Is social media making us sleepwalk into George Orwell’s 1984? - David Behrens

Well, we’ve made it this far. The 21st century is a quarter over and we’ve managed not to blow ourselves to kingdom come. But we came closer than anyone could have guessed when we were setting off those millennium fireworks 25 years ago.

It’s not a long time in the great scheme of things but a lot can go wrong when the checks and balances are removed. It happened in the 1930s and it’s happening again in our lifetime.

Technology, the great enabler, isn’t helping. It should be a marker of our improving intelligence. But when only a few people understand it and the rest just pretend they do, it becomes a threat, perhaps an existential one.

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With hindsight, someone should have shaken Mark Zuckerberg by the throat when he said it was his mission to “connect the world”, as if it were a priceless gift of his to bestow. Zuckerberg is the architect of Facebook and by ‘connecting’ he meant putting everyone on the planet directly in harm’s way. Every scam artist, every nonconformist, every would-be harm-doer now has direct access to everyone else.

'No-one elected Elon Musk to any role yet he controls algorithms that carry more weight at the ballot box than all the politicians in all the world'. PIC: Kirsty Wigglesworth/PA Wire'No-one elected Elon Musk to any role yet he controls algorithms that carry more weight at the ballot box than all the politicians in all the world'. PIC: Kirsty Wigglesworth/PA Wire
'No-one elected Elon Musk to any role yet he controls algorithms that carry more weight at the ballot box than all the politicians in all the world'. PIC: Kirsty Wigglesworth/PA Wire

Relatively few people on Facebook are outright crooks but you don’t know which they are until it’s too late. Beware of geeks bearing gifts: that will be Zuckerberg’s epitaph.

Facebook was the original social network. No-one knew what one was 25 years ago. We had the internet but you had to dial it up and not use the phone when you were online.

We had cell phones, too, and they really were phones. We called up people we knew and spoke to them in real time. We didn’t hide behind aliases so we could be rude to them behind their backs. That was an idea industrialised by social media, if not actually invented by it. It was a runaway success and the reason it ran away was because people who should have known better jumped on board rather than risk being left behind.

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Facebook had no pretensions to altruism when it was invented; its intended users were students at Harvard who wanted to stalk their female co-eds. Today they would be considered pariahs but 25 years ago there was no ‘me, too’ movement.

Yet Zuckerberg’s intentions were benign compared to those of Elon Musk, the Citizen Kane of the 2020s. He has turned online influence into real-world hegemony and may well emerge as the puppetmaster pulling Donald Trump’s strings.

No-one elected Musk to any role yet he controls algorithms that carry more weight at the ballot box than all the politicians in all the world. He is the living embodiment of putting power in the wrong hands.

The gradual realisation of this, not just here but around the world, presents the best opportunity to restore some of those checks and balances before this decade is out, let alone the next quarter-century.

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Last month Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under 16. They will be kept off Facebook, X, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and more. The onus will be on the companies to prevent them from entering, with severe financial penalties if they don’t. So noncompliance will cost them money and that’s all they’ve ever cared about. Not connecting the world; just money.

And if Australia can do it, so can we. We can’t continue to place our children’s safety in the hands of the world’s most irresponsible people just because they understand the technology and we don’t.

But if we’re really going to counter the social excesses of the last quarter-century we have to look to ourselves, too, and we can start by demonstrating that our current obsession with protecting our mental health is more than just empty rhetoric.

Perhaps you’ve heard the expression doomscrolling: it’s one of those made-up words that gets added to the dictionaries at this time of year – like brain-rot and chef’s kiss (the latter meaning perfection, before you get other ideas). Doomscrolling means thumb-flicking endlessly through the bleak cycles of bad news and grim social media updates that crowd your screen.

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It’s soul-deadening because the more you read on the internet the more it seems the same. It’s as if one person had written it all, it’s that formulaic. It will become even more so as artificial intelligence takes over the job of churning it out.

It’s brainwashing, too. If we all read the same pulp we’ll lose the facility to question what we see.

That’s pretty much what George Orwell saw coming. Four decades later than expected he might finally be proved right. Another quarter-century from now, will the next generation have sleepwalked into 1984?

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