“Social media” falls out of the sky
For reasons of psychology and whimsy that I feel are best left unexplored in any greater depth than merely acknowledging them, the only TikTok feed I have actually connected to in any real way is this one, in which some person is using low-res CGI to faithfully recreate every single passenger-involved airplane disaster ever to occur.
Gruesome, I know. And oddly hypnotic, and even aesthetically moving, in its slightly sluggish recapitulation of Mitski’s “Washing Machine Heart” over and over again as the forces of inevitability suck yet another passenger plane out of the sky with anywhere between zero and hundreds of casualties. When I initially subscribed to this feed it was basically the only thing that appeared for me on TikTok whenever I logged in (which is rarely), so I’d go through like five or ten minutes of these things in a steady, nerve-quickening stream. Disaster after disaster after disaster. “Watching Machine Heart” after “Washing Machine Heart” after “Washing Machine Heart.” (That I was doing this in the weeks leading up to my first flight in three years? Let’s leave that nuance unplumbed, also.)
But, I don’t use TikTok much, and I doubt I ever will. It’s loud, and garish, and — let’s face it — fucking incomprehensible. As with its ancestor, Vine, I am standing on the far side of a gulf that is both generational and linguistic; and unlike with its ancestor, Vine, I’m pretty much cool with it. Enjoy your videos, people who make and consume videos. I don’t get it — it’s weird that a guy who spent his teenage years making incomprehensible videos doesn’t get it, I know — and I know I’m not going to get it.
There have been a few pieces this week about the announcement that Facebook (sorry… am I supposed to seriously call it “Meta” now?) is going to TikTokify (so many fun words to make up, in this nonsense era of human interaction!) the Instagram experience (no seriously… this whole sentence, even without the intrusive parentheticals, is gibberish). Here’s a good explainer. The gist: this is basically the end of what we’ve known as “social media,” because social interaction — which built the amusement park upon which Facebook and all its competitors stand — no longer drives the engagement that makes these apps work.
Like everything else in the Western world (and most of the rest of it), social has been gobbled up by “HOLY SHIT, MONEY!!,” and has thusly fallen into the sea. Pretty much as soon as you have any company that’s totally fine with rewiring the way human beings intercept and react to information to make it manifestly more confrontational, abusive, and polarized, you have left the dream of “connected humanity” behind. We’re connected, all right: into a resistance-draining hive mind marketing machine that would make the Borg Queen herself yearn to disconnect and frolic in a meadow, as far away from any other people as humanly possible.
Before this post gets too old-man-yells-at-cloud-y (even that phrase now given snarky added meaning by yes, you guessed it, a commercial product type), one of the things that this piece on the same issue made clear to me was, blissfully, a reasonable explanation for why I’ll never “get” TikTok: TikTok, per the above, is not a social network; it’s a space for content creators, and making that content is, quite simply, time-consuming and hard. And since I’m never going to do time-consuming and hard for a medium that has no intrinsic value to me, that’s the ballgame.
(Fun fact, this also killed podcasting. For me, anyway.)
After all, the UX “eureka!” that brought us social media in the first place — not to mention the entire ecosystem of “free” digital products that begat Internet 2.0 — was ease. You signed up for Twitter (or Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, or Gmail, or whatever), executed a few random commands or took a few photos, and you were in the ecosystem. That “hey, can I look at your contacts?” thing found all your friends for you, and now you had a community, and could see their content. The whole thing took a total of about five minutes — and you could continue to engage at that level indefinitely. “In line at the Starbucks,” I used to like to say, back when I had professional interest in this instead of just personal exhaustion.
But if the default purpose of a social app is no longer to be social — to see what the girl you asked to your prom is up to (she’s in Japan) or to find a community of like-minded Star Wars toy collectors (turns out, a whole lot of them are racists!) — but to sit back and absorb a monotonous content feed, I think I’m out. I don’t have the time or the wherewithal to become dominant in that conversation in any meaningful way, and the more I see what does become dominant, I’m fairly glad it’s not me.
