Intimacy does not scale (2021)
I made a similar observation some time ago, so let me add this: human interactions in general don't scale. Social media easily turns completely normal human interactions into something perverse.Eg, say you've just exited to the cinema and vent to your friend that this movie sucked. What were they thinking? Who had the brilliant idea to change directors mid trilogy? There's a bit of venting, but quickly things settle down. There's a bit of bonding over the shared experience. Nobody is hurt, you're just having a private talk with your friend.Take that to Twitter, use the same words, and now the same thing is an addition to the torrent of hate aimed at the movie's director. You might have meant to reach your 10 followers, but search, recommendations, hashtags, retweets, etc can easily pull your statement out of its intended context.Then there's what it must be like to end up on the other side of that. This happens organically, people aren't organizing around it for the most part. So the torrent of hate can regain its strength at random, wherever some person posts about it 3 years later, it makes #2 in some countdown on Youtube, comes up on the top of AskReddit, etc. In real life most things settle down, the Internet allows rehashing old stuff effectively forever.And I think human interaction breaks at those scales. A single person can't meaningfully interact with a million random people which mostly spontaneously decided to flood you with messages. You can ask a prominent one or two to leave you alone, but more can show up at any time.