On the first chapter of a book I decided to call “Our media in motion: how social life became marketing strategy and relationships became fiction”, I try to map out some of the most pressing issues on social media; I fail, but at least I tried. It still doesn’t make sense that Tumblr was devalued; it still doesn’t make sense that Facebook made more profits after Cambridge Analytica. But we’re trying to make the most of it.

And what is that? What do we actually need from tech companies — the right way to call our beloved phone icons? Isn’t it, like, love and respect, just the way you’d expect from a partner? That’s the point I was trying to make, and nobody needs to read the book to realize someone cheated, and it wasn’t us. Until, well, you look at some scary data from teen analytics and realize ChatGPT and other stuff might be used to configure VPN from Greece intentionally, something you might see in certain chatrooms.

I could totally go more deeply into that. I don’t want to. Just the way I don’t want to talk about maple syrup being more strategic than oil, the craziest headline I’ve seen in a decade. Or the catchphrase: “climate change is a hoax!” Imagine if climate change was a throat trainer. Because, of course, our breathing is affected just the way it is when we inhale the smoke from a cigarette containing toxic ingredients?

AI wouldn’t know what’s funny about this text because it’s not funny. We’ve been led here. We accepted Facebook in our lives, in our homes and beds and toilets. Just like we did with Twitter. Those two alone made a lot of things happen — and that’s why I focused on them on my first posts on Substack. But who’s reading? We gotta look at deeper problems, but at the same time, provide quick solutions.

And the quickest way to interact with people is trusting the suggestions of algorithms. If you followed everyone who advertised on your Instagram, you’d conclude that media is absolutely disgusting. These people trying to make money on the internet are absolute phonies. They’re not serious professionals, they just took a fast course on marketing and decided to record videos, because their cam quality was good. I’d rather cam up with a random chick, honestly.

And this is such a lost cause. Intimacy on the web is absolutely dead. Suspicion reigns, evidence is manufactured and the woke ones criticize the police but watch their porn in secret. Be careful, WordPress is going to censor you! “Excuse me, Mr. Escobar, we have received a complaint from the San Francisco City House and it concerns your online posts, we have some questions for you”. Okay, is that when I talk about Semrush and Cloudflare?

My presence on the web could be summed up in a song. “Faraway… so close“. Any Irish fans out there, who thought New Year’s Day was a great clip back in the day? U2’s one of the most successful venue bands in the world, with their 360 tour nearing a billion dollars in profit, and has been to many places. Who am I to talk about U2? Nobody. Let them talk. “With satellite television, you can go anywhere”, they said, in 1993. What about Twitch, Bono? I’ve reached Bob Iger for comment, but he wasn’t available. Bono wasn’t, either.