Imagine there was a tool or system for doing things that increasingly made your output uglier or less intelligent. The more you used it, and the more that others used it, the crappier everything it was used for becomes. Imagine that. Would you still use it? Like a pen that made your handwriting worse and worse, and in some magical way, made everyone’s handwriting worse and worse too. We would throw that pen in the trash, wouldn’t we?
But that’s sort of the deal with the social media tools we’re using today. Do we really want to keep making spastic videos with increasingly base and absurd gotchas in the first milliseconds? A devil’s bargain for a tiny sliver of that sweet, sweet attention pie? Oh look, someone’s catching on fire, here’s some shampoo. Ah, boobies – you should really try this app.
Is this really the hamster wheel we want to keep running? It’s boring and it’s dumb, and decades from now, they’ll be mocking the sad, stupid “twenties” with good reason. Or the planet will be a wasteland, and no one will care nor remember our silly little posts anyway.