Meta must tighten controls on children’s accounts and pay $567 million into a fund to remedy its role in a youth mental health crisis, a New Mexico judge ordered Thursday, in a ruling that dealt the social media giant another hefty penalty and compared it to polluting factories. (CNN)

A New Mexico judge has declared Meta a “public nuisance,” comparing the social media giant to a polluting factory. The ruling orders the company to establish an abatement fund and overhaul key features of its platforms over alleged harm to children. (RT)

It’s a case of “too little, too late”, considering the condition of the generations raised on tablets, smartphones and social media, I’d say. It’s also a case of “I told you so”, since I kept saying from the beginning that social media is the spiritual equivalent of toxic waste that is by design reducing people to their basest level, but nobody listens to me so yeah. Now they have the irreversible outcomes, and this verdict isn’t going to change anything.

But I don’t think it’s just social media; it’s broader than that. Any situation where people are constantly exposed to feedback from large groups of people will result in a very reductionist monoculture of thoughts and emotions. In essence, this reduces society to a collective idiot, because stupid consensus reigns supreme, and every truly smart idea will contradict that, and such will be violently attacked and ridiculed. In essence, this polices thought until everybody is obedient, retarded and vaccinated.

Also, this form of mental coherence on a very low baseline, essentially the consensus of the IQ 85-115 crowd, the ±1 standard deviations around the median, the monoculture of the Gaussian mean, is something that creates all the fanatical hatred of all dissenting thought, and extreme intolerance of “non-approved” ideas, and it’s not like that phenomenon is new in society, but social media brought it to a whole new level of bad.

So, it’s not that only Facebook, or only the social media, or the smartphones that enable permanent connectivity to the network, are the problem. I think it merely exposes pathology within human social structures, that was always there, but this escalated it to the level of caricature.

I was writing something in the comment section that deserves to be an article, with some additions:

I definitely subscribe more to the “clean” line of thinking – don’t clutter the place with extraneous crap, avoid things that don’t actually improve your quality of life, and if something doesn’t do anything good for you, it probably just drags you down. I had to move too many times, and that’s a good way to learn that stuff that normally doesn’t get in the way but isn’t really useful either still needs to be packed and moved, and as such is a drag. However, there’s a serious difference between that, and trying to get rid of almost everything. Sure, you can say you don’t need winter clothing in the summer, but when the winter comes you’re going to remember what you needed that heavy jacket/coat for. When I’m not doing heavy lifting with my computer, I think that Macbook Air is all I need, but then I get to import lots of pictures and a desktop machine with good cooling shows what I bought it for. One can say things don’t make you happy. Sure, my car doesn’t make me happy, but not having one would sure make me miserable. You don’t get to be happy from things; however, believing that things are here to make you happy is stupid nonsense. Things are here to prevent hardship and misery. They are here to help you do something useful. If they serve some additional purpose, such as look good while being functional, the better. Having a sharp knife never made me happy. Having a dull knife, or not having an extra knife while they were all in the dishwasher sure annoyed me. But the difference between a perfectly functional knife, and some fancy Japanese $500 knife doesn’t mean shit to me. I buy them cheaply in the local mall, and I have good sharpening stones to maintain them. As long as it’s sharp and good, I don’t care about it being fancy. Same with the dishes – they are all the cheapest, locally available brand, and if we break something, it’s easily replaced. No fancy handmade porcelain and shit. We buy it either in Ikea or the local store. Cheap, simple, functional. That’s how I perceive minimalism – don’t waste money and mental energy on stuff that doesn’t matter, because it’s impossible to get it to be better with any kind of investment once you get past the basics. Essentially, get fancy coffee, serve it in the cheapest generic cups. Fancy coffee can improve things, fancy cups can’t, because the basic cups are already really good. Also, there’s minimalism in reducing the amount of overhead introduced by unnecessary fancification of things. Get stuff that you can easily service and replace. Get as much stuff from the same place as possible, because it simplifies delivery, maintenance and replacement. I’ll get furniture from Ikea, for instance, not because I’m much of a fan, but because it makes it simple enough and it’s good enough and once I’m done with it I can do something more important. Also, buying stuff from Apple simplifies things a lot – it reduces the amount of choices that don’t actually contribute to anything, the stuff is well made, lasts long and so on. So, minimalism in a sense of reducing the amount of shit you have to deal with it is something I definitely subscribe to. That doesn’t necessarily mean less things, but it means dealing with unimportant aspects of things less. For instance, trying to get things to be fancy, beyond the layer of functionality, is an incredible waste of energy, money and time. For instance, I don’t have fancy shoes, I have generic Adidas sneakers that are comfortable and good, and I know the exact model and size so I order replacements online once I wear them down. Same with clothes – I get good generic stuff that’s easy to find and replace. Basically, I like the Bauhaus concept of industrial design, form following function, and mass production reducing cost. Sure, I like fancy here and there, but for the most part, I prefer to have the most generic mid-range version of a thing, because that one is most likely to be good, easy to find, cheap to buy and replace, and so on.

I was thinking about this more, and concluded that there are some exceptions to my general rule of just getting shit done and not wasting money and effort on pointless fancification. Those exceptions come into play when something fancy actually means something to me, or I have it to create an impression that serves some useful purpose, and creating a wrong impression would cause more problems than it would solve.

The most important exceptions are cars and watches. In both cases, I will go beyond the minimum of function, and rather treat their symbolism of status as an important aspect of function.

You see, it doesn’t matter whether I care about those things or not. Other people care about them and notice them subconsciously, and I need to do the necessary minimum to “pass” if I want to aviod hassle that might require inordinate amounts of mental focus and energy to break through. I want to create an impression of someone you have to take seriously, but not someone who intentionally provokes envy and spite with ostentatious behaviour. I also don’t want to waste money on status symbols, at least not beyond the point where it suffices to accomplish the intended purpose. It’s a delicate dance. Status symbols have a nasty tendency of backfiring more often than not, because fake people tend to overdo it. You can’t fake class, and you can’t fake the feeling you have when you know you have money. But there are things that a person with money and class could reasonably be expected to do if they wish to avoid ostentatious displays; and then there are things such a person would not do. For instance, wearing a tacky gold-plated supermarket-brand watch is one of those things. But a very rich and classy person could wear an 1980s Casio. Also, if people know or suspect you are tight with money, ostentatious displays will instantly backfire. There are very, very few instances where showing that you have money will benefit you. It’s actually the opposite from what poor people, who want to pretend to be wealthy, think. More often than not, behaving frugally, rationally and “low key” will indicate money and class. Ostentatious behaviour, to me, indicates serious money issues. That can mean not having money, or being stuck somewhere in your past where you didn’t have money, and trying to overcompensate. In any case, it isn’t a good look.

So, my paradigm of prioritising function and getting shit done sometimes means matching some social expectations closely enough to avoid problems. It also includes some level of indulgence. If combining reasonable indulgence with functionality manages to make it easier for me to accomplish my goals, the better. The curve that connects the dots might in fact meet the requirements of minimalism, but the way I see it, minimalism can be an emergent property of trying to get shit done with the least amount of friction and issues, and not necessarily something that has anything to do with striving to have less things.