Late yesterday, Elon Musk asked on Twitter, “Is TikTok destroying civilization? Some people think so.” Nearly immediately, he answered his own question with, “Or perhaps social media in general.”
Just this past week I stopped following Musk on Twitter, and already I find myself blocking him so I can avoid his form of madness. Back to the opening of this post, the audacity, banality, and sardonic nature of his missives have devolved into trolling, and this coming from the man who claims he wants to improve the human condition. Had his question been phrased, “Is social media exposing the true debased face of a society where mediocrity has been propagated for the past 50 years?” maybe then I could have easier digested his aggression.
Social media is a mirror, and the reflection of cultural trainwrecks is the cream that rises to the top because stale stories and images of success are boring. Why would positive stories be boring to society at large? Because success is normal, it’s routine, so who wants to see the commonplace? The spectacle of the extraordinarily stupid, vulgar, and violent is far more interesting when all around us, people just keep paying bills, go on vacation, find praise at work, and buy cars, clothes, and nice food. Why be interested in the mundane while there are people willing to gulp down the world’s hottest chili pepper, stride atop cranes 1000 feet over the street below, or act out some ridiculous miming of the next viral hit?
We do not want to be average, and social media offers us the avenue to be larger than life even if we don’t recognize that we are dumber than all life that came before us. This makes sense when you think about it: you are validated in your mediocrity from a young age, and now you are celebrating it thinking that the other troglodytes are going to dance with you in your overwhelming stupidity, not recognizing just how akin you are to the proverbial box of rocks.
So my message to Elon Musk is: Get off your high horse! You’ve lost sight of the majority of not only our country but the mass of humanity that isn’t insanely rich, works with the smartest people on earth, and rubs elbows with the most successful and beautiful people who move in rarified circles. Elon, you can easily find yourself on any TV show you choose, snag an interview with any news source on earth, ask for a cameo role in a movie, and get it, but the rest of us are relegated to Twitter accounts with maybe a few hundred followers, Facebook with the tiniest fraction of friends as compared to influencers, or a TikTok account that will never see millions of views. Consider that for the masses, this is their version of playing on the stage where Charli D’Amelio, Rodrigo Contreras, and Elon Musk live, and the idea of erasing these platforms because they are distractions, places where people say things hateful or show themselves committing atrocious violence is missing the point.
The point is that we, as a society, are incredibly primitive, and NOBODY wants to address the question of what individual responsibility to the intellectual process is and what it means to be in the club of humans. We are as free to be as stupid, insipid, banal, and lacking self-awareness as we choose, just like Elon Musk.