Big Tech Doesn’t Understand What Josh Wants
April 23, 2020, Josh Swain … and Josh Swain, and several other Josh Swains were added to a Facebook Messenger group. They were given an ultimatum.
One year later, a thousand people had gathered to watch the two present Josh Swains duke it out in rock-paper-scissors. Then everyone joined in with an hours-long pool noodle brawl. By the end of the day, the crowd had raised $10,000 for the Children’s Hospital & Medical Center Foundation, as well four truckloads of food for the Lincoln Food Bank.
All of this happened because some wry humor went viral on Twitter.
The “Josh Fight,” as it has been dubbed, isn’t the only unlikely gathering that owes its existence to internet fame. In 2019, a joke Facebook event to “Storm Area 51” brought sightseers and even music festivals to the site. As part of a social media craze, droves came out in their Sunday best to watch Minions: The Rise of Gru together. A deceitfully similar trend tricked Sony into re-releasing Morbius to a middling average of ten moviegoers per theater. Earlier this November, Philadelphians assuaged their World Series loss by rallying around a man completing his Twitter-announced quest to eat a whole rotisserie chicken for forty days straight.
These spontaneous acts of community owe their existence to the social platforms that Big Tech runs. Yet at the same time, these events reveal just how disconnected Big Tech is from how we connect in the first place.
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As the original Josh Swain explained, he made the group chat and posted the screenshot as an expression of “pandemic boredom.” He repeatedly found that when he tried to make a social media username based on his own name, it was already taken, despite having personally never met another “Josh Swain” in real-life. If Josh thought that was a silly reason to bring a few people across the country to meet in an empty field, a thousand people were there to tell him “not at all.” For in a world no longer receptive to personal interaction, is there any reason too trivial to bring people together?
The pandemic should have been proof-of-concept for social media’s core purpose: bringing together communities where it would otherwise be impossible. Yet while more people did turn to social media for community—engagement rose by 61% over the first year—it brought with it an influx of misinformation and highly idealized self-portraits that can lead to one feeling more disconnected than ever before. Before the pandemic, social media usage had already been shown to have a causal impact on increased depression and loneliness. Over the pandemic, leading health organizations declared a National State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health, capping a steady rise in suicides since 2010. And as the pandemic began to wind down, a British coroner implicated Meta and Instagram for a teenage girl’s suicide—possibly the first time an internet company has ever been assigned legal liability for such.
It would be a serious injustice to solely blame social media for our mental health crisis, or to ignore how online communities can be complicit in driving their own members to self-harm. But I do think that the pandemic has brought to light how major social media platforms foster the dynamics that drive apart supportive communities rather than build them up. In many ways, this is by design.
As the Instagram suicide case was still developing, then Facebook was reckoning with the full knowledge of its platform’s harmful capabilities. Internal research found that social comparison—the motivation to evaluate one’s self-worth in terms of others’ attractiveness or success—was uniquely problematic on Instagram, with more than 40% of U.S. and U.K. Instagram users who reported feeling “unattractive” attributing such feelings to the app itself. Yet, on internal message boards, employees felt that was exactly what made Instagram appealing, that getting a peek at “the (very photogenic) life of the top 0.1%” was “the reason why teens were on the platform.”
Maybe it should be no surprise that a corporation unmotivated to recognize the problem failed to find solutions. The company rolled out Project Daisy, a program that allowed users to hide likes on posts, despite finding no improvement to well-being in initial tests, purely as a PR move to show that they do care about how users interact on the platform and can shape such interactions positively.
This faux performance has only continued to be a recurring pattern. Late last year, YouTube removed dislike counts from videos, citing their misuse in attacking creators—yet this September, Mozilla researchers found that not just dislikes, but all personalized controls never had the supposed effect of reducing unwanted recommendations in the first place. I can’t even find when Twitter rolled this feature out, but now, if Twitter detects language exhibiting self-harm or suicidal thoughts, the poster will receive an automated message asking them to “please know that there are people out there who care about you,” while using the same notification to issue temporary bans for encouraging the same behavior.
Whether out of willful incompetence or sheer bewilderment, Big Tech does not understand how their users’ relationships naturally form between each other, instead doubling down on the artificial assumption that users seek a relationship with the platform itself. Faced with this disconnect between that assumption and actual user behavior, Big Tech has contradictorily stripped users of organic means to shape their own experience while presenting that as a shift towards a more desirable community.
