Some typically nuanced and insightful thinking from Rob Horning, on the matter of social media, a topic whose omnipresence this last week has been much easier to bear thanks to not actually being present on any social media, and particularly not That One Site. But Horning’s point is that one need not be on social media to nonetheless be living in the world social media has made… and that the genie will not be going back in the bottle, even as increasing numbers of us (though still a minority, at a guess) wish it would:

As much as I wish that weren’t true, and that commercial social media were an aberration or a mass delusion or some kind of trick that we’ll all eventually see through, too much time and money have been spent on building that desire up, shaping it and promoting it and experiencing it in the accreting forms that platforms have supplied it with. Those forms are not just about happy sharing and friendship or some fundamental and universal principles of human social connection; they are particular to the platforms that nurtured them and can’t yet be easily separated from them. Part of that derives from the work people have invested in their profiles and want to believe can be salvaged. But platforms shape desire through the frustration that they deliver, the conflict and risk and misrecognition they generate, the commercial milieu that animates their stakes, the masochistic feelings of being dominated by them. Our attachments to platforms are not necessarily rational; what we get out of them isn’t all that connected to having or making unilateral choices, even as this is what the interfaces often foreground.

What I find really interesting about this take is that it recognises frustrations and flaws as intrinsic to the appeal of the thing: the odd mastery of learning a platform, which the part of me that hopped schools far too many times as a child recognises as having something in common with having to learn not just a new social milieu, but also all the connective sociotechnicalities in which that new milieu is embedded, and in which the mastery in question comes from finding a way to be something recognisably oneself, despite the novel contextual compromises and performativities required… though maybe that’s overthinking it. (I know, out of character, right?) At the risk of going too far in the other direction, maybe better to say the mastery of a social medium is akin (albeit only distantly) to the mastery of kludgy interfaces and shoddy simulations that defined early computer games? I dunno.

I’m of two minds about the here-to-stayness of social media, though in the short to medium term, I suspect it’s not going anywhere soon. But here I turn to media ecology for a cold sort of comfort: the world which social media has made was made out of the world that the television and telephone had made before them, both literally and figuratively. And while those two technologies are still omnipresent, they have by virtue of that omnipresence receded from the state of novelty that once made them newsworthy in and of themselves.

Which is to say, I suppose, that I look forward to a future in which social media has become truly infrastructural… though there are a number of ways that could work out, some much less pleasant than others. If information logistics were to go the way that material logistics has gone over the last three hundred years—which is to say thoroughly interoperable and efficient, while also thoroughly privatised and extractive—we might even look back on Teflon Mask’s current flailings with something akin to nostalgia for a more innocent time, much as the original rail barons, from our point of historical vantage, have become caricatures of themselves.