Link to article (noemamag.com)
The introduction of Sora (OpenAI’s video generation platform/model) in the last few weeks has had me thinking that maybe we’ve hit an inflection point in social media’s viability. The initial appeal of social media was always human connection and it has survived on at least the illusion that the things you see are created by other, real, people.
Until now, video was the last remaining media form that you could really trust to be “made by people” in some capacity. I think that’s why TikTok took such a hold so quickly, it gave the younger generation a feeling that they were engaging in something real in a time where all other forms of media can be algorithmically generated at a whim. Even videos that were edited would at least have taken some human effort to create, which upheld the illusion that other people are involved somewhere along the line.
Now that video content is no longer a reliable indication of human involvement, I wonder if the whole thing will just collapse. Will people really still care to spend time on social media once the illusion of real human interaction can no longer be upheld? What are you looking at? Endless generated junk? Why?
The article linked above and quoted below gives a good account of the state of things.
Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. Early platforms sold themselves as conduits for genuine connection: stuff you wanted to see, like your friend’s wedding and your cousin’s dog.
The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.
We’re drowning in this nothingness.
To hold attention, some creators increasingly opt to behave like algorithms themselves, automating replies, optimizing content for engagement, or mimicking affection at scale. The distinction between performance and intention must surely erode as real people perform as synthetic avatars and synthetic avatars mimic real women.
There is loneliness, desperation and predation everywhere.
Scrolling has become a form of ambient dissociation, half-conscious, half-compulsive, closer to scratching an itch than seeking anything in particular. People know the feed is fake, they just don’t care.
These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. There is more to watch, read, click and react to than ever before — an endless buffet of stimulation. But novelty has become indistinguishable from noise. Every scroll brings more, and each addition subtracts meaning. We are indeed drowning. In this saturation, even the most outrageous or emotive content struggles to provoke more than a blink.
Outrage fatigues. Irony flattens. Virality cannibalizes itself. The feed no longer surprises but sedates, and in that sedation, something quietly breaks, and social media no longer feels like a place to be; it is a surface to skim.
Perhaps most crucially, we need to reframe digital literacy not as an individual responsibility but as a collective capacity. This means moving beyond spot-the-fake-news workshops to more fundamental efforts to understand how algorithms shape perception and how design patterns exploit our cognitive processes.
The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones. The question is whether we will do this or whether we will continue to drown.