The Thing That Really Staggers Me…
Human behaviour. That’s what. I’m not talking here about we highly sophisticated and entirely connected humans raining bombs down on each other. I now take it as read that this race will never learn from its mistakes, but I am talking about the problem of ‘habit’. Bear with me, this is good, and the social media magnates will hate it – assuming they would read it, assuming they would notice this minor pinprick in their orb of self-importance. The real problem is that we insignificant, individual humans actually sustain them.
‘Fraid so. Looking back nearly half a century to my student days, I would have been the very last person on the planet who I’d have trusted with running any kind of responsible business venture. Late teens and early twenties are absolutely not the time for us to establish in our garages, other out-houses or bedrooms, a communications system that would over-connect the entire globe for the fifty years following. Look at every social media and music platform, and you will find its origin in teenage. At this point, parents would normally be expressing concern.
Yet here we are, and there they are. The richest man in the world seeks alpha male dominance to change politics forever, and the signs are he’s winning that battle. Meanwhile his nemesis (or one of them, because he doesn’t have many friends) and his cohort of geeks claim they have created a ‘verse’ for the future of this race, where everyone can be connected with everybody, and that wonderful things called privacy is consigned to history.
No, I don’t mean his version of privacy, where all you need to do is issue policies. I mean mine, where every time I open my fridge something apparently intelligent isn’t going to create my next supermarket shopping list. There will come a time soon when all a human needs to do is look in their fridge to instigate a process that leads to the immediate drone or robotic delivery of any missing items. So on current performance you could expect a cauliflower to replace a bottle of milk.
When a business becomes too big it fails, maybe not in all departments but its focus turns away from the customers who sustain it – yes, I’m slowly but surely getting to my point. Sometimes, you need to paint a picture that humans may recognise before delivering the sucker punch that exposes collective, abject stupidity. We are creatures of habit, and if ever there has been a time in our history when we need to break the habit, it is probably now. If we were drug addicts or alcoholics, we’d all have been sent to a clinic by now, some of us for a course of therapy, others to remain there as long-term patients, incapable of controlling our habit.
There is generally a straw that breaks the camel’s back. Remember Friends Reunited, MySpace, and their ilk? However, the 21st century version of the camel’s back appears to be significantly more resistant, dominated as it is by a few mega-rich humans who don’t just have the ear of presidents and prime ministers, they have them firmly by the balls, and it’s excruciating for us all. It’s dangerous enough on a political level, but we have moved now into a mind-control battle that we minions are ill-equipped to deal with, and do not have the inclination or drive to fight.
Most of us are followers, not leaders. We prefer the comfort of someone else having to do the thinking and take the action. Our lives are busy enough without having to consider existential threats, and that’s where they’ve got you. “Everything will be alright in the end” is not something that can be applied to a world where megalomania is so deeply embedded. So we will all continue to use the platforms set up by these maniacs, on the basis that it connects us with our ‘friends’.
It is one of the joys of social media that we can connect with other human beings wherever they may be in the world. It is also one of its biggest problems, because most of us are too trusting: after all, “everything will be alright in the end”. When I was that awkward, delusional, and rather unkempt teenager I would communicate with my friends by going round to their house, or possibly phoning them up. Occasionally, I would hand-write letters. In fact, I was quite good at hand-writing letters, and used to accompany my writings with biro cartoons. These days, we text or message to find out the most convenient time to set up a Teams or Zoom call. It is reaching the point where an impromptu visit from a friend, or even family, is seen as an intrusion. They’ve got us all by the balls too. See where I’m going with this?
It won’t happen overnight, and in fact will probably take the whole of 2025, but little by little I’m de-camping my music and radio effort to Blue Sky Social, on the pretext that it is run by real humans and doesn’t rely on algorithms to direct who sees what and when. Not perfect and probably temporary, but at least it acknowledges that you’ll miss stuff, which means you have to post more often to be seen. I am under no illusions. Blue Sky will eventually go the way of the rest, because we humans like either to control or destroy anything good. However, when Faecesbook spends more time suggesting I should connect with people I have no intention of connecting with, buy things I’ve already bought, splash unwanted post and adverts across my wall, and notifying me of comments made by other users on my posts several days late, thus actively preventing me from communicating with my ‘friends’, then I’m heading for the lifeboat.
I’ve been running my Compendium radio show since April 2021. It accompanies my wider music activities, and has been both a great way of observing how other musicians promote their music and the best way to promote the music of other grassroots, independent musicians creating original music. For the whole of that time, I’ve supplemented my personal and music Faecesbook pages with a radio page, to help my little show to highlight some of the incredible music that too few people are bothering to listen to. From January, the music page will be ditched. On current form, the radio and personal pages may not be far behind.
As part of my radio offer, I run a monthly show called “What’s On?”. The purpose of The Compendium “What’s On?” is entirely to highlight a sample of gigs by independent musicians and the venues where they play across the UK and Ireland. Every month, I therefore post the Faecesbook handles of both artists and venues. Every month, Faecesbook blocks me from doing that on the spurious grounds that it ‘contravenes their community standards’, yet what could be more community-minded, possibly even selfless, than that? Every month, I feed this back to them. Every month, they don’t give a shit. I tried being polite at first, but I don’t think bots understand politeness. Today, I became semi-abusive, possibly to try and get them to eject me permanently, but I really have had enough now.
“Everything will be alright in the end?” Will it fuck. Not unless human nature changes.
The worst part though, is that having said all of that, I may now, as a member of this race, post this article for other humans to read via Faecesbook and other media platforms, then take no further action over whatsoever….except I will. Make sure you follow me and not them. It’s safer.
Peace.
John