I’m profoundly sad to see what has become of social media. Back in September of 2006, when I first signed up for Twitter, there was nothing that excited me more than the idea of a new blogging platform that more instantly connected me to random people via SMS. And I was right to be excited: I made lifelong connections and had numerous positive experiences because of Twitter.

Early Twitter asked you to post about what you were doing, encouraging you to talk about your life. Over time, the objective of Twitter shifted from talking about your own life, to talking about what is happening in the world around you. Twitter realized that the act of witnessing the world could be a powerful instrument of change and encouraged people to do that, during a blinding moment of techno idealism. There were some genuine moments of cultural change that came from this, like the idea that Twitter had something to do with the Arab Spring.

This evolved, and what Twitter was for shifted again. Instead of talking about what is happening in your life, or about what is happening in the world around you, Twitter became a place where you talk about other people and what you think of them. If Twitter’s “what’s happening?” was on a macro-level originally, the new perspective was on a micro-level, encouraging detailed dissections of others. This moment had some fun and important cultural moments, like that woman with the off-leash dog in Central Park, #metoo, and BLM.

Unfortunately the moral outrage component of this era of Twitter became very sticky and we’re now in the present age of social media, where what seems to drive the most engagement on the internet is creating outrage, moral or otherwise, and conveying that outrage to as many people as possible.

In some ways it’s obvious it’s meant to be a community bonding experience, uniting us against a common enemy. Twitter is now dominated by fear-mongering against the “liberal agenda”, and over on Threads the common enemy just seems to be “other people”, with an algorithm that prioritizes relatively benign but still somewhat irritating content that makes you want to respond, “are you really this stupid?”

It’s just a lot of noise. But we’ve been told that being informed is what makes a person intelligent and respectable, and that we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, and that you can’t just bury your head in the sand or else, really, you’re part of the problem. To turn your back on social media feels like a radical act, in a moment where the richest and most powerful people in the world are strongly insistent that social media is the only place worth being.

At some point you have to step back and think about the people who are pushing all of this on us and why they’re doing it. All the politicians, businessmen, social media influencers, and some journalists, are parasites, and they need attention to feed. The social justice roots of social media convinced us all that we’re doing something important by using these services, but those days are long behind us now. Our continued use of social media is only propping up a system that encourages others to victimize our attention, to ruin our mood, to distract us by using our emotions against us.

Our Two Minutes Hate isn’t government mandated, it’s something we do to ourselves all day long, every day; and worse, in this non-fictional real life dystopia, it has ads!