If I was in charge...
What if we reinvented social media, prioritising the 'social' part?
We need to be better than our social media allows us. So here’s an idea…
Each week, a new cancellation. Each month a new scapegoat to throw to the wolves. The corporate media are unhinged at the best of times, but, this past month they’ve out done themselves.
The Jason Arday story really knocked me for six. I don’t think I’ve been so disgusted by people’s capacity for thoughtless cruelty in a really long time. I’m shocked, though not surprised. This is the mainstream media’s bread and butter. We experienced a (smaller) portion of the same vitriol and lies from the press in the climate movement, so I felt a sense of solidarity through that personal experience when the story hit. But, the careless commentary from those who took the bait and fed the frenzy online was deeply worrying.
I’m exhausted by the endless barrage of hot takes on every story that lands in our feeds. Social media was supposed to be our virtual village square — a place to dissect what we see in the news and have our say, to grow understanding and connection across the globe. Instead it’s become a minefield of knee jerk reactions to topics we often don’t fully understand.
It’s draining. It’s become an echo chamber where the most controversial voices win, populated by public figures who've built careers on manufactured outrage. I do believe a lot of very intelligent people have underestimated how much their own participation keeps the vicious cycle spinning. They want to be seen to be a part of the conversation, even if contributing to something that would be better starved of oxygen.
I hope at the very least Jason’s story will help break this cycle.
It’s tricky though. We need spaces where we can speak up, engage with the stories that impact us, call out injustice. But the social media we have today doesn’t serve us – we all know this; it’s working against us. It doesn’t encourage dialogue, it rewards us for tearing each other down with clicks and ragebait. We can say whatever we want while not having to listen at all.
So, if I was in charge, I would get rid of social media — as we know it. I would want to reimagine social media all together and build something that’s actually social, not anti-social like it is now. It would be a constructive space rewarding kindness over abuse, not a space for entertainment, dehumanisation and angry engagement. A platform that encourages understanding and wisdom sharing, to support us to really connect and repair social bonds.
Call In
After blasting Elon, Suckerburg and all the other billionaire social media owners to Mars in their rockets (obviously my first move) I would get to work building a social media that would encourage offline connection, moving us from isolated personal media towards in-real-life social existence.
My platform would be named “Call In”. You know, like calling into your favourite pub after work, or your nan’s house at the weekend. That would be the ethos, encouraging people to call in on their community and neighbours, to knit together the social fabric. It would be focused primarily on three key areas:
a) Encourage a culture of ‘calling in’ over calling out.
b) Taking action together would be rewarded over commentary on a keyboard.
b) Get us off screens and into real-life.
First and foremost, to take part in the conversation, when logging on you would be funnelled towards participating in the following ways:
Funnel 1: In-Real-Life. Call In would provide listings in your area of places where you can go and meet other people in-real-life to discuss the big stories of the day. So, your local pub or community centre, or New York-style news stands with chairs and coffee tables on street corners where you can sit and discuss the day’s headlines. Call In would be designed to help the people who turn up choose facilitators, and provide actual facts about the story that could be written up on whiteboards for all to see.
Funnel 2: Be kind. I always loved Vonnegut’s quote “God dammit, you’ve gotta be kind”. If we tried to lead with kindness a bit more than we did anger, perhaps we could find ways of contributing positively to conversations we so desperately felt the need to add fuel to. So, Call In would have a posting function, but the rule would be that you would have to find something a) kind or b) constructive to say about the person or story you’re commenting on. You would be rewarded for moving the conversation along in a useful, solution-driven way. The like function would be disabled and engagement would be funneled into option 3.
[And don’t worry, I’m not saying you would be forced to say something nice about a fascist or oil executive, because they simply wouldn’t be there! Because in a world where we call in instead of just calling out, fascists don’t get to play with the rest of us and make life miserable. They will be sent to AA style deradicalisation and humanity bootcamps. Once completing the programme they can either choose to rejoin the rest of us or take a trip to Mars. (NB: all journalists from the Telegraph and the Daily Mail would be permitted to undertake this training).]
