Social Contract
The Roman solution to our social media crisis.
Oh, how I miss the old social media. The one that claimed, with a straight face, to be ‘social’. Connecting people, it said. A lofty ideal, sure. But one worth at least paying lip service towards.
But what I really miss about the old Facebook is the wisdom one imbibed with each visit. You’d log on breathless, quivering in wonderment at the mere prospect of a day enriched forever.
I’m referring to the now defunct staple of those quixotic days. The Thirst Trap with Inspirational Quote—a mode of intellectual smuggling so elegant it deserved a Royal Charter. First came the sugar: a lithe young woman—preferably your best friend’s inamorata—in a bikini engineered to defy both gravity and modesty. Then came the medicine: quotes from Gandhi or Rosa Parks. Occasionally, for the more intellectually inclined, a dose of that mad French pederast, Michel Foucault.
For the unadorned, Facebook’s philanthropy once possessed lofty intention. It worked like KGB subterfuge, apparent only years after the fact. Peppered across the old Facebook were photos related to friends, acquaintances, and people you might have once spied groping the wonky lemons in Aldi. It was a community. On Sundays, you’d play a Masterchef host, picking apart your old English teacher’s gravy-sodden roast beef and questioning the sad pallor of his limp, insipid broccoli. The poor fool might know a bit about The Tempest, but he knows nothing about salting his cruciferous vegetables.
That was the old social media. Now Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
Life in that prelapsarian idyll was dreamy. A friend request spiked a syringe full of dopamine right between one’s ears. Ahhh. Unearned reward bounced along one’s veins.
But what I miss most is the intellectual life of the old Facebook. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, an asocial oddball tapping keys for Facebook realised that humans, okay—men—enjoy photographs of lissome and radiant females wearing a minimum of organic cotton across their chests and torsos. The conceit: trick them with this tantalising photo. Once they’re hypnotised, slap them with a brain-edifying quote from a great mind.
I must admit. I learned a great deal from such cunning little photos. But this intellectual subterfuge was like learning to read under the cover of night and the threat of beating. You know, the situation women face in those backwards countries which the far-left cannot help but celebrate.
A friend of mine dated one of these cultural benefactors. Each post triggered a small industrial ritual. Phones emerged. Men disappeared around the back of the warehouse for a sly peek.
“I told her not to post that stuff,” he’d mutter.
We, of course, were less concerned with the flagrant déshabillé than the curriculum. Would it be Gandhi? Rosa? A daring turn toward French theory? The race was on. Thumbs scrambled across screens, each one determined to be the first to reveal today’s pixelated prize. On the screen was my friend’s girlfriend, her body sculpted with hours of gym work, wearing one of those bikinis which render the wearer less than naked. In the curious greeting of her tribe, she expertly angled her glossy behind toward the waiting camera.
And then, the crunch of gravel under a boot. Our mate would appear:
“What the fuck are you all looking at—I bet—I swear—I told her not to post that stuff.”
It was absurd. It was undignified. It was what terrific bores would today call problematic. But it was, in its own way, social. And then it disappeared. Social media stopped being about people and became about attention.
The roast dinners vanished. The girlfriends remained—but now they belonged to strangers paying £9.99 per month for a daily update of smut. The quotes disappeared entirely. There was no need for them. The tech bros had threaded a barbed hook down your throat.
Recently, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for intentionally designing addictive social-media platforms, awarding millions in damages to a young woman whose mental health had deteriorated after years of compulsive use. Whether the verdict survives appeal almost doesn’t matter. The spell has been broken.
And so, something will and must change. Will we see the end of infinite scrolling, auto-play videos and crack-pipe algorithms? The swelling backlash against big tech suggests nothing is off the table.
More importantly, will we return to a more social media? The one with the lurid roast dinners and, of course, the lithe torsos beneath which rested the timeless wisdom of someone or other. Forgive me, I have forgotten their names.
Then again, perhaps it is too late. A civilised people—which we are not—would recognise these corrosive elements for what they are: antisocial. The Romans, acting in the interest of the Republic, would have fed the tech dorks to lions for our viewing pleasure. Sadly, we are far less civilised than they were.
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”. That is the second occasion in two hours that I’ve read that quotation - first as the epigraph to a new book I’m reading and now in your post. What a coincidence. (Sad to say the meaning of your post was lost on me as I’ve never viewed Facebook.)