Social networking is the closest thing we’ve invented to a “snow crash” in the Neal Stephenson sense. A snow crash was something you downloaded off Stephenson’s 80s version of an advanced net, and viewing it took down not only your computer terminal, but your mind. It was a virus that affected both the OS and the CNS. Social networking software latches onto the fact that humans are incredibly specialized to pay attention to each other. We get nearly every need we have as an organism out of a web of attention created with other humans. Our ideas of nightmares often involve being trapped far from other people. Solitary confinement is one of the most torturous punishments we’ve ever invented. Exile has often been considered worse than death. We have evolved specialized brain functions for facial processing and language acquisition. We are defined, explicitly and implicitly, in terms of each other. We are fathers and sisters and employees and citizens and members. This effect is biological and cultural, and they reinforce each other fiercely. The hyper-sociality of humanity is both genetic and epigenetic, and it runs through everything we do. Networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and their antecedents, have infected our computers and phones, usually pulling out our contacts and behaviors and traveling like social worms. They also crash the bit of our CNS that manages attention. They slow us and our machines down tremendously, and we often treat them like drugs. But they also give us astounding powers and deep pleasure. We are coordinating and connecting beyond anything we’ve ever done before, fulfilling a human social appetite that feeds on itself. Someone who needs money in Paris, TX, health information in Montero, Bolivia, or loving support in Lawdar, Yemen, can get these things in seconds from another person in Perth, Australia. In theory that’s just the internet, but in practice, those interactions are contained within the software systems that allow people to socialize. Right now the three biggest places on the net to socialize are Facebook, Twitter, and the Chinese network Qzone. None of these are socially or politically acceptable companies.

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