and mediatization. There is more money in scuttling the “social graph” than leveraging it, because isolated people make for more dependable consumers.

My intuition about social media has always been that it wanted you to hate your friends. It wanted you to see them at their worst, as showoffs seeking to stimulate envy at every turn. Not that this was always everyone’s intention, though the platforms certainly provide the incentives to make it so, but because this is what results from algorithms trying to turn friends’ content into entertainment (turn friends into content), circulating it only because it has previously proved popular across diverse contexts and not because it reflects a specific connection between specific people. When communication is filtered through algorithms, it becomes as if spoken by algorithms; it appears as content made only to keep the system operating and the feeds populated, not meant to sustain a personal connection but as data meant to fine-tune the processing of other data.

Commodified entertainment sold as a media product or an advertising adjunct is basically anti-social, despite our dogged efforts to resocialize it and build communal practices around it. When what friends post is presented as entertainment media, it requires that we think of those friends as remote, as being something we can only enjoy vicariously.

Ultimately Zuckerberg is not saying anything different now than he was in 2018: Meta is an technology company whose engineers work to turn people into data. That can be implemented under the auspices of an entertainment-media platform, which reduces users to what information they consume. That information is conceived as coming from no one in particular, with no purpose other than to keep you watching, producing more information in turn.