Who’s Universe is it Anyway?
A medium read
The X illusion
The day after the U.S. election I deleted X, finally. I know this isn’t a particularly radical act, and I really didn’t know why it took me so long. I guess I needed the jolt of a second Trump term in office. I woke in the morning with a big dose of X reality. X being the often angry, often frustrating, often addictive social media platform once (and not so secretly still) referred to as Twitter.
X is an illusion creator –
a platform designed to help us see our own distorted mirrored algorithmic echo chamber. It exists to reinforce our own personal framework of reality. One we already feel comfortable with. It’s a mirror world into our own minds, behaviours and prejudices. It’s a lie. And because it's self-perpetuating, it traps you inside its Universe.
Nothing is what it seems because of the storytelling that happens via X’s ‘Tweets.’ These mini-chapters, or conversations, in general, are writings of fiction that embody fabrication. Someone shares a Tweet, factually correct, or not; a bit of hearsay, a rumour, a speculation, a grain of truth; an opinion; a fabrication. And just as a mirrorball or a funfair house of mirrors, it echos out into the world like a Chinese whisper game, distorting as it goes.
I was viewing X for two reasons. One, to wallow in my sports team’s perpetual inconsistency, the communal suffering, and the arc of hope. The other it turned out, as I clicked a few US political posts, was to get sucked into the post-Biden-Kamala Harris run to be the first woman President of the United States, pitted against a convicted felon, and villain of the blockbuster, Donald John Trump.
In one instance, the Harris Walz algorithm announced that Donald Trump would not be attending a college football game as, apparently, previously planned whilst visiting Pennsylvania just a week before the election. This of course indicated, neigh, confirmed to the platform’s Democrats that Trump was predicted to lose Pennsylvania, one of seven swing, states, the following Tuesday. There could have been many reasons for not attending the game, one of which might have been that Trump was instead actually predicted to win the state, so he wasn’t wasting his time converting the fanbase. The X mirror, however, to the Harris Walz followers, bent convex, enlarging the distortion in a full and positive fashion, or so they believed. The actual reality of the situation saw Harris Walz lose Pennsylvania by over 134,000 votes.
This pattern of storytelling played out again and again and again, ramping up my hope with what I often believed to be insightful, well-informed opinions.
Instead of reading the (whole) room, I was swayed by a hope that my team might win. Notice we’re back to my initial reason for being here in the first place - hope, and dare I say it, the underdog.
Thankfully, an excellent opinion piece, Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now? By David Brooks, appeared in the New York Times the day after the election. It shared a view of the rest of the room we had been missing. America wanted the straight-talking President who they simply believed would give them access to more jobs, more money, and ultimately a better quality of life.
Now. I. Got. It.
Mostly they didn’t care about women’s reproduction rights, the climate emergency, or if the Republican party was weird. Because not only did they not care about the weirdness, importantly, and this applies to most of us, Trump voters as a whole don’t feel seen or heard. X sets you up to listen and be heard, but only it turns out by your own people. It bounces algorithmically around your head telling you stories you want to hear, in a way you want to hear them.
For some reason, I didn’t realise this at the time - that although the algorithms send stuff your way, the stuff you’re likely to be interested in, it doesn’t discriminate right or wrong. How did I not see this, or hear what was constantly being told to us by wise social media soothsayers? Perhaps it was because the Instagram algorithm I was used to just sent me pretty pictures of Japanese temples, modernist architectural wonders, pictures of Big Sur and the odd surf videos. That, and a plethora of ‘tailored’ adverts I might be interested in. Pictures often don’t speak a thousand words, so in retrospect, I was missing a huge part of the story, and the ability to see through illusion.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’m not (easily) gullible, and I pride myself on being a pessimistic optimist. Yet all this, as Elon Musk so proudly shouts - is “Free Speech.” The problem of course with free speech is, it might be a lie. I wish I could say that the facade of all social media opens the door to your own spirited destiny. But alas, it does nothing of the sort. It sets you up to fail, for disenchantment, illusionment and disillusionment.
There is, of course, little to no moderation going on in social media, and certainly on Musk’s version of X. So you believe what you see. (All the harder now due to AI.) It turns out that mostly Donald Trump was right, it’s fake news, pumped into the screen via algorithmic botox. Pro-Harris or pro-Trump? It’s so damn hard to really tell.
At the end of the day X corals you into only listening to yourself talk.
The mirror world has unsurprising been coined already. It’s a term Yale computer scientist David Galernter first spoke of in 1991. To Galernter, a mirror world was a hypothetical representation of a real word in digital format, on a computer screen accessed by you, the viewer.
So while parallel universes and multiverses sound good in a science fiction story, what we have in easily accessible ‘social’ platforms like X, are distorted versions of reality. The distorted mirror world we have almost 25 years later is the result of a story that has gotten out of hand. A story whereby you are given characters, behaviours, locations, etc. and you choose the outcome based on your own version of reality. None of this helps the actual reality, because if we are able to grasp the technicolour actuality of what is unfolding in front of us, then we could, undistoredly, do something about the outcome. Until then, all we have is the unlikely reality of hope.
The credits etc.
Copyright of the author