The on-going scourge of Social Media

The wife and I made an escape last weekend. After three months of work from home, of only making one trip per week. to the grocery store, wearing my mask. we decided that we needed to get out of the house, more specifically, I needed to get out of the house.

So we decided to pack our bags, our masks and around 2 gallons of hand sanitizer to make the trip to our "local" casino in Lake Charles.  We spent a fun weekend gambling, losing, eating good food, drinking good wine and cocktails, sitting in a pool cabana on Sunday, and generally just having a grand time.

Yes, we wore our masks, we had sani-wipes and used them to disinfect every machine that we sat down to, and we wore our masks for the most part, except if we were sitting at the bar drinking and playing video poker, at which point it seemed a little silly to keep them on when we'd have to touch them repeatedly to pull them down and keep drinking.

Was there a risk of contracting COVID-19?  Yes, probably so. But at some point we have to return to living life in the safest way possible, but we do need to get back into the swing of things and start being productive again. Virus gonna virus, we just have to adapt to our new realities.

We need human interaction, we are social animals after all.

What I did notice is that, after 3 months of lock down, my human interaction compass was mightily skewed by the cesspool that is social media.  If you believe Twitter, every conversation surrounding race etc. is fraught with anger, name-calling, one-upmanship and online "owns".  Drop the mic moments seem to be the goal, and there's no room for nuance. no room for those little moments in Houston interaction that allow for understanding.  Twitter. especially is a cold, brutal place full of awful people whose only reason for existing is to injure others. Not physically, they don't have the guts to do that, but there are different ways to ruin people's lives. You know about "SWATting" and you've certainly heard of "cancel culture" by now, these are just some of the ways bad actors on Twitter go about stifling debate.

Twitter is where the "Karen" meme revealed itself, and it's where the worst of humanity is placed on a pedestal to be mocked, knocked down and humiliated, where mob-rule is the rule and the powers that be seem little inclined to police their huge bot problem.  The government's "solution" to this is to cudgel them into submission, or extinction, by removing their "platform" privileges and making them responsible for what's posted by their users.

Like any government response, this is not going to work, it's only going to push cancel culture underground where, in my opinion, it becomes more dangerous.

The good news is that regular, decent society still does not operate like social media society but the gap is getting smaller., mainstream media reporters, too lazy to work their beat, scour social media for unvetted memes and broadcast them nationally, without question, and without applying journalistic principles such as verification and corroboration. This is leading to social media creep into polite society and, unless we do something to stop this, we're going to live in a society where mob mentality rules, and rule of law goes the way of the Dodo.

It's a big problem.  We're still, just, in a place where decent humans can have a polite conversation on difficult issues without resorting to cancel culture and mob anger.

Humanity needs to keep that, or we're going to regret that it's gone.