Funnel 3: Action, not just words. Maybe the most important funnel, every interaction with Call In would redirect you from the platform towards organising groups near you where people can gather to actually do something about the issue at hand. Part campaign, part direct action, part mutual aid, these spaces to connect and organise would respond to the needs of the moment. Let’s move away from just commenting towards doing something about the problem. So, here are 5 hubs within a 2 mile radius where you can come together with others to take action.
Funnel 4: Call it in. Finally, for those absolutely frothing at the mouth and unable to get to their local action hub before exploding, Call In would be linked up to a friendly call centre where both therapists and people with lived experience of the issue in the headlines would be on hand to speak to you. They would share their stories so you could actually get a dose of what they’ve been through, before choosing to reduce them to stereotypes or a mere headline. Therapists, of course, would be there to help you get to the bottom of that unaddressed trauma driving your keyboard warmongering.
Be better
We need to find better ways of contributing to the discourse without submitting to petty ragebaiting. We’ve been talking about this a lot in the AI office the past few weeks, in part because of Novara Media’s role in the Jason Arday pile-on. I think their example says so much about the trap that many on the left fall into online.
For those that aren’t aware, Novara Media are in pretty big trouble for joining in with the corporate media’s hounding of Jason Arday on X and in their reporting. They’ve made public apologies, which is important. At least they’re taking responsibility, unlike the major news outlets who committed the lion’s share of awful coverage. But it won't be enough for many, I’m sure, who will have lost complete trust in them as reliable sources.
I don’t want to “call out” Novara. I want to call them in. So how else can we speak honestly about how to not fall into this trap and stray into cancel culture? Novara have chosen to use the master’s tools against them, designing themselves as a campaign-style platform, using big sloganeering and propagandised messaging, like the mainstream media does to prop up capitalism and neoliberalism. They did this because they clearly saw no one else on the left was.
But, maybe it’s backfiring? Could we have a friendlier conversation, maybe offline, about how we can all be better on this?
Novara similarly chose to criticise XR starting right back in 2018, rather than look at how we were positively moving the dial on climate action and contributing to the cannon of successful nonviolent mass mobilisation. That doesn’t mean they had to totally agree with our strategy, but they could’ve at least helped onlookers to better understand what we were trying to do and brought useful conversations about debated tactics to the fore. Instead, they chose not to. I do still believe that had a huge impact on who eventually came to support us, in more ways than many might realise. And since then, I’ve always really wanted to sit down across a table with a few of them and just talk honestly about how we can really help each other to succeed, even if we don’t agree on everything.
I think we have to be better at criticising each other’s work so publicly in the way that we currently are, on the platforms currently on offer to us. Because trust has been eroded and we’re resorting to our worst instincts, reacting recklessly to topics where we should be treading more lightly. Maybe sometimes we just don’t need to comment at all? Or, can we hold back until we’ve at least heard the facts? Can we be better at spotting the corporate media’s harmful strategies designed to ensnare us? Can we choose to call in, taking some conversations offline and out of the public view? Can we all get better at getting offline and back into real life conversations where we learn from each other and look each other in the eye?
Here’s the invite then. Who wants to come together to discuss how we as people with a mission to make the world better, and have this conversation in real life?
If we can find new ways to drive solutions over engagement, connection over righteousness, then maybe we can reimagine the value of social media all together.
Elsewhere in Absurdity...
Lots of the crew have been on their holidays the past week or so, so it's been quiet up here at Absurd HQ! A few happenings...
Alex went to the cricket and heard Pakistan's national anthem for the first time and its a lot better than God Save The King 🏏🇵🇰
Tracey attended the launch for Greenwich +Docklands International Festival (GDIF) on and their Greenwich Fair events at the weekend. It was a good reminder of the power of the arts to bring people from all walks of life together. The festival continues until 6 September. 🎡🎪🎟️
She also attended a commemorative day held at the National Maritime Museum, which ended with a reflective Emancipation Walk and a petal-scattering ceremony at the River Thames led by the Ethnovox Choir ⛵⚓, and then on Tuesday she joined the Rastafari Movement UK (RMUK Wellbeing) for one of the National Conversation sessions that are happening across the country. PHEW!
Diya got back from a trip to New York City and headed straight to All Points East in Victoria Park 🎤🎵
Clive designed the latest issue of Left Cultures, which 'dropped' this week! 🗞️✍🏻
