Facebook, Twitter, Apple et al - Helping us Make a Better Connection? Really?

It’s a world of instant gratification, where we’ve all been massively conditioned by a constant barrage of advertising and new, better, bigger – well, actually smaller – products every few months. A world where we’re all racing to save time and make more money to pay for all these new necessities. Or working way too hard for not enough money so the person or company we’re working for can buy whatever they want. If we’re in that scenario we’re imprisoned by our own prejudices against ourselves – that we don’t deserve anything better – and by a pretty generally accepted idea that’s it our fault we’re not more empowered.

Time is money but there isn’t enough of the former, ergo never enough of the latter. We’ve been taught with Machiavellian cleverness and in ways that we’re not even aware of that social media keeps us connected but in fact it keeps us distracted, uses up that precious time and leaves us starved for something real. Because the connections we make are long distance but immediate, often with shorter and shorter sentences composed of horribly distorted and truncated words.

Our minds are deluged with information that’s outrageously seductive and feels fulfilling but only for a few seconds. Then we need more. It’s not the real stuff of connection and fulfilment, it’s a drug and dangerously addictive.

We are the slaves of Apple, Facebook, Twitter et al. Devices get smaller and smaller and we use less and less of our physical capacity. Hunched over a tiny screen, using tiny movements of thumbs. Body tense. Eyes straining to see the print.There’s nothing pleasurable about it and nothing intrinsically good about lousy grammar and small, but we don’t question, we just buy, buy, buy and use, use, use. Or feel left out, left behind if we can’t afford to keep up.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that all this information, all these new and better products, this fast-paced life, is giving us more and more, making our world bigger and bigger.

It isn’t, though. It’s imploding in the places it matters the most. Our capacity to express creatively and originally. To really think for ourselves. To realize that the worthwhile things in life take time and space to develop, and that it’s the journey which brings fulfilment not the immediate achievement or gratification.

And what about our capacity to connect in a meaningful way face to face? Either we don’t have time, or we’re hooked on social media, which has made cowards of us all. We throw words and images out into cyberspace hoping somebody will like them and leave some kind of cryptic comment. But if they don’t, hey, we’ve moved on to something else anyway so we don’t care. There’s no risk-taking and very little reward, so it leaves us overstimulated and understroked; dessicated at a deeper level. With an overactive brain and an aching heart.

It's not hard to imagine where this could end up. A world where, even face to face, everybody’s desperate to be heard by a living, touchable human being – to have that real experience without which none of us can survive in those places it matters the most. So desperate that everybody talks but nobody listens.

Truth - We're Still Burning Witches at the Stake to Avoid It

A wise man once told me that if a person is angry with somebody and they won’t deal with it they will create stories in their head about that person, turning them into a monster of some sort. They’ll judge, hang, draw and quarter the person. They’ll even spread malicious gossip about them and feel justified in it. The one thing they won’t do is give the object of their judgment a chance to tell their side of the story. They don’t want the truth.

They’re usually not aware of what they’re doing, and to them their own actions will seem very logical, their judgments rational. And thus a myth begins that gathers a lot of weight over time. It eventually comes to be regarded as absolute truth. It can ruin a life.

It happens all the time in a family, community or society that doesn’t value personal truth or the expression of emotion and is afraid of both. The person who started the stories often has an outward demeanor of kindness, generosity and sociability. Because they never show their anger. Except to the one they vilify. They gain credibility and their victim becomes a scapegoat for everybody’s unresolved anger.

Once that starts happening, the person being vilified doesn’t stand a chance. If they're more emotionally truthful they’ll express their anger at the injustice of being judged without being allowed a chance to tell their side of whatever story has been passed around. The more they do that, they more they’re seen as imbalanced. 

