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One way of redeeming social media and regaining their more gentle aspects again may be to abolish retweets/reposting. Let me explain:
We should stop retweeting and come up with our own thoughts. Remember "The Ear" in the "Shockwave Rider"? The guarantee that whatever you scream into the vast web a human being, not a machine or AI, will listen to it. You inundate this openness by Pavlov-like repeating standard content.
Please keep remembering: The tremendous loss in languages, seeds, species, cultures, histories is accompanied by or juxtaposed with an explosion in patents, data, programs, content. The one is not possible without the other. (At least we should tentatively think it that way.)
The most odious specimen of content is facts. They are gruesome, cruel beasts.They come with the power to enforce consent. They usually set practical constraints. They hide their being man-made behind a flair of innocent objectivity. They are like damsels, ruling with their purity.
The idol of fact, the dogma of fact-ism, it stifles ideas. Facts don't nourish but drain. Facts are disgusted by exuberance, glee, and joy. Facts are bureaucratic by nature, and they are only satisfied when they can convince us of their mores. To think without ambiguity & polysemy.
But if you no longer think in terms of ambiguity and polysemy, you start thinking like the facts: bureaucratically, narrow-minded, single-minded, unequivocal, straight to the point. Your thinking cannot but entertain content relative to practical constraints, goals, collateral damage.
So don't retweet. Don't chew on content. You're robbing social media the very opportunity they provide. Think and talk aloud. "The Ear" is there, with its promise that somewhere, somehow, a human being, not a machine or an AI, is listening. Even if you don't get a receipt.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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So how would a social media look like, how would its timelines, its conversations, its atmosphere feel like when the repeat of other people's posts were not possible? We should try that in the #fediverse with some of their instances.