It's a cultural moment fiendishly constructed to drive a certain brand of pragmatic-but-principled left-leaning soul (a group in which I include myself) into dark corners. If all this is speech, and the people putting these things in front of people are making speech and the doomscrollers are consuming speech, and blocking speech is banning books, then the people that ban books are martinets at best and totalitarians at worst.

But, on the flip side, come the hell on. This isn't the PTA of BFE trying to get the local librarians to put Lady Chatterley's Lover on a higher shelf, it's the largest piles of money in the world playing the 'move fast and break stuff' card ten or fifteen years past its expiration date in an orgy of surveillance, predatory dumping, and court arbitrage powered by a politics that sits somewhere between reactionary and willfully apocalyptic, and if you know someone in a bad way it's not a hard guess that the first thing(s) they need to do is stop posting, stop talking to chatbots, stop gambling, sell their crypto, and touch something made of wood.

I wonder if the way through is to just acknowledge that essentially everything we consider 'social' media is fundamentally closer to old-school broadcasting and consider the metaphors and regulatory environments that spring from that consideration. The posts that people see that come from people in their actual social circles has reached single digits on most platforms; conversely, the average 'content creator' (a phrasing that still causes me to gag, as it should all self-respecting persons) that achieves consistent 'virality' is now a professional, and sitting between them is a company using public wires and airwaves to distribute that content according to opaque in-house software making what amounts to editorial decisions to audiences larger than broadcast TV ever dreamed of.

And maybe that's a place to start! Just puncturing the mythos of the garage company of teenage wunderkinds empowering a billion creative people speaking to their friends in favor of the truth- that this is Wall Street and oil money creating the piecework version of the boob tube with a side of data crunching- might shake loose some cruft and start conversions about trust busting and public utilities that might get us somewhere.