The New Social Disease

It was supposed to be fun.  The whole idea of social networks was meant to augment our actual lives.  Instead, in far too many cases, it's practically replaced them.

We've been big fans of the virtual world for as long as we've been around.  In the beginning, it was primarily about communications.  Being able to connect with people from all over the world was truly a magical - and often illegal - achievement.  In the age of smartphones, the very concept of long distance has become a thing of the past for many, defeated by various "unlimited" packages.  Of course, we're still paying the same companies vast amounts of money.  But we achieved the global connections we were striving for in those early days of hacking and Blue Boxing.  We won.

But things started to take a wrong turn when we began to lose our perspective.  People in control - whether in governments, schools, or homes - feared the power of new technology while also embracing it.  Therefore, anything that threatened to upset their perception of the status quo was treated as a greater danger than any equivalent act in the non-virtual world.  This led to crackdowns on hackers throughout the 1990s that saw offenders sent to prison for minor transgressions on computers - and often sentenced to more time than individuals convicted of violent crimes.  They were often punished not for what they did, but for what they could have done.  This is what happens when those in charge don't have a firm grasp of how it all works.  Making judgments while being afraid nearly always results in bad decisions.

At the time, we argued that hacking a website was the equivalent of painting graffiti.  But that was often not how the courts saw it.  They chose to look at the (often merely potential) financial damage caused by this act of virtual vandalism.  And it all came back to one thing: people taking technology far too seriously.  In those relatively early days, websites were a fairly new concept, and things went wrong all the time.  And the poor security that was endemic on many of them was simply part of the growing pains we all were experiencing.  If our own website had ever been hacked (which, sadly, it wasn't), we would have taken the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and build something better, while swallowing the mild embarrassment the incident would have caused.  Instead, corporate America and government institutions declared war on anyone or anything that showed their systems to not be what they imagined them to be, all the while refusing to learn how to fix their setups.  It was a scenario where everyone lost.

Today, we see much the same thing in the form of social networks.  Yes, the websites are more secure and professionally run.  But now the problem mostly centers around the actual content.  Again, we find ourselves taking things far too seriously.  Reactions on outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram seem to matter more than reactions in real life.  Often, the latter is even defined by the former.  Make no mistake - this can be a good thing.  But it invariably turns bad once we sign over our common sense to the latest virtual trends.

Throughout history, crowds have been assembled for both good and evil.  A civil rights rally or a Communist rally each took preparation, organization, and an already existing group of people.  But online mobs can be put together much more quickly and without the infrastructure.  And it becomes impossible to ignore them, a fact that can greatly enhance the reach of fringe elements.  Virtual mobs are able to greatly influence our behavior due to the perceived numbers behind them, even though we have no idea how many people are actually involved.  All it takes is the perception that lots of people are behind a trend or movement for real humans to take it seriously and become involved.  Of course, many times it works the other way, where movements are born in the real world and use social networks to strengthen their organization and become more well known.  This is the difference between using social networks as a tool and being a tool of social networks.

Over the years, we've been known to embrace the phrase "become the media."  One of our HOPE keynote speakers (((Jello Biafra))) has made this a foundation of his spoken word presentations.  We still very much believe in this premise, where we all have the power to be heard and to provide an alternative to the mainstream news we hear every day.  But, again, this concept is tainted when we legitimize sources by default.  When all of our media comes from a single mainstream outlet, whether it's Pravda, CNN, or Fox News, we're going to only get certain stories.  Others simply won't be covered.  And we will likely be influenced by their bias - and they all have bias.  Knowing this simple fact is often enough to get someone to seek out other perspectives.  However, today's landscape is such that literally anyone can become the media on platforms like Facebook without having any actual journalistic ability, other than the desire to get a particular message out.  This is hardly the same concept as alternative voices becoming the media by shining light on ignored items with verifiable information.  Instead, it's basically agenda-driven individuals making up stories to influence large crowds of people, who then go on to legitimize them through numbers instead of facts.  Often, artificial intelligence is used to help spread the word.  And it's working - because we don't question it enough.

We often hear the phrase, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."  Yet, this is precisely what we are faced with when people only rely on news and information from sources like Facebook, where literally anything can be packaged as news.  When people get their information on such health hazards as coronavirus primarily from sites with absolutely no standards, the results can be catastrophic.  In the hands of the dishonest and/or uninformed, the potential for danger is staggering if we treat such sources with the same seriousness as we do the ones that have been vetted as legitimate and knowledgeable.  Literally anything can be presented as the truth if it has a fairly polished look and is spread around by enough of us: flat-Earthers, (((lizard people [Mirror]))) (look it up), anti-vaxxers, etc.  (There are a lot more examples we could cite, but we honestly worry that so many already take them seriously that word would get out and we'd be dealing with angry responses for months.)

Legitimacy needs to be earned over time and what we are seeing in social networking runs counter to that.  Facebook allows you to connect with all kinds of friends and relatives who can then bombard you with "news" items that look real without being checked for accuracy, resulting in all sorts of misinformation being spread around with very little opportunity to refute it.  On platforms like Twitter, mysterious algorithms decide whose words resonate more while others are ignored completely.  Twitter alone decides who is legitimate (they call it "verified") and who isn't, even though they themselves have no real standing to do this.  The result of such arbitrary authority is an environment where it's not about what people are saying but rather who is saying it.  So instead of fulfilling what could have been an opportunity to be a great equalizer, Twitter has become just another echo chamber for the elite, while the rest of us struggle to get any message at all out.

And this brings us back to the unwarranted seriousness that people afford these services.  We saw it with early websites that were easy to hack into.  Now we're seeing people charged with crimes for figuring out how to take over Twitter accounts - but only the "important" ones.  That very sentence 20 years ago would have seemed absurd.  Now it's our reality.  But all the wishful thinking in the world won't make an Instagram posting or a bunch of tweets into anything more than what they are: a temporary means of conveying a message that may or may not have come from the source indicated and which will likely be forgotten after a day.  When we say it like that, its actual importance is defined much more accurately.  Sure, there are people and companies who take their social network presence super seriously and would easily see its compromise as equivalent to an actual armed robbery.  That is what the real problem is that we need to address and fix.  In much the same way we used to tell people to relax if they found themselves kicked out of an IRC channel because "it's only IRC," we need to do the same thing with the various communication methods of today's social networks.  They can be great, but they're no substitute for real life interactions or secure communications.  Once we put all that into perspective, they will lose the undue power they're having over so many of us - which is precisely what those invested in these platforms don't want.

It's easy for us to say that these services are letting us down in so many ways, despite the positive features they give us.  What's difficult is designing something better.  Consider that in all of this critique, we haven't even touched upon the tracking and privacy intrusions we're all subjected to whenever we sign into one of these networks.  We can and must do better.  In all likelihood, that next generation of social networking will come from within the hacker community, as we tend to have a keen sense of the value of privacy, the threats of blindly following anything or anyone, and the undying importance of the individual.  What we have now illustrates very clearly what the dangers are and gives us an all-too-brief look at the positive potential of the social networking project.  And, as with any project, revisions, upgrades, and rewrites are inevitable.