Passwords are lost, providers are hacked, and people pass away. Moreover, as Seth mentions, most companies aren't incentivized to make data reliability a priority because data reliability isn't exciting. Besides, human beings aren't very good at making long-term decisions. Very few people are clamoring for safeguards that will help them in ten years.
The lesson? Back up your data! Make extra copies of important files and share them with people you trust. If you have the need and the means, work with a company that truly understands archival. Otherwise, you may find, at the least opportune moment, that no one is doing it for you.
“As anyone who has actually gone outside to touch grass will attest, what you see in social media is typically so exaggerated and distorted that it may as well be entirely fictional.”
I've been listening to The Attention Merchants, my first foray into the world of audiobooks, having begrudgingly ceded more freedom to DRM. I was struck by this passage, discussing the disillusionment of Walter Lippmann, a journalist and media critic:
“Any communication, Lippmann came to see, is potentially propagandistic, in the sense of propagating a view. For it presents one set of facts, or one perspective, fostering or weakening some 'stereotype' held by the mind. It is fair to say, then, that any and all information that one consumes—pays attention to—will have some influence, even if just forcing a reaction.”
It's easy to notice this happening today. So many memes, videos, and tweets advance ludicrously simplistic perspectives. Fake news spreads 6 times more quickly than true news. Whether we agree or disagree with the content we see, we react, and antisocial media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok monetize those reactions.
If Lippmann is correct that “any and all information that one consumes… forces a reaction,” and if the information we consume today is vast, simplistic, and even wrong, then perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by the extreme reactions we witness.
Text-based conversation is inherently hazardous. I’ve known too many people who can be jerks in writing, despite being pleasant in person, to believe otherwise. I myself have done the same too many times to believe otherwise. We didn’t evolve to talk this way to the extent we do. Facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language are so important, as is the compassion that shared space instills.
Of course, none of this excuses (anti)social media, which is even more terrible for so many reasons, like a house of horrors built along a fault line.
When others are unkind or unpleasant, I take comfort in the power I have over them: the power to lose respect for them. No one can force me to feel otherwise.
I tweeted the following on April 2nd, 2019, about one month before deleting my account:
Our technology is evolving faster than we are. We have built ourselves a twenty-first century library when we possess stone-age critical thinking skills. What did we think was going to happen?
I later learned that Dr. E.O. Wilson once made a similar point, in a statement often quoted by the Center for Humane Technology:
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
His version may be better than mine. I'm just glad I'm not alone.
“[When social media makes us behave like pack animals], we become obsessed with and controlled by a pecking order. We pounce on those below us, lest we be demoted, and we do our best to flatter and snipe at those above us at the same time. Our peers flicker between 'ally' and 'enemy' so quickly that we cease to perceive them as individuals… The only constant basis of friendship is shared antagonism toward other packs.”
I'm afraid I've seen this happen often in Facebook groups. Pleasing the in-group and attacking the out-group are primary objectives. To hell with learning from the other side and bettering ourselves; it's better to ascend the ranks by espousing ever-more extreme views and by demonstrating allegiance through performative discourse. The results are unsurprising, with hostility, righteous indignation, closed-mindedness, and emotional and intellectual fragility on display for all to see.
I'm sorry to say this, but of the two people in my life who are most misinformed about current events, one is addicted to cable news and the other is addicted to TikTok. I think they would despise each other, yet they're more alike than they realize.