Oakland’s been in the national news lately but it’s not because of our horrendous homelessness or crime or the scandals plaguing City Hall. Instead, it’s because the big Meta trial is underway at the Federal courthouse, on Clay Street. The legal issue is, are Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram addictive like drugs? Or are they just harmless amusements that millions of kids like?
Far be it from me to try to define addiction. When I was a kid, “addict”meant drug addict, as in heroin. We knew what that meant: the drug somehow physically altered the body’s biochemistry so that the user needed it constantly or else suffered from some kind of withdrawal. Eventually, we heard about alcohol addicts (alcoholics), and nicotine addicts, and then chocoholics, until nearly everything that I enjoy was said to be some kind of addiction. I love to read: am I addicted to reading? Are fans of the Forty Niners addicts? Are bird watchers addicts? Are we addicted to breathing? You can see the complications.
It will be interesting if Meta loses the lawsuit. But Meta has some logic on its side. Nobody forces anyone to access social media, which, like anything else, can be abused. On the other hand, the accusations against Meta, particularly the teenaged suicides allegedly causes by social media addiction, are serious and heartbreaking. Did Meta know they were creating something as addictive and harmful as fentanyl? If they did, should they be punished and, if so, how? What is the responsibility of parents? And another question: Can Mark Zuckerberg get a fair trial, in a day and age where millions of Americans apparently hate billionaires?
I have some experience of this personally. I like watching Facebook videos, which they call Reels. I can spend a couple hours mindlessly scrolling through them. Of course, Meta knows what I like, and so their algorithm gives me a steady supply. I enjoy Paul Lynde videos from his days on Hollywood Squares (he was the most “out” gay on TV, except maybe for Liberace). I also like videos where criminals try to escape from cops, only to be tased, tackled or taken down by a K9 dog. If I don’t care for a particular video, I can quickly scroll through and find something better. I’m not pretending that watching Reels is some kind of high-level intellectual pastime. But it’s fun, and doesn’t hurt anybody.
If Meta loses, the implications are enormous. The entire social media superstructure could be threatened, which is to say the Internet itself. A Meta loss would mean that anybody who feels harmed by anything on social media could sue the publisher and have a plausible chance of winning. This is obviously going to the Supreme Court regardless of the lower court’s ruling, and I can’t see this conservative SCOTUS ruling against a corporation. Instead, the majority likely will conclude that Meta has free speech rights (“corporations are people too, my friend,” as Mitt Romney sagely observed) and dismiss complaints against it.
At any rate, the social media horse is out of the barn. I’d love to be alive in, say, fifty years to see what it evolves into, and how we humans deal with it. This doesn’t even take into account artificial intelligence. I have no idea what kind of strange future is awaiting us. But one thing I do know is that there have been many, many technological advancements in human history that pundits predicted would be the end of life as we know it. Many mainstream Christians of the fifteenth century worried that Gutenberg’s printing press spelled the end of human thinking. Early last century, the American humorist, Ambrose Bierce, called the telephone—then just starting to become popular—”an invention of the devil.” With more than a century of experience, we might now ask, Was he right? Is it too soon to know? Is social media “an invention of the devil”? What does that even mean, anyway?
Well, we’ve adapted to the discovery of fire, and the wheel, and gunpowder, and we’re still here. All have threatened humanity. But humans are clever enough to survive most threats, and I suspect we’ll get through this social media conundrum just fine. Whether it’s good for young people to spend all their time staring into their phones is another question. I think, personally, it’s a drag, but maybe I’m just a Luddite.
Steve Heimoff