A Screenless Social Media
It’s time to define a new logic of social technology
This is part of a series of stories, for now titled “Consolidation”. For a framing of this project, start here.
A thought experiment: imagine a social media without any virtual interface. Imagine a social media that is concerned only with person-to-person collaboration, with the coordination of large groups towards ends that are easy to define and universally accepted. In the summer before my final year at Yale (the summer of 2019), I had the opportunity to travel to Estonia to conduct some research on my senior Economics thesis. It was through this trip that I was first exposed to a new skeletal framework for how governance might look in the 21st century — and which, through months of consolidation and research, enabled me to arrive at the ideas that underlie this present series. Outside of the nominally interesting features of Estonian democracy, the country seems to be founded on a politics of cost-reducing efficiency as the central driving force for technological innovation. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a new, young, democracy-focused leadership was able to build new structures of governance in the shadow of late-stage technologist philosophies which had been solidifying throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Instead of creating aspirational tools which somehow had to adhere to existing institutions (which limits true innovation in nearly every other rich country), the Estonian leadership was able to set the foundations for government in a world where the internet was clearly imminent, in which personal computing has already effectively ascended.
I do not think that Estonia is a model for the world. To believe so relies on the naivety of a-historical technological optimism. Countries like the United States are not capable of building new models of governance from the ground up because they are irreversibly burdened by bureaucracies which include millions of real people, families who depend on those government salaries and pensions, and institutions which have to go through innumerable rings of regulation and convention in order to change. To ask the American government to become a modern techno-state would ignore the layers which would need to be reconsidered and reconstructed and the mindsets which would need to radically change.
It is here that I ask you to return to my initial thought experiment. I think the great victory of social media is precisely that it made no effort to reshape the underlying social web nor media landscape in the places it initially arose in. On the contrary, companies like MySpace or Facebook leaned into the creation of an entirely new layer of social interaction, mediated by new computational tools. They created new modes of interaction that did not have analogs in the past. And, in many ways, the early experiments in social media were extremely effective towards these ends. They brought together groups that couldn’t have met otherwise. Communities were able to form that both ran alongside existing groups, while also generating spaces for once impossible group identifications to solidify. As this new infrastructure became more and more central, however, it fell victim to those external forces, those I’ve termed “majoritarianism” which insisted on a return to the external logics of the distinctly political world. Filter bubbles are simply the algorithmic recreation of external politics, presumably salient by their salience in the world around them. That is the fundamental flaw of all social media — it makes permanent these invented social categories through the rigidity and momentary-truth of data collection. The trouble is that communities of content, communities where people are obsessed with virality and mass-recognition, will inevitably see this politics as an obvious rallying point. Add a venture capital-driven obsession with users based on projected ad revenues, and it is clear why social media is seen as such a miserable institution nowadays .
A screenless social media, in recognition of this, would (or, rather, should) have no inclination towards this political logic. It should be oriented towards pure interaction on a level deeper than the content surrounding those interactions. It should bring people together without requiring reflections on those interactions. It should operate on a logic of pragmatism and efficiency, defined outside of profits, which says that the internet itself has the capacity to improve people’s operational existence in the world. It should make use of the internet while not operating directly within it. It should give users more than it frames for users. It should encourage collaboration without requiring participants to relate that collaboration to the existing logics of the political. It is more social than it is media. I think a lot of the forces of the new Web 3.0 paradigm are pointing towards this — but even a decentralized web will still operate within a political world that is itself defined by centralized thought. I am trying to imagine what a social media of this sort might look like, but it will have to seem unfamiliar and impractical. It will have to seem like something that isn’t necessary in the existing system. It is only in the explicit recognition of this fact that a new layer can really begin taking shape.
