We’re not ‘dumb fucks’ Mark!

Why the next wave of social networks won’t resemble social networks as we know them today.

We’re only 9 days into 2018, and the much needed backlash against Facebook, social media platforms and the tech industry in general is starting to be taken seriously by the media.

The backlash has been a long time coming for Mark Zuckerberg, and he probably never imagined how prophetic his 2004 “dumb fucks” comment would become, and how this would come back to haunt him 14 years later, but it has.

There is a growing realisation that the exploitative and extractive, ad-supported ‘attention economy’ business model is unsustainable, and the algorithms being used to manipulate and shape the thinking of the global population will only lead to increased levels of societal mistrust, and FOMO related anxiety.

The purpose of this post is not to single-out and point the finger at Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. However, there’s no getting away from the fact that Facebook are the world’s leading social media platform with more than 2 billion users. Facebook have paved the way when it comes to figuring out with a cynical user-experience how to extract billions of dollars in ad-revenue that’s totally dependant on the data that’s freely given by it’s users (the product) on a daily basis.

As the saying goes, “if you can’t see the price tag, you are the product.”

In a recent post I wrote on 5 December, 2017 ‘They Know — (an ode to the dark side of social media)’, it’s apparent that Facebook knows more about you than you know about yourself. It really is starting to look and feel as if 2 billion people have strolled headlong into something resembling an Orwellian mass surveillance society. When you couple this with the spying capabilities of today’s smartphones, we’ve pretty much given up any rights that we had to privacy so that we can share pictures of cats, create lowest common denominator animated GIFs, and other futile online activities that serve no purpose whatsoever, apart from stealing our time and monetising our attention. So I guess Mark Zuckerberg is correct when he calls us ‘dumb fucks’.

So with all of this in mind, the question I would like you to start asking yourself is, “what kind of social networking experience do you want to be part of in the near future.”