They will be judged, hung, drawn and quartered, stoned to death, burned at the stake, choose your metaphor. Which is probably what happened to women accused of being witches in the Middle Ages.
We’re kidding ourselves if we think those days are over. They’re not really. We maybe don’t actively cause physical death but we contribute to myths that create depression, isolation, massive self doubt, and can lead to a person committing suicide. Either we actively participate in furthering the myth or we stand aside and do nothing. 

For the victim, that is. We’ll do a lot for everybody else, to reinforce the idea that we’re wonderful. Got to keep that credibility up.

Truth? We don’t value it nearly as much as we value our own fictions. We’d much rather build stories that rescue us from having to face our own anger and vulnerability and be accountable for our own actions, our own unresolvedness. I suppose it’s because societies still run on quite a primitive concept of right and wrong. And if we let ourselves see the truth of our anger, our very not-niceness, we would vilify ourselves as much as we do the victims of our stories. I guess for all that we like to think we’re civilized it boils down to this: it’s easier to hurt somebody else than to hurt yourself.

Snapchat Fills the Facebook Gap and Silicon Valley Invests in Privacy

Imagine a world where companies listed on the stock exchange didn’t make any money at all, but investors bought and sold according to the companies’ popularity. A monetary value would be attached to non-tangibles and creativity would be directly rewarded for its own sake. Nothing would have to be bought or sold; it would just have to be created, requiring investment.

It’s not such a wild idea. Snapchat, an app that lets you share photos and videos for a couple of seconds before they self-destruct, attracted the attention of Silicon Valley investors after its popularity started going through the roof. It was created 2 years ago by Evan Spiegel, 22, and Bobby Murphy, 24, from Venice Beach, responding to a need they saw for better privacy, especially in their own age bracket and younger. The app now has 60 million users a month, most of them between the ages of 13 and 25.

Users see it as a way to be more real with friends – which of course includes sexting, but that isn’t its exclusive use. This is really about a younger generation wanting to be able to express itself freely but valuing its privacy above everything else. And it’s about investors rewarding creativity for its own sake, not requiring the artist to sell their product. Not much different from artists getting sponsorship just to produce art. Except that Snapchat’s value isn’t tangible.

A successful entrepreneur and investor, Scott. D. Cook, founder of Intuit, put his weight behind Snapchat, valuing it at $60 - $70 million – without it having made a cent and not even really having a capacity for making money – which resulted in Snapchat raising $13.5 million recently for development.  

Unfortunately, as Dominique Mosbergen points out in huffingtonpost.com, it’s really easy to take a screenshot of images and videos before they disappear, without the original sender being aware, so its privacy isn’t really privacy after all, but it is a notch better than Facebook. When Katie Notopoulos asked the founder Evan Spiegel about this vulnerability, he said, rather cryptically, “The people who most enjoy using Snapchat are those who embrace the spirit and intent of the service. There will always be ways to reverse engineer technology products — but that spoils the fun!” (Buzzfeed)

Snapchat has moved in where Facebook failed, by recognizing the most important thing to users – privacy - and finding a way to capitalize on it without compromising it. So far, anyway. It will take a creative investor to understand where the real value lies and that they also need to join in the creativity and find a way to create profit without destroying the most important component. It’s hard to imagine that investors will be that creative. They seem hard-wired and utterly insensitive to where real value lies. Advertising seems to be all they know as a means of creating revenue. 

But it’s not really working on Facebook, and in any case, advertising is finite; there’s only so much space on a page and people either get inured to it or they get annoyed and stop opening up that page.
Whether what’s happening with Snapchat is really creativity being valued for its own sake is hard to say. All successful companies have an eye on Wall Street, and even though most trading does seem to be controlled by prediction, to think that pure speculation based on popularity but no income stream is enough to trade off is kind of like science fiction. 

Some kind of change is in the wind, though. Snapchat has competitors, including Poke on Facebook, all a response to market demands. Maybe individuals and companies will find it harder and harder to earn megabucks in an advertising-saturated world; maybe eventually they’ll run out of options, particularly as people become better informed and demand what’s important to them. Maybe founders of apps like Snapchat won’t enjoy the idea of world dominance, like Mark Zuckerberg did, and kill their own birthchild.