Dating is not math
This article, which I read a month or so ago, still sits with me. It’s about a lot more than just the crazy-making unsuitability of dating apps for the actual purpose of dating, but obviously, that bit stuck out for me. Like most single people, the coupleds in my life have exactly one piece of advice — “have you tried the dating apps?” — and have exactly one proof point for why they’re even bringing it up — “I know someone who knows someone who met the love of their life on an app!”
This goes to a larger problem with the coupleds, which… well, as far as I can tell, the second someone partners up, whatever part of their brain actually went through the dating process seems to deteriorate into a pile of dust, because they think dating is math. “Single person” plus “single person” equals “couple.” This is why so many coupleds fix their friends up with one another using exactly two criteria: the appropriate tabs and slots (per the individual pair’s gender and sexual preferences), and “are they single?” Because, again, in the post-brain-deterioration insanity that is living in the mind of a coupled, being single is the only personality qualifier for matchmaking.
What’s been astonishing for me in my journey to and from the dating apps, and all of the multitudes of conversations I have been forced to endure with the coupleds throughout this process, is the absolute, flat-earth conviction that the apps fundamentally, always, unfailingly, work — that, effectively, it is a problem of technique (“you’re not doing it right”) or criteria (“would you let me swipe for you for five minutes?”). Hey, I will be the first to acknowledge when I suck at something — and I suck at the apps, and suck, generally, at meaningless conversation with total strangers — but I’m also a pretty diligent son of a bitch. When I commit to do something, even something I don’t particularly like, I will actually give it a solid effort. I take advice from experts. I read shit-tons. I do the work.
But what seems to get lost in this entire conversation is something that the coupleds, particularly, seem terrified to admit: that dating apps are not a one-size-fits-all, or even a one-size-fits-many, solution to the fundamental problem of meeting someone in a technologized community in the 21st century.
Like, they may not actually be the answer.
Like the social media examples above, the apps are easy, but that isn’t, in this case, necessarily an advantage. Or, more to the point: if you’re the sort of person who can look at three photos and six data points about an individual and determine, based on that, that you would like to have a conversation with them, bully for you.
I, on the other hand, if confronted by six data points and three photos, am very likely to reject them. Why? Because one of those data points will be something I don’t care for (dogs! it’s always dogs!); one or two of the photos will be unappealing (selfies aren’t actually a good look, y’know? They’re kind of only endearing if you already know the person?), and if I have to make a left-or-right swipe decision based on a data cloud that contains 3 fails and 6 maybes, I’m obviously going with “no.” I’m going with “no” because that person has been flattened into a single piece of information — puddle-deep and woefully trivial information, to boot — and there’s nothing to invest in, no thread to follow. They’ve been reduced to code, ones and zeroes, and they’re a zero.
And the important thing to say here is, that’s me. The actual person trying to do this. I fully acknowledge and recognize that dating apps work for some other types of people. Again, bully for them. What’s maddenning about dating app supremacy in both the actual world of dating and in the world of advice about dating is that the fucking apps have somehow managed to push every other option off the field, leaving people like me stranded.
Old man yells at cloud
So on the one hand, we have social media apps that aren’t that anymore; they’re viewing platforms for users to be nullified by numbing “content.” And on the other hand, we have social dating apps that aren’t as broad or as useful as everyone wants to believe, but have nonetheless overthrown the landscape for how to meet someone you actually want to interact with in the not online space. Feels pretty fucking dire to me.
The last few months have been a fairly momentous shift in how online I’m actually interested in being. Part of it is my white privilege showing — it is awesome (not awesome) to look at the news and actually have the option to self-select out — and part of it is general bafflement with how we, as a community, ever let it all get this bad. Arab Spring was ten years ago; and the best thing that happened on Twitter this year was that Elon Musk maybe didn’t buy it. The surging promise of the whole experiment is long since spent. I fear we don’t need to be, and aren’t meant to be, connected to one another like this, and aren’t wise enough to see how badly all of this is damaging us.
Naturally, I could be wrong — obsolete — and the generations growing up now will have no idea how or why it ever could have been another way. If they survive the apocalypse we’ve foisted upon them, I won’t even complain about it. The romantic part of me wonders if this migration towards incorporeality is part of the deal, the proverbial “next step” in human evolution. The planet burns and we all go online. Washing machine hearts on spin, forever and ever, falling out of the sky on a loop.