Reunited friends and family, post-World War II. (Personal photo.)

More than a decade ago I worked for a major social network. Of all the places I’ve worked, this was the most analytically-minded company. Almost every department had an analyst, and meetings were frequently a competition of numbers. Despite this network’s poor reputation, I had been lured by the idea of what my first manager there called the “coolification” of the network, including making it more about the customer’s needs.

Sadly, coolification was not in the cards. The company, burdened by poor legacy user experience and lawsuits, ended up rebranding completely. They changed their name and their URL and their business value. They were 15–16 years old when Classmates became Memory Lane.

It did not last. I wasn’t there when Memory Lane became Classmates again, so I don’t know specifics (and wouldn’t share them if I did), but as Don Ohlmeyer told Tony Kornheiser, “The answer to all your questions is, ‘money’.”

Now Facebook, 17 years old and burdened by public outcries about possible privacy violations, alleged negligent content management, lawsuits, and a generally poor reputation, is rebranding itself as Meta. We’ll see how that works for them. Personally, when I discovered that “meta” means “dead” in Hebrew, it seemed poetically appropriate.

It’s not surprising this warning would appear on this particular Wikipedia page. (Link above; screenshot taken 31 October 2021.)

Social networks can never ultimately be about people’s needs. They have to make money to exist. That money comes from advertising, or user fees, or data gleaned from observing users, or any of a number of sources — but it’s necessary. This is the nature of the beast, and it’s not so much immoral as it’s simply the case, in the world as it is.

Still, when your goal is to connect people, people associate your business with their personal joys and sorrows. And they get upset when they feel those highly personal needs are being leveraged for money. This is the nature of the human, and it’s not so much illogical as it’s simply an internal conflict between the kinds of things we expect to associate with friendly sharing and connection, and the kinds of things we associate with big business and number-crunching. This leads to lists of issues like the below (another screenshot from the Wikipedia article, Criticism of Facebook):

Again, it’s not surprising that the above partial table of contents from the Wikipedia article, “Criticism of Facebook” would be so long. (Screenshot take 31 October 2021.)

But here’s the rub: people don’t want drills, they want holes in the wall.

No, I’m not changing the subject. People don’t want social networks, people want to connect. Eventually, that will not require separate apps and networks to manage, it will just happen. Like mobile phones replaced landlines for many of us, like the cloud is replacing personal storage, direct sharing will replace social networks.

Here’s what I see:

• Being able to choose people in my phone contacts and group them (oh wait, that’s a thing).
• Being able to click on a photo or video or set of photos and share directly with contacts (Oh, we can do that already, too? Hmm.)
• Leveraging smart TVs for remote sharing events (hey, that’s a thing, too!).
• Being able to allow ourselves to be open to follow as ourselves, without leveraging an app.
• Curating what we share, both in advance and after the event.
• Curating what metadata is shared from our content.
• Curating what we experience.

That last one is the key. You’ll say, “But the OS is the social network in this scenario,” or some-such. But it’s not. It’s the OS for a phone or a TV or a wall or a refrigerator. We will be ourselves, not user IDs in an app, and able to use our devices without sharing a quantum of personal data if we so choose.

William James pointed out that, “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” and we simply need to stop attending to social network apps.

All we need is the functionality, and we can leave behind the age of social network dot-coms like the butterfly leaves behind its cocoon.