How Twitter is destroying the collective

Twitter is a social swinger that has inscribed in the daily the “little phrase”. But the little phrase is vilified by all observers concerned about ethics and transparency. Taken out of context, it truncates the opinion in which it is pronounced, sometimes to the point of representing the opposite. Nasty manipulation that should have disappeared, as a bias of expression? On the contrary, it has become institutionalized. Which shows us, among other things, that…

The show won its war against the truth

We are all perfectly conditioned by the society of the spectacle. The last free minds died. The media stream is a psychotropic drug administered continuously. Its concentration is so stable that it prevents us from thinking in isolation. Connected zombies. The dependent mind no longer knows how to look for its sensation of reward elsewhere than in scandalization, hypertrophied contrast, the incredibly true. But as very little truth is incredible, the news is most often false, simply made up with a veneer of truth.

The veneer rarely lasts more than a few days. Doesn’t matter. Who cares today to admit that she was wrong? Each wave of news engulfs the previous one and washes its traces. The mind no longer holds anything back since its digital assistants do it. No past resides in our heads anymore. The impression of remembering becomes illusory. It is in fact the expectation that a future event will remind us of the past. Instead of maintaining an existence of its own, our memory becomes suspended by the stream of media that will arrive at us.

Cerebral fast food

This makes it even easier to manipulate our minds. How could they verify the relevance of the information that comes to them since their memory has not yet occurred? The media stream contains not only the news, but also the entire way it should be interpreted.

It is in this context of decrebration that networks such as Twitter thrive. What’s easier to swallow than a tweet? It causes a minimum of fatigue for the mind. The spicy news is swallowed like a peanut during an aperitif. We do not hesitate to bake them in handfuls. Digested quickly and effortlessly. The emotion arises instantly. The brain is happy. No need to consume more than a few micrograms of glucose to get a reward sensation. Why bother for hours thinking in these conditions? The tweet has settled in every corner of our inner world, like the largest mental fast-food chain.

Losing face-to-face sincerity

The biases that make the tweet truncated are well known. It is devoid of any body language that could inform us better. When the ‘little phrases’ are spoken face-to-face, whether at a bar counter or at a social gathering, we immediately see Who they are coming from. What is not anyone. She contains the collective opinion of herself. Let me explain :

Is body language innate or learned? Both, one given the other being the story of our socialization. My mind, born as a simple “thinking body” gradually created an image of itself from others. This opinion is displayed in the attitude. Against my will, I show the collective’s opinion of me to those who do not yet know it. Whether this opinion is right or wrong does not matter in this case, since it is not intrinsically mine. I admit what other people think of me. Body language marks a kind of sincerity towards the collective and oneself. It prevents you from rigging your own image at leisure. This sincerity does not exist in a tweet.

Freedom of pressure

The biggest and most false advertisement sits on Twitter’s sign: the network would be the protector of freedom of expression! Protector of permission to fake reality, yes. Freedom of pressure. Producer of instant show, in short, and of the most mediocre quality. Spiteful seed dispenser. But then would our species, which adores it, be spiteful?

The nasty, toxic, jealous, slanderous, is above all a hyper-individualist. This is what Twitter flatters in us: the individualist. Under the false universal value of being free to express ourselves, Twitter encourages us to be individual. “The universal” must come from me rather than from others. In the permanent conflict between our soliTary part —I am an individual— and our soliDary part —I belong to— Twitter presses heavily, repeatedly, on the T of the soliTarian, causing a deep imbalance in our mind. The true collective dissolves, replaced by the one that each of us would like to see happen.

Inseparable conflict

The isolated individual has no chance of achieving her ends. No possible winner in the conflict between individual and the whole. They are indissolubly linked, two sides of the same coin. By taking advantage in too many individuals, the soliTary share always ends up reinforcing the soliDary in others, and vice versa. The reign of ‘every man for himself’ creates collectivist religions; the suffocating egalitarian regime creates anarchic revolutions. Democracy, however, is a good balance. Why is it threatened?

Precisely because phenomena like Twitter excessively excite individualism, encouraging our free will to encroach largely on that of others, to refuse the majority vote, to make the collective a collection of individuals. But whoever confuses the two has understood nothing about the nature of the collective. It is formed by what is similar in us with all others. The Whole is an independence that does not belong to us and yet is part of us. Ignoring it is mental schizophrenia.

A network of attractors is not a whole

Failing to completely destroy the collective, Twitter pushes its fragmentation to the maximum: it is groupism. The general interest of humanity has faded, replaced by that of clans, opinion groups. Their separation is clear-cut. They don’t talk to each other anymore. The hypothetical world organization of nations, which was emerging in the last century, is being replaced by an increasing fragmentation of these nations. The hierarchy collapses because it hinders individual claims. Twitter creates eight billion personal baronies, associated by circumstantial interests.

The truth, when there is an authentic collective, can spread everywhere. Becoming universal. Unifying humanity. Only way to solve its biggest problems. Would Twitter, by connecting all humans, be the possible instrument of such success? It’s the opposite. By sanctifying each individual opinion, by prioritizing the soliTary at the expense of the soliDary, Twitter creates insurmountable barriers to truth. It is fragmented into contradictory aspects. Each aspect frolics within a group, locally reinforcing the impression of personal freedom, muzzling that of the collective, which loses any chance to evolve.

Sects spring up and multiply. Humanity is stagnating, as a species. Technologies are booming, human social values are in decline. Technological advances, fewer and fewer humans benefit. This is obvious in the field of health but we are not aware of it, fascinated as we are by our latest model of smartphone and the permanent spectacle that springs from it.

A Muskled Twitter makes a twit¹Tasty note: “twit”, among our Quebec friends, means “stupid person”. In Quebec, they have already understood that Twitter often means ‘network of idiots’.

Twitter is of course not the only network involved and can be improved.²Improve Twitter? A clear distinction should be made between the de facto tweet and the opinion tweet. The first helps to build personal social and mental hierarchy. The second destroys it and replaces it with prepared opinion., but it has become caricatured with the travesty that Elon Musk has just made. Here is an assumed autistic, techno genius and mediocre empath, who explains what freedom of expression is. Human relations are the notorious domain of his incompetence, but he becomes for us the teacher. An extreme soliTary mind would like to teach us soliDarity. Amazing, isn’t it?

And yet on Twitter, the pill is swallowed, like the others. Certainly Musk’s body language would better inform us of the true nature of his speech, but which of his followers met him? And who above all could disregard his power to judge him as he is? This is also the interest of the hierarchy: to be judged in the circle of one’s equals and not by a crowd of fans…

To save Gaia is to make humanity such an integrated entity

After this dark article there will be another more encouraging one on how to save the collective. In short, it is a question of reducing the weight of hierarchies on individual interests, but not by reducing the former to the benefit of the latter. This makes hierarchies even more rigid, or else the collective disintegrates and society collapses —this is the threat to the heavily tweeted West. On the contrary, hierarchies must be extended, multiplied, made more flexible, which makes it possible for everyone to fit into them. Human swimmer, who goes up the hierarchical current thanks to her individual efforts, lets herself be carried back if she is tired.

Everyone wants to impose themselves as a Whole, but the Whole sees us each different, changing. An inseparable conflict, an engine of human reality from which we cannot escape.

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