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Asocial Media

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.

The World We Live In

Let me recap it for you: We live in a world where self-driving cars, which we were told for the last 15 years would solve every possible problem, from accidents to traffic to perhaps even loneliness, are going to be used to deliver hamburgers. Yeah!

Funny Times

NVIDIA is worth 8% of the US stock market.

88% of their revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, half of it purchased by only 4 companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.

These 4 companies will have spent $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in 2024 and 2025. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion. Funny times.

Link: The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble

The Valley by the Decade

The 1990s were the decade of E-commerce! The idea was that you could — and thus should! — sell everything online, starting from books (Amazon) and Pez Dispensers (eBay), or focusing on diapers (Diapers.com) and dog food (Pets.com). Own the vertical!, they said. Strangely, those who chose to focus on diapers or dog food did not come up on top.

The 2000s were the decade of blogs, the open web — and Google, Larry and Sergey’s lofty goal being to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Overall, they were a time of optimism and progress. Don’t do evil may seem quaint now, pronounced by what was to become the Californian Stasi, but many of us believed it.

The 2010s were the decade in which things took a dark turn. The idea was now to organise all the world’s information about us, and then pester us with non-stop nonsense targeted advertising (Google and Facebook). They were also the decade in which Silicon Valley took on the real world, with Airbnb, Uber, Bird and Lime — and influenced elections!

The 2020s look like the decade in which tech companies will take the Valley’s favourite literary genre, the dystopian novel, and use those smart words of warning as if they were a how-to manual, the blueprint upon which to build a Fake New World, with the awkward push for the metaverse first, and now the so-called generative artificial intelligence.