This is not my beautiful pub...

The strangeness of social media as it stops being a social hub.

As social media, like all disruptor tech, enshittifies a couple of decades in, there’s this weird feeling I’ve only just noticed.

Where is everybody?

Your friends aren’t in a place where your friends used to be. They’ve left, or been swamped by paid content. And it leaves this meaningless hollow sadness, that’s a little embarrassing. Did we all need this social space that badly? Did we get used to the dopamine hit of clicking on the apps to make contact with our friends, and finding so much more than one-to-one chat? Did we think it was… real?

There’s an irony in checking a healthy follower / friend count – smiling as the tally of your own social acceptability adds up – but still feeling incredibly lonely. A warm sense of connection has been replaced by a creeping feeling of isolation and desperation. You want to have a chat; this is the right place for a chat, yeah? Even, maybe, the right place for an argument…? And then… just your own voice, bouncing off the walls…

It’s an echo chamber, but not the one we expected.

You haven’t really lost all your friends. (Unless you’re enormously unlucky.) But you are the human component in a very modern transaction, mediated by colossal tech corporations: selling your attention for hard cash. (I’m doing it here. It’s an inescapable transaction that you can seek to minimise at best. It’s what we signed up for fifteen, twenty years ago, and it’s hard to abandon now.)

As a human being, when everybody vanishes, even if you know social media is a bit silly, you still feel abandoned. You might even suspect that you’ve done something wrong. That you’ve become a pariah. (Something that can happen easily on line where our personas might be more abrasive or assertive than in real life.)

But the decline of social media spaces, the exodus of actual mates, is triggering the same neurological process for many of us as being snubbed by your actual real world community.

Weird shit.

Of course your friends haven’t (I hope) actually gone. Even though they’ve often been replaced by monetised clones, bots and brands, faking friendship for your attention… but it has the same effect on you, subconsciously.

Where is everybody?

Around this time of year, it can come into sharp focus. Try and organise a physical party, say a Christmas get-together. A book launch. A gig. An event. Where will your mates be? What comms system are they using now for socials? WhatsApp? Discord? No point organising a Facebook event. They won’t see it past the ads.

Do you even have their emails or phone numbers any more?

Didn’t everybody used to… be… here?

Sure, in real life, people might move from place to place. We change our hangouts over time as they (and we) change. But that process doesn’t usually come with this empty feeling. We don’t go back to the old place and find it full of people who still seem to want to chat, to take up our time. We spot the empty chairs. We get the message that we should move on, find out where everyone went.

Because in those real life spaces, there isn’t money to be made by chummy strangers and brand stooges acting like a friend to keep you there.

There’s a specific uncanniness to this. Like the staff at your favourite bar were all suddenly wearing weird smiley masks, offering to chat to you, saying “don’t go”. Insisting it was always this way.

This isn’t about fake people or bots or identity impersonators - though they’re definitely present in all our feeds. And it’s not about takeover by digital Nazis or the other big newsworthy shifts in social media. Nothing so tech dystopian and sexy.

This is about the mundane decline in actual friendship online, at least as it might be recognised as an analogue for real-world social groups. A digital analogue of interaction with our meatspace circle (hey, what you been up to, that’s a nice dinner, great pic of you with Bob and the kids) has been replaced by a search for the dopamine hit of interaction with real people whom you don’t actually know, that hardcore subgroup still using the service (these people might become trusted online friends, or even real world friends, of course, but that’s different…)

We’re dealing with a decline in our real friends sharing online spaces with us, combined with a sudden flood of paid corporate insertions into those spaces, as these platforms reveal what was always true: they’re here to make money out of you, not to make you happy. What we used them for – hanging out, chatting – was a side effect. It was a feature we might abuse, like meeting friends in the foyer of a cinema but never buying a ticket. But it was a privilege which they could stop offering as the money got tighter and the costs went up and the investment went elsewhere. Sit still. Watch this. don’t go.

Without us maybe noticing it, the balance has tipped, as more and more of us abandon these spaces, annoyed that they’re “not the same” any more. So you open Facebook or Instagram and it’s just you and all the strangers now, and the targeted brands. Lots of them seem interested in the same stuff we’re into. Our music, our films, our football teams, even our prejudices. It’s a bit like our friends, but not quite.

It’s sinister. The algorithm makes it almost convincing enough, pushing the same buttons as plenty of human interaction. Maybe it’s like the sort of person you bump into once in a while who remembers you like a certain TV show, so the conversation never goes much further. Warm small talk. Nothing deeper. That can be nice. Especially if nobody at work is into your favourite stuff as much. It’ll do. And it’s close… enough… sort of. It passes. Almost.

So we go back to the digital social spaces, for a hit that’s better than nothing.

And slowly it starts to be less than that.

The old canard that if it’s free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product is hard to stomach when you stick around long enough for the stark lighting to come on in the bar. When the bar props and trappings all fall away, to reveal a lab, where you’re connected up to this clanking milking machine that extracts your attention as a sparkling fluid to sell to investors.

Social media was never just your IRL friends. It promised something more thrilling and modern than that. A broadening of your social circle into likeminded others. That ever-increasing follower number, with its inevitable dopamine hit: approval from outside, even approval from heroes and famous people perhaps. Nobody objects to a kind word from welcoming strangers. But in those “town squares” with their come-one-come-all policy, it’s now almost all paid posts and monetised interference. The cushion of actual friendship there has got very thin.

The nasty truth is that the ideal for any commercial communication or broadcast medium is to remove content completely and occupy every moment of your attention with paid ads. That’s where the monetisation plan leads, especially for a “free” service. Of course we all knew that would probably be the case with social media, but the genuine friendliness covered it up, and I don’t think I’ve seen a medium pass that tipping point before so brazenly.

I remember explaining to my kid - annoyed that the pop music had stopped in the car and there was yet another advert - that commercial radio owners would prefer to remove all the music and just have ads, if they thought you’d still listen. Radio was an advertising medium with necessary breaks for songs. It’s why newspapers and magazines existed. Come for the content, and while you’re here… It’s not a new phenomenon.

But those were all broadcast media, not a hangout where all my mates were chatting. I know why there are ads before a film when I go to the cinema. It’s not why I go, but I understand the deal. I don’t expect ads round my dinner table at home. That would be weird.

(Ages ago, I remember writing a sketch about someone who’d sold the gaps in their conversation for advertising. The sketch had them down the pub, and the joke was that every lull in the chat was filled with paid content. That wouldn’t even be a sketch idea now. It’s too everyday. We’ve accepted it. What else is that bit in a podcast where the host-read ad for a VPN or a website design app appears seamlessly in the chat you were enjoying with a virtual friend…?)

While we were all here, on our phones and screens, hanging out on Facebook or Insta or Twitter, together, it could pass as an analogue for something recognisable, organic and real. A replacement for physical human social space. Of course, it never was. But the problem is that because it was such a convincing and convenient illusion, and compounded by a combo of a global pandemic and work-based isolation… we stopped going to the old bar, the old coffee shop, the old club, the old shops. We stopped chatting there. We got out of the habit. We didn’t care. Cos here was better. You could do more. Meet more people. It was great. It pushed a very fundamental button for social animals like us.

We thought this place was the same as a bar or a pub or even a marketplace.

But it’s not. It’s a farm. For selling our attention. And we’re the battery livestock. And now the noise of the farming machinery is so loud that we can’t actually talk. We can’t hear one another.

So what now?