Toward Some Truly Powerful Social Media
The necessity of profit keeps promising social media tech from radically changing the world. (Social Media Tools #3)
Learning about social media, one will often confront a particular type of pundit. He (it’s probably a “he”) will say that the very existence of social media has shifted communication capabilities so massively, so irreversibly, that the entire global power structure has changed. They will point to citizen journalists, to the dynamic networks of people organizing themselves into shared-interest groups or private economies, and to the dominant power this new landscape affords social capital. I have one huge problem: all this hasn’t yet structurally affected actual capital.
The internet and social media more specifically have given people the opportunity to build economies for and within their specific communities, skill sets, and schedules. People have indeed been able to build sharing economies that appear independent from the grinding corporate machine. Hell, Paul Mason in The Guardian even said this signaled the beginning of the end for capitalism. It all sounds downright revolutionary, launching escape pods from the exploding ship to begin anew on another world.
The problem is that most of these “independent” economies or “sharing” cultures can’t actually subsist outside of the larger demands of a capitalist economy. Most people within them still have to pay rent, buy groceries, wear clothes, and are generally subject to the same pressures of “actually having to make money to live”. If your rent goes up, you cannot just divorce the demands of that system. Do the drivers keep or even split all the profits from an Uber ride? Does my TaskRabbit gig enable me to do anything beyond subsistence (with perhaps a little left over)? Do I fundamentally have any more control of the globoeconomic machinations than I had before? Ha. I probably won’t even get insurance.
The economy still functions in the same way, and in fact it is worsening. The work of the many has enriched the few so significantly that the wealthiest 62 people alive have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world. The top 1% collectively own about as much as every single other human being combined.
I say all this to point out that this is clearly not a problem unique to social media, but social media is one of the few industries (or perhaps the only) where the removal of the quest for profit — in theory at least — actually does have the capacity to topple power structures. We can look to Black Lives Matter marches, the Ukranian Revolution, or the Arab Spring to see the astonishing potential of social media. We can also look at Telegram.
I will be doing a presentation on Telegram later this semester, but when I read about it a few weeks ago it was all news to me. Telegram is a social media application that has become the most popular messaging app in Iran through a combination of dumb luck and spectacular technology. Surveys put Telegram use in Iran at about twenty million people, or more than a quarter of the country.
With Facebook and Twitter censored, the heavily-encrypted Telegram got so big so quickly that the government didn’t know where to begin dismantling it. In fact, they couldn’t. They’ve been forced to embrace it, with even hardline conservative politicians who want to shut it down using it to get out the vote for themselves because to fight it publicly would be career suicide. The politicians panicking, the desperate hypocrisy, the selling out of religious ideals in pathetic pleas for votes. It’s slightly magical.
It might not be surprising then that Telegram exists on the basis of a massive donation from Pavel Durov and has no need to ever make money. That has allowed them to put the focus on the privacy and independence of its users. The need for profit in most social media has grossly outweighed privacy concerns. While Facebook mines your data for dollars, Telegram can shift elections.
“Big internet companies like Facebook or Google have effectively hijacked the privacy discourse in the recent years,” the Telegram website says. “Their marketers managed to convince the public that the most important things about privacy are superficial tools that allow hiding your public posts or your profile pictures from the people around you. Adding these superficial tools enables companies to calm down the public and change nothing in how they are turning over private data to marketers and other third parties.”
So while Facebook or Twitter allow us to generate ridiculous amounts of original and independent content, we still don’t control the fate of that content. We don’t even control the fate of our own birthdates. Because Facebook and other social media must make money (preferably insane sums of it), we are still just turning our data over to them. They make decisions about their platform, and they allow us to post as they see fit. If they choose not to one day, we don’t have any forseeable voice.
Telegram is probably not the app that is going to topple the global power structure, if that could even be done with technology alone. Still, it offers an intriguing look at what happens when the power of social media is divested from profit. As long as what we create, even what we are, is property of an employer, a company, or a nation, the people most in need will never get free. We will replicate our systems of exploitation on new platforms. The upward funnel of wealth will continue because the pillars of our system have not been altered. We can question whether social media companies even want to do that, but there are millions around the world who would benefit. They just aren’t the usual suspects.
