this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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Gonna disagree here.
Humans have always had "social media", but it's not been directed by a cadre of oligarchs until recently.
I mean shit, humans have been sitting around the campfire telling stories to each other going all the fucking way back to forever. Sure, a campfire story isn't a tweet, but for our monkey brains it's essentially the same thing: how we interact with our social groups and learn what's going on around us.
The problem is that the campfire stories couldn't be manipulated into making your cavemen neighbors hate the other half, because half of them were totally pro rabbit fur while you're pro squirrel fur.
You absolutely can do that and worse now, so while we've always had social media, we just simply never had anyone with enough control to make an entire society eat each other because of it's influence.
There's a big difference between sitting around a fire telling stories. And sending pseudonymous click-baity messages (I'm slightly exaggerating) across the globe.
As it's not guaranteed anymore: Have you sit around a fire with friends? IME it's so much more fulfilling and less prone to hate. Healthier (apart of the smoke). There's so much more to communication than text messages.
You certainly could tell cavemen stories to manipulate them, back then.
The difference was you could only reach one campfire at a time. Nowadays the whole Internet is one campfire, metaphorically.
Lol chimpanzees kill each other in literal wars with torture, kidnapping, extortion, terrorism and more, and you think a caveman never thought of lying about the enemy group?
The previous post didn't talk about inter-campfire relations. It talked about relations between people in one campfire. Relations with outsiders have always been fucky. It's a miracle how the EU even came to be in the first place with how different everything/everyone is.