Superbloom - Volume 23 in the "Social Media is Awful" Series
While I was writing this I came up with an analogy for social media is like a room that has very strong opinions about who is speaking. I think it has some potential.
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
By: Nicholas Carr
Published: 2025
272 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
On its surface, this is a fairly typical anti-social media book, though Carr does have some interesting things to say about weaknesses inherent to the medium: content collapse, algorithmic engineering, and hostility generation. All things I’ll get to in a bit.
What’s the author’s angle?
Carr comes from the Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman school of media criticism. Media have inherent properties that lead to different sorts of communication, and different strengths and weaknesses. Carr, like many, thinks that social media has some particularly salient weaknesses.
Who should read this book?
When considering whether to read a non-fiction book, one has to consider where it fits with one’s various interests. If you’re really interested in the negative effects of social media, then I would definitely read this book. If it’s one of many interests, but not in your top 5-10, then you can probably skip it.
What does the book have to say about the future?
Like everyone else who has an opinion on social media, he’s worried about what’s going to happen once AI gets going, though he does go deeper than most. In particular he’s worried about the lack of reality AI will increasingly usher in, and points out how many of the people pushing social media are explicitly aiming to replace “reality” with something better. For example, this quote from Marc Andreessen:
Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.
Specific thoughts: It all comes back to Google+
Perhaps you remember Google+, Google’s entry in the social media space. One of the things Google tried out as a way of differentiating their platform from all the others was a feature called Circles. Circles allowed you to segment your followers into various buckets. You might have three different circles, one for friends, one for family, and one for co-workers. Your friends get your posts about Dungeons & Dragons, your family gets the post with Uncle David’s obituary, your co-workers get the latest industry news, and all of them get the beautiful pictures you took in Bali.
I really liked Circles. Perhaps I grew up in a different era, or maybe there’s even something wrong with me, but I’m not very interested in trying to tell people stuff they don’t want to hear. And I know that these days people just ignore stuff they’re not interested in. (Or the algorithm never shows it to them.) But my reluctance remains.
Circles gave you the ability to avoid that. And I found the idea that I could get deep into the weeds on something without annoying people really attractive. The moment I gave Google+ a shot happened to be during the Tour de France.1 I had some friends on the platform who were equally excited about the Tour. It was great to blog about the minutiae of cycling without any fear of losing the interest of any of those friends, while also not worrying that I was boring or confusing other friends.
Carr points out that this sort of switching happens all the time with normal in-person interactions. I behave and talk about different stuff when I’m playing D&D with my friends than I do when I’m on a road trip with my wife. Social media makes this sort of thing functionally impossible. All content becomes “Content!” Optimized for the widest possible audience and the maximum possible engagement. There are no circles of interest with carefully curated discussions, there is just the firehose.
It would be one thing if the platform was content-agnostic. Certainly we’ve been at a gathering where people naturally gravitate to one particularly charismatic individual. The room the gathering is being held in doesn’t have an opinion on which individual should get the attention. But the “room” created by social media platforms has very strong opinions on who should get attention.2 The person loudly holding forth on their hatred of “the other side” is going to get a spotlight and a megaphone, but only for about a minute before the spotlight and megaphone are passed to someone else. And it turns out the more these people share, the less we like them.
Google+ Circles was a reasonable approximation of how we normally interact. And normal interactions involve some friction. Social media companies hate friction. Friction breaks engagement. So encouraging normal interaction is the last thing social media companies want to do. The firehose works much better. Though I guess the more appropriate term is the “feed”.
Even though no other social media company has implemented “circles” in quite the way Google did, we do see something similar with something like Discord Channels, Telegram groups, or WhatsApp groups. Will these venues eventually supplant something like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok? Probably not, and my experience is that much of the content that appears in these other venues originates in the other social media channels. So it may be that there’s something of a symbiotic relationship. Should the fact that these other venues exist make us worry less about social media? Maybe? I mean… If you’re anything like me it’s hard to worry more about social media…
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Of course I guess Substack is also a form of social media, so perhaps there’s an element of hypocrisy? I will say that I think Substack has thus far avoided the worst abuses of the other platforms. Whether it will stay that way is anyone’s guess. I will say that my posts are custom crafted to avoid almost anything that will increase engagement. (I do add pictures at the top, but that’s because they’re pretty.) If despite this you still feel engaged, please consider subscribing.
I used to be really into road racing, but the doping scandal took the wind out of my sails.
Obviously the layout of the room matters somewhat.
Substack has functionality to segment your mailing list, and I am hoping to figure it out soon...