The goal is to regain peace & harmony without negativity
So this is what my friends are sharing on Twitter, hoping no doubt to fight our technological trap with the weapons of beautiful nature herself:
I'm asking those who love the outdoors to post a picture YOU took. Just a pic. No description. The goal is to regain peace and harmony without negativity. Please copy the text, put a picture on YOUR page, and let's look at these beautiful pictures.
If you change a few words, it’ll sound like a scam. Or if you change the words around again, it might be a Protestant church, probably a more charismatic one... There’s something about the will to believe that people are incredibly excited about. I respectfully dissent.
I’d rather we had a better twitter & substack, & beauty is surely part of that. How can we mix the personal appeal & the mass reach, the twin problems of modern life! What really comes out of this “virtue signaling” is network effects & scaling effects: We’re marveling at what we can do, furthering our habit of relying on technologies we don’t understand… Peace, harmony, no negativity is what social media was always about, the only problem, people have found, is that it doesn’t work. I’m taking suggestions in the comments, by the way.
For my part, I won’t try to start a movement of people deploring other people’s willful blessings. I won’t start a myth-busting or debunking campaign to play along with the more earnest people. I don’t even want to upset my friends for behaving this way by pointing to the defects of vanity. I just want to point out that there are probably ways to think of social media as social that nevertheless don’t suffer from this failure. It probably starts from things you share with a few people, not potentially billions.