I posted this elsewhere in shorter, less developed form, as a comment on a friend’s post and decided to post it here, more fully, on my page. It describes one of the ways in which I see how our society has strayed off the ‘path’, how we have substituted virtual, social engagements, for direct human engagement with both the place we live and the people and life ‘of’ it. In the process it has helped bring us to the doorstep of a bleak dystopian future. More and more Americans have adopted virtual relationships replacing the real and necessary relationships of healthy communities and a vibrant functional society. We are succumbing to the irresistible siren call of social media’s ‘brave new world’, losing ourselves to the algorithms and machinations of Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok and X, the former beast that once was Twitter, each run by megalomainacs of almost unimaginable conceit. These and other lesser known ‘engines’ driving social media prey particularly on our weaknesses as human beings. Their ‘generals’ have taken various social and psychological studies and used them not to heal us, but to take advantage of us for their purposes. Seduced we participate, not just willingly, but enthusiastically, voluntarily becoming entangled without understanding the cost it demands of us. We are caught up in the untested experiment of virtual society that is steering us into a startlingly unpredictable and frightening future. Which is the ‘best’ social media platform? Is there one? Can we ever get what we want/need from any of them? Is there a way out? How do we regain control of our lives? Especially when so many seem perfectly ‘happy’ with the game that consumes them? Unaware and fatalistic?

Our economy and technology are predicated on constant change and the dissatisfaction that we feel in consuming it. It ‘tells’ us that it will satisfy our need, while doing the opposite. The initial flush of excitement we feel, soon dissipates and leaves us hungry for the next. We never find satisfaction. Our consumption is never enough and we are never sufficient in ourselves. While engaged with social media we are continuously under a bombardment of ads, algorithms and various methods of psychological ‘warfare’, prods and judgements and, as a result, we learn that we are insufficient. Social media today has become a ‘need’, a product we consume that promises connection while at the same time it often works to undermine local community, which has been a cornerstone of our species over the entirety of our existence.

It is one thing for us who grew up, having formed our basic personalities, our approach to the world and patterns of thinking, before we adopted computer use and social media which followed. It is very different for those unformed young people who engage with it today, absent these basic social structures and our individual neural networks derived from these relationships. Such a ‘base’ has historically developed over time through the repeated social contacts found throughout local intact, functional, communities. We are as a people today, increasingly, unmoored, more isolated from the people around us, wider society, and the landscape itself. All suffer from this loss. Initially the computer and the evolving internet, was a tool to help us think, an incredible connecting resource, a new tool supporting communication, and it still could be. Much of our contact with it has transformed into a technology that sustains ‘its’ growth, and the profits of those who guide it, while shaping us to meet its ‘needs’. For younger people without an already formed social and neural base, it has begun to determine our relationships, our world outlook, how we view ‘other’ and even determines how we think. Our relationships are increasingly ‘virtual’, selected for us, by a system with its own priorities. It plays a dominant role in the formation of our neural pathways, while direct and local social interaction is minimized, our choices less ours, as the algorithms make them for us.

Neural pathways are shaped in ways analogous to muscles, they form and are reinforced over time through use, or atrophy with its lack. They, in a very real sense, determine or at least limit, the ways in which we each think, help define how and what we think. They set the stage for our imagination and in so doing help determine the limits of possibility. In a world of such dominant social media, what is imaginable, or within our capacity to consider, becomes narrowed down to that of the dominant algorithms. Imagination, perception, our ability to problem solve, our options, all narrow down to fit within the algorithm. In a more open, free, connected society, the possibilities, the solutions are expanded. In a society fully engaged to social media the possible future is narrowed and in our present state, that future is far more dystopian, even apocalyptic. Our brains, particularly those of the young, are thus engineered to fit the algorithm, its possibilities. That which is outside of these pathways, our patterns of thinking, our experience, in a very real way, do not exist to us. The virtual world, the ‘world’ of algorithms, the world outside of our choosing, becomes ‘real’ for us, while the physical, biological world, the world of unimaginable relationships and possibilities, in which we physically exist, upon which we depend for sustenance, shrinks away from our awareness, our concern and our control. More and more begins to simply ‘happen’ to us, beyond our awareness, our control and we yield, not because we must, or because they are no options, but because we have become ‘blinded’ by our consuming relationship with the variously determined realities of social media.

We older adults, are less affected in these ways having pre-established patterns in place, but we aren’t immune to them. In fact we can become very dysfunctional as our more entrenched belief systems, our ways of thinking, our world views, come into continuous conflict with the virtual worlds of social media. We didn’t see this aspect of this powerful technology coming. We don’t ‘understand’ and as we age, many of us tend to retreat from its onslaught. Our internal conflicts can lead us to rebel and reject these technologies in their entirety, along with those who promote its use. Our response often takes the form of rejection and a retreat to an imagined before. Social media impacts each and everyone of us. The sharpening disparities and conflicts very often result in a rejection of the entire ‘package’, the good with the bad…and there is much good that has genuinely benefited society, but the selfish predatory nature of social media in its current form, as it enriches its owners and bestows a level of power on the few this world has never seen before, once again simplifies these questions into a black or white, either/or, all or nothing question. We are overwhelmed with ready access to so much information today, more than any of us can cope with. It is presented with such rapidity and with little attempt to understand it, that it becomes ‘worthless’. We become ‘numbed’ to it and reject it out of hand. These social media corporations do this intentionally, so that they might gain power, as the majority retreats and gives it up. Younger people don’t see this change because they are more fully integrated into social media. Their ‘base’ is different. They have a learned dependence on it which they take for granted, much as do those older of us, whom without examination, cling to our own social conventions of the past. Today we are drowning in information, data and fact. Social media, seductively, both adds to this problem and promises a way out as we increasingly become engaged in our own chosen, individual worlds, looking for a calm in the storm of information. We seek distraction from the confusion of a world that intentionally pushes us into one that intentionally creates chaos.  There appears to be no common thread working to reform and join the disparate parts into coherent, knowable, wholes. The world of social media  has changed us and how we interpret the physical/real world around us and therefore, how we react to it. The physical, organic, living world around us has been likewise confused in the process, so that a disconnected population no longer shares an understanding of its value and our dependence on it. On many days our transformation from organic, living, closely related and dependent beings seems complete as place degrades and that which we need becomes in ever greater demand while also becoming less available. Social media has become instrumental in this process. As life becomes more threatened, as resource scarcity increases, as the ‘threat level’ associated with ‘other’, we look for ever more distraction, the ‘treatment’ we seek, we desire, necessarily more potent and direct as the consequences of our disconnection accumulate. Social media is our collective drug of choice. We have incorporated this technology into our functional being. Physically implanting that technology into our bodies is not a very big ‘next’ step. Some even look forward to it.

