”Dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres”
Or, if you’d prefer, the English version of the same saying :
“You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with”.
TBH, I’m a big believer of the Spanish saying over the English one (it comes from the motivational speaker Jim Rohn while the Spanish version is a thousand year old saying perfectly embeded in the culture — even in Portugal it’s huge, but that now is “claimed” by the writer Esmeralda Santiago), mostly because it’s stated as a matter of fact, instead of an “average”.
The Spanish saying states, “tell me with whom you walk with & I’ll tell you who you are”.
This all comes to my mind because, increasingly & exponentially, the value of what people see and interact with on social media — is immediately correlated to the circle of people (the tribe) in which you’re inserted in (or that the content comes from).
Be it a DAO, a digital community, a FB group, a Discord invite only server, and on and on, the reality is, social media cred becomes a fundamental metric to evaluate lives across the world… more & more we’re judged (and bullied) because of it (the cred).
My concern is exactly correlated to the “weight” that is given to the people that you connect to nowadays, as in prior moments of history, those valuable assets/connections were all stated or measured holistically and theoretically, but presently and in the future, they’ll be measured analytically and exactly (very dangerous if you dig deeper into how that can be used against you in the future - cancel culture & its strength asof late comes to mind).
So, while everyone keeps being scared over the social credit system available and running in China, the reality is that the cultural and mental blocks currently being implemented across every “westernized social media platform” — follow a lot of the same algorithmic metrics to amplify the messaging and the reach of the accounts that identify us as that of the Chinese social media platforms (and gov tracking). This not to add a statement of value for either but we all need to be honest & realistic over the values we’re implementing = worlwide.
Moving forward the value of an audience, a circle of connections & a tribe will be something one can “wear on their sleeve”, monetize, trade, buy, etc, and to that I say — jokingly… can we create a new version of the Thunderdome and see who ends up being the last one algorithmically standing?
Oh wait… Ronaldo is already that :/
