Less heavy but not unheavy, I’ve been trying to think of words to frame some of the issues caused by our collective obsession with social media and its consequences. (1)
The first relevant term I learned, personally, was “future shock.” Roughly, it’s the state where people suffer emotional distress because everything is changing so fast! I suspect we’ve all felt it: that moment when, at work, something changes. So, you’ve got to abandon your expertise with the previous system for something else, which is often riddled with bugs, and just when you’re getting good with the new one, bang, they change it again. It can also be felt with the rapid rise and subsequent fall of social media networks – or just their sheer proliferation – as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and others compete in the same crowded space. And, lately, I’ve been seeing the final stage of future shock: the kids have it. Much of the discourse against gen AI is from young people who are seeing their futures stripped away by the rise of the AI shoggoth, its tentacles into everything.
Now, obviously, we’re all future-shocked to some extent, but we also know some of the mechanisms of it. I’d like to start talking about the mechanisms of future shock and give them some terms, which hopefully spread far and wide. So, bookmark this article, it might be important! (2)
The four terms I’m inventing are simulaconorm (living like a hyperreal world is normal,) echonormality (echo chamber-induced performativity and normalization,) algoloop trap (the self-reinforcing cycle of online and offline conformity,) and algofog (the depression, anxiety, and confusion that result from algorithmic immersion.) Let’s get into further discussion about them!
Simulaconorm: This is where my philosophical roots get super-dooper clear. It’s a portmanteau of “simulacra” and “normal.” It describes the intersection between Baudrillaud’s hyperreality and Alexei Yurchak’s hypernormalization. Hyperreality is, very briefly, the inability to distinguish between reality from a simulation of reality. In normal language – ignoring some of the fussier bits of philosophy of language for the moment – a word means something real and shared. Like, we know what a table is because all of us have experience with the physical objects we call “tables.” In hyperreality, though, the word table doesn’t have a referent to physical tables. Instead, imagine a person who was thrust into a computer role-playing game as an infant, say, Fallout 3. In the game, tables are immovable, indestructible objects! To that person, a table would have no shared referent to the rest of us whose idea of tables is inextricably bound up with physical objects we use in day-to-day life.
A real-world example of hyperreality is parasociality. A human person in a parasocial relationship doesn’t know the person but only their curated media-friendly persona. A specific example of this is, I believe, the relationship Swifties have with Taylor Swift. Swift is known, amongst her fans, for being emotionally accessible and relatable, but she’s always been a hyper-attractive and wealthy person – her father was a stockbroker for a major house, and her mother worked for a mutual fund as a marketing exec; Swift was not only a child of extraordinary privilege from the jump but had youthful access to all the tricks of marketing – which isn’t very much like her fans at all. They do not get on their private planes to watch their NFL boyfriend play while surrounded by a cloud of paparazzi. Yet, they are sure that Swift is emotionally authentic and accessible, which is a marketing ploy. (I’m not hating here, she’s a remarkable woman. It must be incredibly hard to juggle being a ruthless businesswoman managing a billion-dollar franchise while coming off as accessible to people all over the world while getting into a string of high-profile relationships to provide fodder for upcoming albums! I’m just saying that I can see the hyperreality about her persona to create parasocial relationships with her fans.) Of course, the same could be said of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and a thousand others.
At the same time, we are also victims of hypernormalization. That’s the state where things have gotten so batshit crazy that, out of sheer exhaustion and option paralysis, everyone just goes about their normal business. There’s a meme that points out this attitude:
THIS IS FINE. Everything is on fire (which is almost literally true these days), but it is fine. That’s a better description of hypernormalization than I could ever give!
Together, they’re the simulacronorm. Living in a hyperreal world and acting like it’s all normal, unaware of how fucking weird and destructive it is because you’re also in an algoloop trap.
Echonormality: The kind of hypernormalization and hyperreality that occurs to people who are stuck in an online echo chamber. Its characteristics are people who are in online spaces where performative value signaling is used as a mechanism to ensure ideological conformity and, crucially, bring those values into offline social spaces. Because it is hyperreal and hypernormal, people caught in echonormality are both unable to communicate with others in other online spaces – since the performance of online virtues is narrowly applicable to specific communities – and those offline while demanding the same kind of total agreement required to succeed in online spaces. It is the intersection of an echo chamber’s hyperreality with hypernormal behavior patterns shaped by the echo chamber. (Infinite recursion loops are a feature of hyperreality.)
Algoloop trap: It’s how you get caught in the echo chamber. Through social media manipulation, people become sorted into narrow ideological groupings online. But part of the algoloop trap is that even when offline, one demands meatspace peers to conform to online values with the same performativity as online – aka, echonormality. When offline communities don’t immediately offer enthusiastic support for the person’s hyperreal beliefs because that’s insane to those not caught in the algoloop trap, the online person tends to retreat back to ideologically sorted but safe online communities. Thus, the loop closes, and the trap snaps shut.
Algofog: The mental fog created by echo chambers. Not just the hyperreality and hypernormality of it all but all the other negative traits experienced by people who spend a lot of time on social media: they’re more depressed, anxious, risk-adverse, and withdrawn. They’re the ones stuck to their phones in the middle of a friendly outing, unable to disconnect for a couple of hours, who talk about people they’ve never met like they’re good friends while ignoring their family and offline friends, even when they’re present.
Feel free to use them all! If any of them go big, I just want it known that I invented them! ME! Bwahahahaha! If you have any more, I’ll add them and link them to you!
Notes
(1) When I was younger, I clumped much of this under the term “anticommunication,” which I defined as communication that was grammatically correct and superficially relevant but also muddying the waters of communication. Gaslighting is a similar concept, but anticommunication doesn’t necessarily arise from an intent to deceive. Now, I see anticommunication as part of hyperreality where the parties aren’t able to communicate because they no longer have common linguistic reference points despite speaking the same language. Since I am, apparently, now in the business of copyrighting words, I thought it was relevant!
(2) I already missed one Internet term that went wide because of me! I believe I am the first person to use HGOGA to mean “hot girl-on-girl action.” Not again! I’m marking this shit down!