What the executives running Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. fail to recognize is that despite the fact those platforms host millions upon millions of communities whose dynamics they’ll never begin to understand, no app is a community in and of itself. There is no belonging to be felt in a pop-up message asking if you want a break from Instagram, or in a Twitter notification promising other people care for you. An algorithm is fundamentally incapable of capturing why sharing the same name as someone else is worth traveling across an entire nation to meet, or why the self-inflicted pain of devouring a rotisserie chicken is a way to get others to smile. Only the people who choose to be part of such a community could understand why it formed in the first place. Even then, no two people will give the same answer.
Yet, Big Tech’s ambitions continue to expand, seeking to encompass every possible reason for online interaction under the same platform. That is the driving motivation beyond Meta’s “metaverse.” Zuckerberg’s world is idealistically anything you could want it to be, but it was pitched as one-to-one representations of how you already interact with the real world. Bring over your home office, your wardrobe, your favorite art, your different work-life personas (yes, he implies this), your own gestures and facial expressions—But not your legs. Please don’t make us have to track your legs, we’re already planning on spending the equivalent of the entire Apollo Space Program on this project. Oh fine, if you insist, we’ll just pretend we can.
The thing is, that whole PR debacle missed the point. The people who were using Zoom for video conferencing have no use for modeled legs in a virtual environment; the people doing exercise classes in VR Chat care enough about leg tracking that they’re willing to get the specialized equipment for themselves. People arrived at the Josh Fight in superhero costumes and at the Minions movies in suits, with the same practical illogicality as traveling without legs, but isn’t that the point? Internet culture fully embraced self-expression of all forms, irrespective of their practical relevance. Online, a shared meme, irreverent practice, or even just a coincidental name is enough of a reason to build a whole community culture around without question of their necessity. Yet, Zuckerberg thinks that in the “metaverse” of infinite imagined worlds, users will need legs on their avatars in order to go to work.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk thinks we’ll want to put our basic means of living on his platform. When he bought out Twitter, he envisioned transforming it into an “everything app” a la Chinese app WeChat, through which all matters of communication, transactions, and even other apps run through. “You basically live on WeChat … if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success.”
However, time and time again, we’ve established that Big Tech executives fundamentally misestimate their platform’s value in facilitating social interaction. When Musk rolled out a new version of Twitter Blue, an $8 subscription service that (along with other features) offered to prioritize your tweets in search results and grant your account a blue checkmark as a status symbol, the overwhelming response was to ridicule anyone who bought into it.
If Big Tech is going to completely fail at supporting the communities of the present, of course their self-aggrandizing forward-looking projects would be torn to shreds. After all, Big Tech’s vision of the future seems only to be an ignorant rehash of communities that already exist. Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” offers nothing that Second Life and VRChat users already created for themselves, with their own internal cultures and user preferences. Musk’s “everything app” is simply a copy of a foreign phenomenon without the socioeconomic conditions that allowed it to exist in the first place, failing to monetize a user-base with a shell of that idea.
The Internet has already led to the formation of communities to a scale never seen before in human history. So Big Tech’s vision for online communities is being rejected, what more do people even want?
I don’t want to oversell myself as a prophet (much like Zuckerberg has), but I think the discourse surrounding Twitter alternatives may hint at an answer. Some platforms like Instagram and TikTok do pop up, but I’m seeing more conversation around platforms like Tumblr, Mastodon, and Cohost that openly push back against the mainstream trend of commodification and algorithmic control in their own ways. Tumblr is welcoming back the less safe-for-work forms of community expression. Mastodon promises an escape from centralized oversight within self-moderated servers.
But it is the last example that interests me the most, because the culture of Cohost embraces a mode of self-expression that no other social media has. Cohost allows posts to use CSS, which enables users to embed into their posts animated art, interactable storytelling, and even entire retro video games. This is a level of transformation that would threaten the mass appeal of any established platform, but that’s never been the goal of any of these rising platforms. Cohost, Mastodon, and Tumblr are always going to be made up of communities of misfits. But then again, in this world where Big Tech increasingly wants to monitor and control everything we choose to do, I think all of us feel a bit like a misfit right about now.
But maybe that’s not any different than people have always felt when seeking out community on the Internet, turning there when knowing people in-person was not enough, until everything goes full-circle with a thousand people meeting in a field to play with pool noodles. Maybe the misfits were the reason the Internet changed our world. So, if you log onto social media today because you want the misfits of the world, the Josh Swains of the world, then we’re going to have to start looking in places that let him be weird the way he wants to be.