Time to rethink social media

 

Where do you live? Malaysia? Singapore? Indonesia?

Does it matter? “Of course!” you’d likely exclaim. Where you live dictates a large part of your life, you’d insist.

You’re right, but increasingly less so. The past decade has seen us spending less and less time in the physical world and more and more in the digital one. If you have an iPhone, all you need to do to remind you of this reality is to swipe right on your home screen to see your daily phone usage time.

If your phone usage (with the lion’s share being social media) is less than 3 hours daily, you’re a borderline internet luddite. Many millennials and GenZers that I know casually clock double that. Add your time spent in front of your laptop, both at work and at home, and your total daily screen time easily comes up to 12 hours a day.

You spend another 8 hours sleeping, leaving you with a measly 4 hours a day to split between eating, commuting and socialising in meatspace.

Now tell me, where do you live?

I’d contend that you live first and foremost in cyberspace. Or as Balaji Srinivasan, a crypto savant would say: “Where is home? Home is the home screen”.

Your digital geography increasingly matters more than your physical one. While physical geography is split by cities, states, countries and continents, digital ones are split by the internet giants that have built digital fiefdoms in cyberspace – the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), and Amazon.

This flies in the face of the early vision of the internet. The internet was supposed to be open and permissionless, with little to no gatekeepers – in a way that the physical domain is not.

In fact, many digital primitives – the rails that the internet runs on – are decentralised. They’re not controlled or monetised by anyone. For instance, the internet uses the TCP/IP protocol, email uses SMTP and the web uses HTTP – all open and decentralised.

This is a good thing. Digital rights are essential to living a meaningful life today and having decentralised protocols underpin our digital lives mean people can’t be deplatformed for any reason whatsoever. If someone is found to be engaging in activities that are explicitly illegal, they can and should be criminally prosecuted according to their country’s laws.

However, today, an immensely important province of the internet is not open – social media. There isn’t an open and decentralised protocol that underlies social networks such as X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, WeChat and Reddit.

This means these companies control and curate every aspect of their users’ interaction on their platform. Thanks to network effects, they have grown so dominant that there are no viable alternatives. It’s their way or the highway.

Crucially, the profile, connections, distribution channels and value a person creates in one platform can’t be ported over to another. If they are banned, deplatformed or somehow nerfed – something that’s increasingly happening, especially for those holding opinions disconsonant to ones espoused by these platforms – they can’t carry over all the value they’ve created elsewhere.

Let’s compare this to a protocol like email. Don’t like Gmail? You can move to YahooMail, ProtonMail, Microsoft Outlook or a hundred other email providers. Since email was built on an open and decentralised protocol, all email clients (apps) are interoperable and anyone can spin up a new client if they want to.

Since social media has become even more vital than email these days, it’s only apt that a decentralised protocol underpins it. Such a protocol needs to fulfil these requirements:

a) Maintain a persistent identity for the user across different social media clients (apps) that are built on the protocol;

b) Ensure the user can’t be deplatformed and have their content deleted on the protocol level; and

c) Ensure the user owns not just the content but also the connections and network they’ve built and cultivated. Hence, they should have the ability to port their content and follower base to another client if they want to.

Is this available? A solution may just have surfaced.

(To be continued)

 - FMT

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.