Raoul

Nothing is more American than social media: it's basically media for illiterates. Social media is, in every meaningful sense, the greatest literary achievement of a civilization that stopped reading. Centuries after Gutenberg democratized the written word, America has democratized its abolition — replacing the paragraph with the caption, the argument with the reaction, and the sentence with a row of yellow circles expressing emotions too complex for language and too shallow for silence. The genius of the form is structural. Twitter understood early that the optimal unit of democratic discourse is whatever fits between two bathroom breaks. Facebook grasped that people don't want to read — they want to feel vaguely angry at someone they went to high school with. TikTok, the final evolutionary stage, dispensed with text altogether and handed civilization back to the cave painting, except the cave paintings at Lascaux showed more compositional discipline and told more coherent stories. What makes it distinctly American is the packaging: the relentless optimism of the interface, the gamification of opinion, the democratic promise that your thought — yes, yours, the one you had while merging onto the freeway — deserves an audience. Europe may have given the world philosophy and America the internet, but only one of them thought to combine the two and produce a comment section. The Greeks had the agora. The Romans had the forum. Americans have the reply thread, where the losers of every argument simply repeat themselves in capital letters until the other party leaves. The crowning irony is that social media calls itself a platform for voices — as though the problem with human civilization was always that too few people were sharing their opinions. The library existed for centuries, stuffed floor to ceiling with the distilled thought of the dead, and was largely ignored. Social media arrives and suddenly everyone is a publisher, an analyst, a witness, a victim, and an expert in epidemiology. The barrier to entry, once a working knowledge of grammar, is now a functioning thumb.

New look at Earth. (Source: Artemis II Crew)