There is a particular feeling of waiting for something to load that’s only a little bit different than expecting the Messiah. The ineffectual scroll, the spinning pinwheel that never goes anywhere, staring at pictures and posts from minutes ago that refuse to make their way into the endless archive of the digital past and stubbornly haunt our screens’ present. Surely, new things have happened, non-events that nevertheless demand very real attention.
Nearly three billion people spent part of today scrolling to nowhere. Service has just been restored, but for hours Facebook’s digital empire, from its flagship blue-tinted capital to its mighty provinces of Instagram and WhatsApp, went dark. What initially appeared to be a local problem- your phone is slow, the service in your apartment is terrible, the WiFi in your office stutters- is actually the most global of disruptions, as if the world’s largest country suffered a coding coup and went dark.
I often wondered how we would arrest our digital addiction and reverse the profligate bequests of our attention to the pixels behind our screen. Would some of us rise up in resistance, reborn Luddites eager to smash these newer idols that have taken up residence in our pockets? Or perhaps we would simply consume so much that it becomes too much, a buffet that consumes us rather than the inverse. Maybe our release from the social media matrix would be a complete merger with it: migration to the metaverse, diving and dissolving through glass, being reborn as avatars and Bitmojis. An algorithmic baptism for each of us.
Less likely but seemingly most desirable would not be a push away from tech, but a pull towards something else. The printed page might rediscover its charm, or the legal pad and postcard its intimate handshake with the work we need to do. If writing could declare independence from the laptop and snapping pictures from the phone, our device landscape might feel a little bit more scaled for the human body and brain.
Today suggested another possibility: that Big Tech might be the authors of their own calamitous decline, with their users as helpless bystanders. Empires almost always are co-conspirators in their own undoing, unwittingly but decisively collaborating with external forces to underwrite the paradigm shifts they are most eager to catalyze or forestall. It was the very rigidity of the Pharaohs that built their pyramids and turned their divine dynasty to dust, and eventually, the sun did set on the British Empire. Rome ruled the world until the world ruled Rome. Change happens slowly, and then all of a sudden. Planes fly into Kabul, and in something like an eye’s blink they fly out.
It is likely true that Facebook and other social media giants are both weaker than we think and stronger than we know. Their power is vast but also never far from vanishing, built on clouds and driven by the dopamine in our brains. The Wall Street Journal’s reporting reveals a company reeling and fretting, even as its profits soar. but being a behemoth is hard work, and the titans of Silicon Valley are just as vulnerable to entropy as the barons of steel, oil, and the railroads once were.
This outage was fixed, and soon enough the internet’s lights went back on. If anything was too big to fail, it is the master curators of our attention. But this pause, an unexpected and involuntary respite that neither we nor Facebook wanted, might provide a providential opportunity to gain in wisdom what is lost in service.
I have always believed that the stories we tell about social media are infected with the moral nuance of the cartoonish: do-no-evil heroes and nefarious villains, world enlightenment or democratic decay, the crowning glories of American capitalism or its excesses run amok, and running the world aground. Cartoons might shine with superhero heat, but they rarely shed the kind of light that helps us see the path ahead.
The reality is that social media is a trillion-dollar business because more people than we can imagine like using it. It brings them joy. And for the rest of us, it brings a cocktail of things: professional contacts, the strange and dull pleasures of voyeurism, the hunger to see and be in the scene, an accounting of our days. It brings curses as well as blessings. It is quite simply how we live now, and it is our revolution to sort out and muddle through. But it does not mean it is how we will live forever.
The thing about a brief interruption is that it shows that a longer one is possible. A little bit of freedom can be a dangerous and glorious thing.
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