Well, well, well. There are so many possible angles to take on this assessment of facebook, by one of it's own (formerly). He points out that facebook fosters an inane form of communication. He also highlights instances where social media has been instrumental in horrific deaths and even genocide. He slaps down a culture in thrall to the quick dopamine hit from a "like" or a "mention".
He's right about all that, of course. On the other hand, the same can be said of 30-second sound bites and they've been around since the dawn of mass media, not social media. As far as the dopamine hit, for that we can blame evolution for giving us something called the Coalitional Instinct.
At some point in our evolution some humans developed a mutation wherein our brains released dopamine (feel-good juice) when we bonded with others into a group. Groups were better at hunting and gathering and providing and also better at protecting themselves from the terrors of the primitive world, so people with this mutation thrived relative to loners, and pairs, and simple family units. Groups became clans became tribes became nations and so forth.
That biochemistry is so powerful that we will readily engage in terrible behavior in the service of our group. It can range from simple hypocrisy and little white lies to outright atrocity. And we will use every trick in the book to delude ourselves that we are acting nobly no matter what. This behavior is hard wired into us. We probably engage in this charade multiple times every day. And when I say "we" I mean you, me, and everyone else. Every time you link to some news article that demonstrates how your side is right about some issue or another, and you convince yourself that it amounts to some sort of clear, objective fact, you are engaging in this activity. When we are in thrall to this Coalitional Instinct, we literally do not see or hear information that would result in cognitive dissonance, our brains erase it from perception.
This is what the internet and social media have unleashed. All the information in the world is at our fingertips, yet rationality and thoughtfulness are swamped by that ancient, primal dopamine hit from demonstrating a righteous, loyal connection with our tribe. And for all it's complicity in this, facebook is a poor second to Twitter in this game. Have you ever been on Twitter? Yikes.
Anyway, this is the generalization of what the facebook exec in the article, Chamath Palihapitiya, is talking about, although he loses sight of the core problem and decides it's really just that people aren't sufficiently devoted to the progressive issues that he thinks are important.
None of this is new, but like everything else in the world it is faster and easier than ever before, and the genie is out of the bottle. We'll never go back, we had better learn to deal.
Personally, I'd be happy if facebook would just stop presenting me ads for "male-enhancement pills" and "50+ dating" sites, although I understand them thinking that is my tribe. There are are worse tribes.
