We’ve hit Peak Digital, now it’s time to turn back

5 Feb 2022

With the money draining away from social media, all Ming the Merciless of Meta is left with is a festering pile of hatred.

In a time of darkness, a light at the end of the tunnel. In a world of pain, a glimmer of hope. In the turd-blocked U-bend of human development, a possible loosening. . . For Facebook appears to be finished. Don’t quote me on it, especially to your financial adviser, but the company that changed its name to Meta only weeks ago — no doubt intuiting what its benighted name has come to represent these last 18 years — suffered a share price collapse on Wednesday so catastrophic that it would have wiped out the annual GDP of all but the 43 richest national economies in the world.

$240 billion they lost; 25 per cent of the company’s value. And while the share price may eventually recover a bit, this all happened on the same day we learnt that the number of daily active Facebook users had fallen for the first time in the firm’s history. Numbers had stagnated in Europe and North America of late but, like all peddlers of evil poisons — one thinks of the tobacco and fizzy pop companies — Facebook had sought growth in Africa and South America, which was achieved initially but has since fallen away.

Mark Zuckerberg, the blank-eyed, sociopathic Ming the Merciless of Meta, blamed his horrible social Ponzi scheme’s downturn this week on the growing popularity of TikTok and YouTube, like a 1990s heroin dealer blaming his business problems on the emergence of crack. But shares in Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest also fell sharply, and suddenly I find myself daring to dream that it might all be over.

The death of social media. Imagine. The longed-for return to a world where your children are safe from bullies in their own bedroom and people in restaurants eat their dinner, instead of doing a photoshoot with it. Where sex with a stranger is not achieved at the swipe of a phone screen, where notions of love and friendship are not reduced to a digitised, monetisable parody, democratic elections are not perverted by Russian bots (and fat American property developers), and impressionable young women no longer visit plastic surgeons with a screengrab of their face as it looks through a favourite Instagram filter, asking him to replicate it, IRL, with his scalpel and soldering iron.

A world where, when a wellmeaning middle-aged teacher writes a memoir which uses a handful of outdated terms to describe beloved pupils, and, two years later, three younger writers notice and are offended, they write a polite letter to the publisher, suggesting that certain phrases be altered in any future editions to reflect changing mores, and that’s the end of it. Instead of the whole thing degenerating into a circle-bash on Twitter that ends with everyone involved claiming that the actions of everyone else have exposed them to abuse and/or driven them to the brink of suicide.

There were no bad people in the Kate Clanchy debacle and no evil thoughts or intentions (obscene moral cowardice of the publishers aside). It was social media that made it toxic. Twitter in this case, which, like all social media, generates only two things: money, for its owners and investors, and an increase in the world’s store of hatred. And now that the money appears to be draining away, surely the hatred alone can’t be enough to keep it all going?

Likewise, Netflix. The bottom has fallen out of that one’s financials too: share price halved and company value down $150 billion. Presumably because after two years of forced incarceration, the people of the world have realised that what they want for the future is not, after all, to lie comatose on the sofa, watching glossy dorksploitation serials, while waiting for a kid on a bike to bring them a dogburger and chips that they ordered and paid for on the phone that is their only interface with the rest of humanity.

And Spotify is in trouble, too. One little spat about Covid protocols (mask-wearing folk singers of the 1970s versus bare-chested QAnon nutcases in a battle to the death that exists only on social media) and the once untouchable music-sharing platform’s share price took a massive dive, raising questions about its future.

Have we, then, reached Peak Digital? Have we finally got as much of all this rubbish as we want? Are we going to start uninventing some of it? I think we have and I think we are. I think we might be getting to the point in human history where going forwards technologically just isn’t appealing any more. Leaving aside the spiritual depredations of the online world and looking at the direction our hardware is taking, I think it’s clear that concerns about pollution and climate change are starting to reverse our enthusiasm for motorcars and aeroplanes, and the way ahead seems very much to be about having fewer of those, rather than more, and eventually none.

Furthermore, this demand from a select committee of MPs that the ban on gas boilers be brought forward to next year, plus the chancellor telling us we will have to get used to higher energy prices in the long run, suggests to me that we have got to the stage where we are not only “connected” enough, entertained enough and widely enough travelled, but also about as warm as we are ever going to get. And that being any more connected or better entertained or more widely travelled or warmer than we are now just isn’t going to be financially or environmentally feasible. And that, if anything, we must go back a bit. Use a bit less of everything. Accept that we have to be a little colder, a little hungrier, a little more stationary, a little more bored. Like before. In the good old days.

It is not so much a turning point in history that we have reached, as a turning back point. The virus is over, Trump is over, Boris is over, Facebook and Twitter and Netflix and the car and the plane and the big smelly boiler are over. Even “woke” is over, which is the best news of all. Did you hear poor old Whoopi Goldberg, the Kate Clanchy of Beverly Hills, saying this week that the Nazis weren’t racist? Do you know why? It’s not because she is a bad person, or stupid, it is because woke has hit the wall in 2022, like everything else, and there was nowhere else for her to go but into sheer lunacy.

You remember 30 years ago, when that guy said that the ascent of liberal democracy had brought about the End of History? And then those other guys blew up the World Trade Center and everyone said, “hang on, maybe there’s a bit of history left”? Well, I think what happened after that is that we carried on for a bit, seeing where the internet would take us. And it brought us to here. And now it is very clear to everyone that it has all been a terrible mistake, and it is time to turn around and go back where we came from.

Now, if someone could just tell Mr Putin . . .

The virus is over, Boris is over, the car and smelly boilers are over