You know the Devil wore Prada. You may not know that she’s coming back. And this time she’s wearing a camel pencil skirt that she got at a blandly branded, brightly lit Gucci outlet store at the Sawgrass Mills Simon Mall sandwiched between a downstream Versace and an off-label Armani. That’s because, Miranda Priestly is still running a magazine and it’s 2024 and, notwithstanding a spate of news that print, like boyfriend-style jeans, is making a comeback, times are tough for old media and, by extension, for her. Apologies for the sartorial riposte syntax checker you’re going to need to parse all those nested commas but we needed a fun apolitical rant and this seemed like the one to go with.
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You know what’s rapidly become old media these days? Social media. No, really. I’m not talking crapping itself while hooked up to an oxygen tank decrepitly old. More like getting up multiple times a night to pee and groaning each time aged.
Why is social media maturing? Because we’re not creating it anymore. We’re consuming it. To bastardize Thoreau, we sucked the marrow out of social. Now, they’re going to suck the life out of us.
They have us living in a dystopian matrix (the “Matrix”). They keep us distracted while they use our time and attention as a source of monetary fuel.
I mean think about how much less lively it is. In the early days, we’d snap a picture of our snap pea salad and post it for a few friends to see.
Facebook sold our activity as a reason to advertise there. Today, the only thing active about our social media is that we occasionally have to nudge the feed along. On TikTok not even that. It just advances to the next “show” all on its own. The only thing that differentiates social from TV is that they replaced the knob with an algorithm. Which, in a sense, makes TikTok advertisers late-night infomerciallers selling set-it-and-forget-it rotisserie chicken toasters.
Social doesn’t sell ad buyers that we present anything. Just that we’re present. They don’t say how much we post. They say how many people have accounts (Threads, 175M) or how many monthly or daily active users they have (TikTok US, 120M) and how much time the average user spends there (YouTube US, 40 minutes). Those all sound like lofty stats. Until you compare TV. 266 million Americans watch TV every day. The average American spends 175 minutes per day watching TV. Adults spend an even more staggering 294 minutes per day watching TV. And, we want kids to turn off their screens.
No one would call TV a new medium. Yet only one thing separates social from TV. Clicks. We click to like things. We click to share things. Occasionally, we even click to comment on something. Without those clicks, social would have to prove to advertisers that we didn’t leave our phone on the couch when we went to grab a beer from the fridge during a commercial break.
Sure, they *could* just have a bot farm somewhere on the other side of the planet that randomly clicks on things. But then they’d have to buy the phones, pay for the electricity that powers them, write code to seem random, and pretend that the clicks were coming from inside the country. We’re docile. We buy our own phones. We feed ourselves. We’re sufficiently random. And, best of all, to the machines that adjudicate our clicks, our clicks look real.
Mark Zuckerberg has us in his Matrix. He’s taking stuff off his desk and tossing it at pictures of us while yelling, “You’re common! You’re common!” Because he worries that we’re >- this -< close to popping the red pill and waking up. Worse, advertisers will wake up.
Is it any wonder Mark Zuckerberg is trying to reinvent himself in a $1,150 Balmain t-shirt in Ibiza? In a few years he might have to shop at the Balmain Outlet. The one beside the Timberland at Woodbury Common.