What we spent the better part of two decades calling social media have turned asocial.
In 2023, the time spent viewing friends’ content was 22% on Facebook and 11% on Instagram. In 2025, that timeshare has dropped to 17% and 7%, respectively [link]. The rest is chosen for us by an algorithm, like it was on TikTok from the start, and based on what we are more likely to watch rather than on what our friends like or comment on.
An increasing percentage of this content is AI-generated, and the platforms seem uninterested if it’s UGB — user-generated bullshit, or AI-generated bullshit. Nobody at Facebook, Instagram, X or YouTube really cares. The only two metrics that matter are time utterly wasted on these platforms and revenue generated per dumbfuck user.
Platforms that were once presented as many-to-many, participative and even revolutionary are now clearly few-to-many and based not on our social networks, but merely on recommendation systems that privilege passive metrics such as watch time and completion rate. Users are bored, alienated, captive and often underprivileged spectators.
What is even worse, this new form of mindless and wasteful broadcasting is personalised, meaning that there is no common ground, no possibility to talk about or critique what is being peddled to us because each of us watches his or her private, personalised channel. We have very little idea of what other people are watching in their own little worlds.
Orwell was wrong. Huxley and Postman — Amusing Ourselves to Death — had it right.