Rather Suspect

There are at least two fundamental parts to every social media business.

The first and most visible part is the service that invites you to share what’s on your mind. When designed well, these experiences make you feel like you’re at a party, someone’s just handed you a microphone, and the crowd is yelling “speech! Speech!” The room goes quiet and all eyes are on you. If you’re an extravert, perhaps this feels exhilarating. If you’re more introverted, perhaps it’s anxiety-inducing. But no matter what, there’s a power to that feeling.

But of course we all know there’s that second part — the invisible part — that is about distributing the content you post. And note the transformation. Your witty quip, your heartfelt response, your photo from last night’s dinner out that makes you smile? Each has been reduced, simply, into content.

Instagram isn’t a gallery where you hang your latest work. Facebook isn’t a hushed writer’s salon where you stop in to write a few paragraphs. TikTok isn’t a sound stage where you try out that new comedy routine you’ve been practicing. Or, rather, they’re designed to feel like this — but, in fact, they’re all just the visible facades for the invisible machinery behind the scenes.

The invisible machinery’s job is not to distribute content in order to, as Mark Zuckerberg says, “bring people together.” The invisible machinery’s job is to make money. And in order to do that, your ideas and feelings need to be turned into products.

But how do you turn something as inherently fuzzy as an idea or a feeling into a product? You need to deconstruct it, quantify it, and package it up so it can be sold through a transaction on a marketplace.

Transactions tend to fit nicely into well-defined boxes. The best are discrete, quantifiable, and short-term. The products that encourage the largest number of transactions have an end-date. In fact, ideally a product expires soon so that it must be purchased quickly.

But what if you’re dealing with something that can’t be deconstructed? What if you’re looking to truly connect with another human — to build and strengthen a bond of mutual respect, admiration, or even love, over time — how does one go about breaking that down into a set of parts?

Or what if you have strong feelings not towards an individual but towards a community? What you’re trying to contribute authentically — whether through openness and vulnerability, sacrifice, or collective work towards a common cause? Is it even possible to deconstruct those types of connections?

Because the trouble with those sorts of feelings is they resist being made transactional. They aren’t discrete, they can’t be quantified, and — perhaps most importantly — they aren’t short-term. In fact, it’s not just that they’re long-term — it’s that they’re designed to last forever. We don’t search for those feelings in the works of Shakespeare, Rumi, or Mary Oliver to help us complete a transaction. We look to them because their words are timeless.

And machines do not do well with the timeless.

And so, we’re faced with two concepts that would seem to be incompatible. As humans, we want to share the timeless, to build deep relationships, grow vibrant communities, work towards creating cultures that last forever. But the machines we’re using actively try to break those things down, to deconstruct them in ways so that the pieces and parts of these ideas can be bought and sold like so many fidget spinners.

How do we make these two concepts work together?

Well, if we act consciously, we intentionally place machines into their proper role. We create structures and technologies in which these quantified transactions serve us. Take, for example, a university, with a campus, classes, grades, administrators — and all the machinery of a formal system whose job (theoretically) is to help preserve, share, and spread a culture’s lasting ideas. Or think of a well-run farmer’s market, where buyers and sellers congregate to perform as many mutually-beneficial transactions as possible on a given Saturday morning — and in so doing, help make the community more self-sufficient and sustainable.

But what happens if we participate unconsciously in such a way that these roles get reversed? That is, what happens when we act so that the culture doesn’t control the marketplace, but where we elevate the marketplace and try to “fit” culture inside of it?

It doesn’t work. Marketplaces, by definition, deconstruct and reduce. They make things smaller. They’re not designed to facilitate long-term, difficult-to-define connections. They are machines designed to optimize transactions that complete.

But by placing so much on our social media platforms we’ve found ourselves — most likely unconsciously — trying to create and grow our culture through what are, at their core, simply marketplaces. Given this, should it be any surprise that many teenage girls (as just one example) encounter mental health issues when using Instagram?

The platform isn’t designed to build them up. It’s designed to break them down.

So as we look toward designing the next generation of our idea-sharing web platforms, three questions. What will it take to create platforms that don’t deconstruct, but encourage growth? That don’t treat long-term connections as one-time transactions? And that help us — individually and as a community — create things that last?