Fediverse memes

Do you consider book authoring to be social media, then? Should print be abolished? How is modern social media more than just a supercharged version of writing down your ideas, printing a shitload of copies, and handing them out in the street?

Also, you keep trying to make this sound optimistic and making it creepy.

I'm fully aware. I'm not exactly excited about it, rather it's something I think is necessary for human society to function at the scale it has grown to.

And we're not going to become an actual hive mind. But unless it becomes "normal" to make decisions in a way that doesn't screw someone over on the other side of the world, down from us as individuals, up to our representatives in government, the world will continue to be shitty. That's what I'm referring to when I say "hive-mind" or "global" thinking.

We used to be able to live our lives within the confines of a tiny plot of land, and nothing you did within that plot of land affected anything outside that plot of land.

That is no longer the case. The materials of our homes, clothes and devices are made of, and the labor to assemble them. Our food, and the immense logistics around producing it just in time for us to consume.

All these things and so many more, and how they are achieved, have global implications.

As a species, we don't get to go back to the simple life anymore. We have responsibilities now. Ones we will likely fail to live up to, sure, but responsibilities nonetheless. And I don't think we can even attempt to function as a species without global broadcast communication, or whatever you want to call it.

That actually doesn't mean individuals can't opt out. If we can figure out how to make every t-shirt cruelty free, then yeah, you don't need to think about which one you wear anymore. And even before then, I don't think there's anything wrong with some living life as passengers in society.

I have started blocking US media actively in my feeds to avoid those specifically.

That's fine. The social media I think would be best for us is one that nowhere near everyone needs to engage with. Not everyone needs to connect globally, the same way you don't need to know everyone at work, or every person in your city.

Everyone using it all the time is something commercial social media strives for. Because it needs to make money. And not just some, but ALL the money.

When it comes to communication, there IS such a thing as too much. If you only ever talk, then you never do. And if you refer back to my original comment, the kind of social media I want to see, takes very real effort to properly engage with. That kind of social media can't be something you use every day. Or even the kind every person wants to, or needs to, use.

We don't need to connect every person to every other person. But I think there does need to be systems that connect some people in every community, to a couple other people in every other community. And each connection doesn't even need to be the same few people.

The part that matters is that if done right, I think social media could teach us to stop playing the prisoners dilemma by endlessly defecting on a planetary scale.

That's something communication of all kinds achieves on a daily basis in millions of tiny instances. No-one has really built a system of communication around aiming for exactly that. In fact, most modern platforms very deliberately do the opposite.

As for the optimism you keep trying to attribute, please stop. I'm disagreeing with some of what you claim, not that things are shit and will continue to be shit. I fully agree there. People like to eat trash, and will continue to do so.

Telling you salads exist, isn't exactly optimistic when I'm fully expecting the diets of most people to consist of 100% trash for the foreseeable future.

But there IS an option besides not eating at all. Which, when it comes to communication, same as food, isn't optional. For you individually, sure, modern society, no.