Is Social Media a Failure?

A Tiny Case Study in Economics vs Eudaimonia

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but social media companies might yet prove that old dictum untrue. They’ve made headlines daily lately, in a fairly appalling way. Facebook selling anti-semitic ads, swaying an election with “fake news”, Twitter being a platform for extremists. And so on.

So. A tough but necessary question: is social media a failure? Let’s think about it for a moment, not with condemnation, blame, or shame, but just clarity, purpose, and understanding.

The economics of social media are stellar. Facebook earns piles of cash. Twitter isn’t as successful, but it’s still a publicly traded company — a billion dollar tale of modern-day fortune.

But the eudaimonics of social media are dismal. By eudaimonics, I refer to eudaimonia, or well-being, wealth, and human possibility — whether or not a thing helps us live genuinely better lives. Let me explain.

What effect does social media have on people? There’s plenty of research concluding Facebook makes us unhappy — and the longer that we spend on it, the unhappier, more depressed, anxious, angry, jealous we get. Conversely, if we take a break, our happiness soon rebounds. We can probably surmise that most social media, Twitter, Snap, whatever, has a similar effect. It reduces people’s social and emotional well-being pretty sharply and immediately.

Now, you might say, so what? Don’t a lot of things make us unhappy? Sure they do. But they have a long-term point. Getting an education is painful, but in the long term, it elevates well-being. You’re smarter, wiser, wholer, better in many ways. The same probably isn’t true of social media. It’s not an education, it’s barely even entertainment. So it’s net effect on individual well-being is probably needlessly, uselessly negative.

Now let’s think about social media’s effects on a very different kind of well-being: civic and social well-being, what you might think of as trust and democracy. That’s what the latest hullabaloo is about: by selling ads that sway elections in illicit and unfair ways, Facebook’s corroding democracy. This effect goes deeper. Misinformation is a kind of illth, or negative wealth (just like information is a kind of positive wealth). It won’t just dry up and go away — happiness rebounds if you take a break, but this doesn’t. Like air pollution, antiobiotic resistance, or toxic waste, it lingers. Until and unless someone cleans it up.

Happiness rebounding is a short-term effect — but illth reduces well-being over the long-term, just like fracking poisons water tables forever. In this way, social media’s effects on social and civic well-being are worse than they are on emotional well-being: they last longer, do more damage, and need clean-up crews to scrub them away. And even then, the mistrust that’s been created by misinformation lasts (think of the people that now really believe Hillary or Obama are the devil, and so on) — it’s another kind of genuine long-term illth, that’s much harder and costlier to repair.

So in the terms of my little framework, social media has a low and sharply declining Omega: it’s ratio of well-being to income is falling. It also has a low and declining Theta: for every increment of wealth, it creates more and worse illth. What does that tell us? Well, there are three reactive answers. industries that damage eudaimonia in the long term suffer. They get regulated and taxed by governments, like Big Tobacco, and that’s probably on the horizon for social media — if not in the USA, then in the rest of the world. People eventually wise up, and defect away from such industries — you can think of soda and fast food as a tiny example. And increasingly, they forego the future: they’re just not seen as good partners, buyers, suppliers, people to do business with. That window of punishment closes faster and faster these days, in years, not decades.

But those are reactive answers. A, maybe the, problem today is that organizations only have one thing to maximize — income, and so, robotically, that’s all they do — instead of having ways to optimize eudaimonia, through new constructs like Omega and the like. So the proactive question is: how do we build better organizations — that don’t just maximize profits at the expense of well-being, but expand well-being itself to begin with? This is where I think we need to get a little radical, and where I think those of you most comfortable the linear, mechanistic, Western way we think about economics and management are going to get uncomfortable.

What do we do in organizations? We sit around and debate and discuss whether our actions and decisions hew to our guiding principles. So I’d say that such organizations need better principles, values, visions. Even if you’re a hardcore socialist and you believe such organizations can only be owned by the government, that remains true. The real question is giving people tools with which to make wiser, better, truer choices. In this case, I think such organizations need two new (or very old, depending on how you look at it) principles: Ahimsa and Ziran.

Ahimsa means doing no harm. In a sophisticated and subtle way — not just physical violence, but negative effects on well-being, like the above. Maybe, just maybe, with an Ahimsa principle, an organization would have to first ask itself: are we damaging people’s well-being? Society’s? Democracy’s? The world’s? Ziran means really transforming human lives. You’re meant to live a long, happy, meaningful, purposive life. Not by the fates or gods, necessarily — just by your nature. It’s naturally what you strive for, and feel empty when it eludes you. So Ziran asks: are we transforming well-being in positive, maybe radical ways? Or are people just a little number and dumber than they were before?

Maybe you don’t like these strange, unfamiliar words. And yet, zooming out, social media’s just a tiny example of a bigger problem. A paradigm in which organizations maximize income, at the expense of eudaimonia. And that’s the underlying cause of the globe’s great problems, from climate change to stagnation to social breakdown to extremism. So whether or not you agree with, like, or love my tiny principles isn’t really the point: we’re going to have to change the old paradigm.

Is social media a failure? The answer’s pretty clear by now, isn’t it? Like so much of the rest of this thing we call “the economy”, it’s a case study of how not to spark eudaimonia, lives genuinely well lived. The good news, I suppose, is that we can learn from its mistakes.

Umair