Social media — friend of the good, bad and sociopathic
Personally, I look forward to being old. How instructive it will be for the youth of tomorrow to gather at my feet, and listen eagerly as I recount the wisdom my generation has gleaned. “Grandad, what was Facebook?” “Well, lad, Facebook was a wonderful thing. Marvellous, it was. Basically, it was a system where you merrily handed over all your private details to one of the most powerful corporations on Earth, free of charge, and then a load of unseen opportunists used those details to con you into voting for dangerous lunatics.”
“But, Grandad, why did you sign up to that?”
“Well, that wasn’t our original reason for joining. We joined Facebook because we were excited about a new thing called ‘social media’.”
“What was social media?”
“It was a brilliant invention that made sure you never had to bother speaking to your friends ever again. In the old days, before Facebook, people actually used to phone their friends, to ask them how they were, and what they’d been up to. Some people, believe it or not, used to like their friends so much that they even wrote letters to them. Facebook meant you didn’t need to waste your time doing any of that. From then on you didn’t so much as write an email. You’d just see a picture that a friend had posted of their legs on a sun-lounger, think, ‘Smug so-and-so, never liked him anyway’, and then scroll listlessly down the feed for another couple of hours or so, while ignoring your spouse and children.”
“Was that all you did on Facebook, Grandad? Stare at people’s holiday photos?”
“No no no, lad! Mainly we used it to stalk people we’d had unhealthy crushes on at school 25 years earlier. Oh, and to spread conspiracy theories, lies and propaganda from hyper-partisan political blogs and fake news sites, resulting in the undermining of democratic elections, the death of trust in public figures, the unstoppable rise of extremism, and the eventual collapse of civil society. Ah, those were the days.”
“Was Facebook the only form of ‘social media’, Grandad?” “Oh no, there were lots more. Like Twitter. Twitter was different. You didn’t use Twitter to publish your holiday photos. You used Twitter to publish ill-advised rants and drunken abuse, thus unwittingly ruling yourself out of more senior employment for decades to come. Ah, I miss Twitter. It was wonderful, the way it irreparably reduced our society to savage tribalism. Did you know that of all the hundreds of millions of people who signed up to Twitter, every single one was at some time or another accused by complete strangers of being a transphobe?” “Grandad, I’m not completely sure what ‘the internet’ was, but it doesn’t sound very nice.” “Not very nice? The internet was tremendous, lad. So gloriously democratic. Before the internet, rabid antisemites, Stalin apologists and white supremacists hardly had a voice in this country. The poor creatures were almost completely shunned. But thanks to the internet they were all able to build enormous followings of the vulnerable, angry and ill-informed. And that wasn’t the only thing the internet was good for. It was also good for putting countless employers out of business, killing the music industry, closing every magazine and newspaper on Earth, and concentrating 98 per cent of the world’s wealth among a handful of sociopaths in California.”
“This has been really interesting, Grandad. But I’m starting to get a bit hungry. Do you mind if I eat that last piece of rat?”
“Hands off, lad. We’re saving that for next week’s dinner.”
Like any parents, my wife and I are used to hearing endless demands. Our four-year-old son wants to own this or that toy, or watch this or that TV show, or eat this or that heap of lethal junk food. That’s all fine. We can deal with that.
Suddenly, though, he’s started demanding something new and unexpected. A sister.
“Mama,” he announced solemnly, at bathtime on Tuesday night. “I want you to have a baby in your tummy.”
He then proceeded to lay out his red lines. The baby must be a girl, and she should be born as soon as possible.
Gently, my wife suggested that he might not like having a baby around. Babies, she said, were very noisy, and would wake him up in the night.
“I wouldn’t wake up!” he promised. “I would keep my eyes tight shut!”
There wasn’t much room in the house for a baby, she said.
“The baby can sleep in a cot!” he explained. “Cots are small!”
But, said my wife, we would need lots of room for the baby’s things.
“I’ve got a drawer in my room!” he said. “The baby can have my drawer!”
It’s very nice that he wants a baby sister, and that he’s put so much thought into it. To be honest, though, I suspect that while he likes the idea in theory, he might not be so keen on the reality. According to my mother, I wasn’t keen myself. When my sister was born, two-and-a-half years after me, I apparently informed my mother that I didn’t want “the new baby”, and instructed her to “take it back”.
At any rate, we aren’t currently planning to have a second child. Also, it’s possible that our son’s interest has waned. He hasn’t mentioned babies in the past two days. Now he wants a Buzz Lightyear and some more Mr Men.
Last Saturday morning, in our town in Kent, it was blowing a blizzard. Snow swirled and raged in the bitter wind. All around was white and cold.
We’d just got our boots on, and were about to venture out into the storm, when up our drive strolled the postman. He was wearing shorts.
Let me tell you: Vladimir Putin is messing with the wrong country.
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