Passive influencers are destructive influencers
We’re living through a time of rapid acceleration of solutions to local and global problems.
In the words of Will Gibson, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Unregulated, neoliberal capitalism was purported to ensure a perfectly functioning free market, and efficient direction of capital to the best* projects, but ultimately has resulted in a highly inefficient system dominated by huge companies, billionaires and virtual monopolies.
Similarly, the social media space was supposed to positively connect us together, mix communities and increase the efficiency with which worthwhile voices and projects are discovered. On the contrary, unregulated, it now breeds tribalism and smothers even the most important voices. Even the Cambridge University press office now seriously struggles to get their biggest stories into the media, and when they do, hardly anyone even reads them.
We are intelligent creatures, and we can create systems that check and balance our civilisation, but we need to create and strengthen the institutions that can do so.
The longer we pretend that we can choose single metrics like “money”, “likes”, “shares” to optimise our world, the deeper this hole will become.
For now, anyone with either a platform or inordinate amounts of wealth (or both) who isn’t using what they have to support important projects perhaps doesn’t realise that their passive state is actively bringing about the decline of civilisation.
*Of course “best” here is only measured through the ultra-narrow lens of “profit”!
