Monday 7 August 2023
Social Media billionaires challenge business and the state
The 2023 Bloomberg Billionaires Index - bloomberg.com/billionaires - lists Elon Musk of Twitter with $232B as number one, Jeff Bezos, Amazon at $164B, 3rd, while Mark Zuckerberg of "meta" at $113B limps along in 9th place as "meta" currently snipes at the temerity of the Canadian government's legal efforts to control the corporation. At the same time Donald Trump thumbs his nose at the US government's legal assults on his right to act as his wealth and status prompt him to, that is, to be Donald Trump. With Uber changing transportation behaviour and Shein, from China, revolutionizing the fashion industry, social media, the motive agents of all these phenomena are as significant in our day as the printing press that eventually toppled feudal regimes, starting in renaissance times. Such actors can be seen as "anarchists without a cause", or no cause more elevated than the "dominate!" that was Mark Zuckeberg's creed as a young entrepreneur growing up in White Plains, New York. If AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the engineering mechanism of our times social media are the mass communications agents. Together Twitter "meta", instagram and the myriad like are shaping the world that we inhabit or, more accurately now, that, in a Copernicus like reversal, inhabit us.
However ethically meagre and pedestrian the imaginations of the non-state social media agents involved, that teenagers and cartoon applications like Tik Tok can dominate the attention, and increasingly the energies, of states, is a central reality of the 2st century. This struggle is a mismatch. States, "handicapped" by societal responsibilities, cannot match the speed and immediacy of unaccountable social media based entreprise. Framed as a challenge to democracy, which they are, social media require a response worthy of the challenge and the only option of those motivated for the struggle is the spontaneous collabaoration of progressive, social media based enterprise. Such coalitions have begun to emerge. It is the special challenge of TorontotheBetter and like motivated actors to merge visions and energies to ensure the genuinely radical potential of social media is realized in the face of its many trivializing and adolescently impregnated, but enormously wealthy, emanations of our still early second millennium.
# posted by Taodhg @ 9:01 am 