In ‘playing’, the social media game we’ve accepted its rules, accepted the ‘role’ it assigns us. How we see our lives, how we define ourselves. Our purpose, is then shaped by the game and we give up a key part of ourselves. Such constant change, its continuous stimulation, our ever increasing dependence upon it, keeps us off balance, dissatisfied and divided. For all of its ‘promises’ to connect us into virtual communities, it leaves us more alone. We are, after all, biological creatures. We are not devices. Not complex loops of algorithms. Social media as promoted, is a disruptor, a weapon. Its potentiality as a tool for the healing of society, its betterment and the more widespread ‘flowering’ of individuals, is unfulfilled. It is in fact actively discouraged by social media platforms today. Their goals do not include our ‘self-actualization’, our fulfillment as human beings pursuing our fullest expression of our unique capacities and abilities. Our use of it gives us a false confidence that we are in control of our lives, that we are fully engaged, but, in doing this, are in fact surrendering an essential part of ourselves, our humanity, to it, in proportion to the degree that we have engaged with it.

Self control, self-actualization, the realization of our ‘dreams’, any sense of fulfillment is found by living one’s life directly, in the physical, organic, living world, with direct consequences, exploring ourselves in the process of attempting, failing, learning and succeeding, independent of abstract, virtual, gate keepers, influencers, marketers and politicians, who would have us look to them for direction and purpose. It is an error to think of one’s virtual community as a viable pathway to a full life, a life of independence. Social media gains power over us as we disengage from our local human community, as we become disconnected from the living world with which we would have otherwise been immersed, as we reject other human beings, members of the larger community, mentors and teachers, collaborators and competitors, surrendering the clear and connected relationships of an active , engaged life, for those chosen, by algorithms and our ‘peers’, choices which, more and more become choices made outside of us, by a collective other.

In doing all of this the owners and developers of these technologies, these ‘services’, have consciously cultivated a dependence on them by we the users. Our need feeds their profits. We come to believe that we must have them. Marketers and advertisers work to package us, to smooth our edges and conflate our desires into one. In contradiction to their pronouncements, they seek less engagement with us. They seek to shape us rather than accommodate our unique qualities. That requires more of them, which translates into more cost, less profit. They are dependent upon our collective and shared desires. They seek to sell us packages they can provide easily and in mass. It is the nature of mass marketing. The individual merged into the masses. Like purveyors of goods and services, social media have taken a similar approach and have created a need, a demand for their service, that absent our engagement with them, would not exist. No one ‘needs’ social media, not like we do air, water, food, shelter direct human relationships, so our commitment to social media requires deeper, long term engagement to establish and sustain our relationship with it and now they have that. As I said above, we don’t really need the supporting technologies implanted in us, we have already chosen the path they’ve made for us. We carry our devices everywhere, readily supplying them with what they need to know about us to perfect their algorithms and cement our relationship to this self-described ‘benefactor’, capable of meeting our every need…as long as they fall within their system’s capacity provide and control it.

The next step is AI. Many are eager to adopt this and give up ever more of what makes us human and unique individuals including the creativity which gives many of us our sense of fulfillment, contentment and joy. In the process we give up another of life’s challenges as we forget what such adoption costs us, the satisfaction, purpose and value, that only comes from effort and doing. Today they are selling effortless creativity, while ignoring the benefits such endeavors provide us, selling us reformulations of the past as our personal inventions. What will they sell us next? What else, that defines us, are we willing to give up?

We are not digital creations. We are analog, animal, organic beings that live in engaged relationships with all others around us, dependent on those points of contact, participants in an economy that joins us to meet our mutual and individual needs. We are social animals, in dependent, voluntary relationships, without which we are far less. We are parts of teams, communities, schools, associations, neighborhoods, professional organizations, individuals with shared interests, necessary relationships that define, support and empower us, without which we are far smaller. Our demands for individual liberty come to nothing without the ‘whole’. Without the collective, without our shared relationships, we are small and lack the capacity to fully realize ourselves. We ignore this at our individual and collective peril. We cannot escape this fact by rejecting those around us and picking and choosing between offered digital alternatives, which themselves exist in a disconnected virtual world…but for our willing participation. We are the seat, collectively, of all power, the goods and services, the benefits associated with any society. Life requires direct relationship in every way and we are ultimately nothing of consequence without it.