Frankly, I’ve never understood why anybody would want to have so much financial power. What on earth can a single person do with it? Absolutely nothing. How many cars can you drive, how many houses can you live in at one time? How many places can you fly to in a year? How much stimulation can you take in?

That lust for more and more is a beast. Eventually you run out of ways to feed it. I think the world would be a much more peaceful and better place if these giant corps and super-wealthy individuals were brought down to earth a bit. And imagine a world where you weren’t besieged by advertising at every turn.

What Angela Merkel Isn’t Admitting To

 Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Double standards and a very creative, resourceful capacity for denial have come to be almost the hallmark of western mainstream culture. Take the way we behave around borrowing and lending money. Financial lending institutions survive by lending, but when you sit across from your bank manager in a chair a few inches lower than theirs, to ask for a loan, they don’t treat you like an equal, even though without people like you they don’t have a job. 

They’ll never acknowledge the deal is mutually beneficial, and that therefore the terms should be too. Blame it on society’s values. Philanthropy is high on the list of admirable traits. But a person needing to receive is at the bottom of the pile. There’s a distinct absence of logic here. In reality, nobody lends money solely for the other person’s benefit. It’s always a mutual deal, and it’s usually about control for the lender. Between individuals generosity may be mixed in there, but it’s not always the motivating factor. 

Who is ever going to admit “I’m helping you because it gives me, at least in my head, the right to dictate to you and that gives me a sense of control in my world.”? Not many are honest enough with themselves to acknowledge it. They’re enabled by society’s blind spot around lending money: it’s only a mutual deal if the lender gets money back. Well, that’s a value, but it’s arbitrary. In politics it's more convoluted, but essentially the same double standard and blind spot play out.

As with Angela Merkel. Conveniently for her and her supporters, but rather less so for Greece, the world is fixated on Greece’s needs and irresponsibility. A big nasty word to apply to a whole nation. With this as the only perspective, it’s understandable that Germans should balk at bailing out the Greeks with their hard-earned money when they’ve been disciplined and the Greeks haven’t. It sounds good and righteous to say that Angela Merkel should have the right to dictate terms, no matter what impact they have on Greeks. But it’s not the whole truth. 

She doesn’t have the God-given right to dictate terms of the bailout to such an extent that they destroy lives, for this simple reason. Germany is getting something out of the deal also. Its economy strengthened because of sweeping welfare cuts and wages kept lower than elsewhere in Europe, so it can rest on its laurels for that, although I don’t think it makes for sustainable strength because it disempowers the middle class and encourages greed and exploitation. 

But setting that debate aside the competitive edge European countries gained with their regular currency devaluations was eliminated by the Euro. At that time Europe was Germany’s biggest export market. It’s done quite nicely by the Euro and by squeezing its own people. And even though it has shifted its export focus to growth markets, the declining Euro has made German goods more competitive. Plus Germany has got to be aware that growth markets are slowing, so where will it turn to sustain its own growth? Back to Europe?

I’m not taking away from the truth that Germany has rebuilt its economy, although off the backs of its own workers. So it’s easy to understand why people who work too hard for too little would get resentful of their country giving to people who have let things get out of control. But none of that takes away from the reality that the bailout is a quid pro quo. In reality Germany is saying “we need you so that we can remain strong, so you must do what we want, and we don’t care if you starve. We won’t, and that’s all that matters.” 

No wonder Greeks are angry. Angela Merkel wants to have her cake and to eat it also, and I don’t think she can pull it off. Greeks aren’t easily controllable. They’re a passionate race, hot blooded, and they’ve been pushed to the point of no return. This isn’t politics for them. This isn’t a game. It’s about real suffering. Politicians can’t just deal in the convenient world of figures and double standards. They have to take humanity into account. Otherwise humanity will take them down.