What’s below the lowest common denominator, because social media has finally hit it. Hell, they’ve drilled straight through it and opened an AppleBee’s in what I can only assume is the outer fringes of Dante’s Inferno. Look, I’ve been on Twitter since March 2007, when it became all the rage at SXSW. I resisted at first. After all, if Jaiku was good enough for my ancestors, should it have been good enough for me? At the time, though, there was no dopamine-injecting “Twitter app” tricking me into doom-scrolling. It was just SMS. It was basically a group chat where about fifty podcasters and their followers swapped in-jokes and recipes. Yes, it was sharing what you made for dinner or what you were watching on TV, but it was sharing your life with your peer group, not some lame attempt to sneak your boobs in the corner to gain a dozen more followers. We actually vetted followers back then.

The “dissolution of geographic peer groups in favor of dispersed peer groups of niche interests” or “ragtag bunch of weirdos around the world sharing their brand of mundane nonsense” was something I’d written quite a bit about back in college. This was before “WWW” became a thing, and Gopher was too fancy for most people. I was hoping to sell it to Mondo 2000 or Omni or something like that, but admittedly, it was hardly an original thought by that point, so I just ended up posting it to alt.internet.culture or alt.zines in the hopes that somebody would pick it up and publish it. Of course, posting such ideas on Usenet was like going to a grocery store and suggesting they develop a wheeled cart-type thing so people could transport all their food together from the shelves to the checkout line.

You see? That’s all I want. Just a geographically distributed peer group of fellow weirdos who like the same things I like. For some reason, despite my best efforts to use the “not interested” button, my “Picked for You” feed seems to be all 2nd Amendment/gun propaganda, violence, and half-dressed women. I really don’t want convenience store CCTV footage of people getting their heads blown off captioned “He got what he deserved.” I don’t want endless underage boobs with the caption, “My BF says I’m ugly, can I get a like?” I don’t want my elected public servants trading insults like middle schoolers at the bus stop. I sure as hell don’t want every fourth post to be an ad for a life–changing tactical ballpoint pen that doubles as a high-intensity light-based weapon used by Marines in wartime. Most of all, I don’t want to read a total stranger’s opinion of something a celebrity may or may not have said or done.

Do I want to know what Rui in Lisbon had for dinner, however? Yeah, I’m curious, and he’s a great cook. Do I want another obscure prog-metal recommendation from Mats in Stavanger? Absolutely, he hasn’t let me down yet. Do I want Craig in Glasgow’s hot take on Martin Quinn’s Scottish Scotty? For sure. I crave the mundane, the everyday, the real parts of people. What I don’t want is to be stalked by an OnlyFreaks AI bot who thinks “block” means “please send me three more friend requests and drop your URL in the comments of every picture I post of my daughter and me.”

One feature I would love to see is a “Dunbar Filter.” For those who never took sociology, Dunbar was that one wet blanket at the party who calculated that humans can only maintain 150 meaningful relationships before our monkey brains short-circuit. Freud would say it’s because everyone we meet falls into two categories: someone we want to punch, or someone we want to sleep with. After 150 people and a dozen drinks, we instinctively know we’re very likely to get those mixed up and commit a serious social faux pas, so we’re just not wired to effectively deal with any more people than that.

The point being, social media thinks Dunbar and psychology are for whimps. “No, let everyone be your friend,” the platforms chant. “Friend your kindergarten teacher, friend your cousin’s neighbor’s ex-boyfriend’s cat. Oh wait, here’s ‘someone you might know:’ the parking lot attendant who told you to have a nice day earlier this morning … he goes by PainKiller69 and his profile picture is an animated pentagram he made with the help of AI.” Social media wants you to believe you’re a hyper-evolved 21st-century dude who has transcended biology, and Dunbar means nothing to you. Sad news, Skippy, but you’re 12,000 generations removed from homo heidelbergensis. The difference is that they huddled in small groups because they knew better than to friend the guy who seems erotically preoccupied with the collection of woolly mammoth ribs he keeps strictly for self-defense.

Knowing this, why hasn’t anyone created a feature that allows me to Dunbar filter my feed down to posts with fewer than 20 comments or accounts with fewer than 150 followers, thereby finding the types of people and content I’m looking for? Why does the algorithm assume I want to be the 12,000th commenter to provide affirmation to what is inevitably someone’s AI-driven propaganda bot with 1.2 million followers? Let me float in a quiet pond instead of belly-flopping into the over-crowded public cesspool that’s got to be carrying at least a dozen communicable diseases. I prefer engagement over followers, and I don’t mistake strangers effortlessly clicking to put a heart on my post as “love.” Remember, I’m an expert on local authors and local musicians. I really don’t want to know about anything that is popular or famous.

And spare me, “You need social media in this age to market your music, your art, your book, your YouTube channel, etc.” or “I use my 10,000 friends for ‘business networking’ and ‘soft touch sales.'” Do you, really? Do you really want to compete for the attention of the guy whose only goal when he gets out of bed is to bait a MAGA troll into admitting we still haven’t seen the real Epstein files? Is that your audience? Honestly, the only business networking and soft sales I’ve seen (even on LinkedIn) lately were three multi-level marketing pitches and an invitation to join GeekBoobs2010’s Patreon, where she does something called “unboxing.”

Side note, I thought this was going to be like fighting in reverse. No …it’s … a teenage girl filming herself opening her mail … with cleavage … and people pay her for it … that’s all … that’s the entire business model. I’m typing 500,000 words into novels, blogging like one of Lex Luthor’s chimps in my spare time, and wondering why I still have to go to a day job. I am definitely in the wrong line of work, too old to be on the Internet, and looking for my tribe in all the wrong places.