The long slow death of ‘social media’

A couple of days ago I was on the bus from Piazzale Roma to Marco Polo airport. In front of me were a young couple, gleefully passing between them an iPad of the photos they’d taken in Venice over the previous few days.

It was all so public those of us on the bus couldn’t help but see.

The two of them on the Rialto bridge.

The two of them in the Piazza San Marco.

The two of them by the lagoon.

The two of them in their hotel bedroom (thankfully quite tasteful).

No pictures of Venice that I could see. Just pictures of them in which Venice happened to be the backdrop. A canvas behind their lives, not something to a marvel at in itself.

On the bus they started to load them up to social media, Instagram, TikTok maybe, I didn’t bother to look. They were so excited and happy as young people should be. And they’d ticked off Venice. Where next to head for their selfies?

The day after I got back there was that circus in Washington and Elon Musk raising his right arm in a gesture anyone with an inkling of history surely knows well. It’s not ‘my heart goes out to you’, honestly. Surely the richest man in the world who also thinks himself the smartest would know that.

I took one look at the video of him doing that and knew straight away my eighteen mostly happy and fruitful years on Twitter (I won’t call it X) were over. I’d been getting a bad feeling there for some time, but being on a platform with a modern wannabe Mussolini was just too much. This is why I deleted my account, in spite of the fact there are people there I’ll miss, and you'll find me principally at Bluesky from now on.

What connects that happy young couple of the bus to Marco Polo to the vile Elon Musk?

Social media. Or rather it’s absence. When Twitter began it slowly coalesced into a way people could communicate across nations, across viewpoints, without barriers. Which occasionally wasn’t such a good thing but overall it felt there was some genuine two-way social intercourse there.

Now? So much of it’s about selfies and ticking off experiences. About tribes too, right and left, woke and unwoke and all the other clans in between. Me, me, me. Rarely us, us, us unless the us happens to think the same way.

Thirty years ago I was covering technology for the Sunday Times while building my career as a novelist. I spent months in Silicon Valley watch the internet emerge from early online communities like CompuServe, AOL and Apple’s brief foray into the arena, eWorld. Those three were largely closed worlds apart from email. But they were a genuine attempt to build some new form of worthwhile connected digital society using the technology then emerging.

No one imagined a world in which so-called influencers tried to earn a living and an international lifestyle by begging for free hotel rooms and putting them in Instagram. Or communities that would be devoted to the spread of misinformation, either through bizarre conspiracy theories or at the behest of malign foreign powers seeking to wage a kind of hidden war against their enemies.

The internet’s got its good points but boy does it have some very bad ones too.

There’s no winding back the clock, of course. The Silicon Valley pioneers of yesterday have morphed into villains from an Austin Powers movie, one that’s all too real. In the meantime decent people cling to the hope they can somehow redress the balance by quitting Twitter and moving to Bluesky or something.

I’d like to think it’ll work because I’m not sure what the alternative is. But it’s easy to delude yourself. I couldn’t count all those posts, often from important, well-placed people, predicting a huge victory for Kamala Harris fighting a US election against a felon most of the rest of the world regards as a malevolent clown. But the more of those gleeful posts I saw, the more I felt sure Trump was going to win. Twitter rarely called any election right in all the time I was there. What influence it’s had seems to be on people who don’t follow events anywhere else, people who think that what appears there, on Facebook, on TikTok, represents ‘news’, regardless of how accurate or well-sourced it is.

We live in a world where people believe what they wish to believe, not what’s real and true. For all the bright and optimistic predictions I heard thirty years ago in Palo Alto and Seattle, that’s the legacy Silicon Valley has given us. Rule by tech oligarchs who now have the power to dictate what we mostly see and hear and buy.

All the same, it does feel good to be out of Twitter this morning.

No going back. Only forward, wherever that leads.