Playing the wrong game

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On March 25th, a California jury delivered the most consequential verdict in the history of Big Tech to date, when it found Meta and Google liable for deliberately engineering their platforms to addict children. By targeting platform design rather than content, plaintiffs’ attorneys found a way around the federal shield that has protected Silicon Valley for decades, setting a precedent that could end social media as we know it.

A generation raised entirely on smartphones may gotten there first. If a recent NYT article is to believe, they are rejecting social media, switching to dumbphones, deleting apps, and reclaiming their attention, out of sheer clear-eyed understanding how these platforms are designed to exploit them. But going analog is both a trend and a privilege — not unlike Emma Grede’s limited time with her kids — and for every person who can afford to opt out, there are more who remain trapped by their smartphone.

The shift is not just social and cultural, but also commercial.

Brands, who had years to perfect the ways to reach of the most coveted demographic via organic and paid social media are now targeting algorithm, not humans. To believe that social media is still a place where people proactively share things with each other is naive at best and uninformed at worst.

The most culturally influential, financially valuable, taste-making, high-value consumers are drifting away from social media, and they do not seem to be coming back. They went somewhere harder to reach: private communities, live events, physical retail, word of mouth, books, zines, entertainment, newsletters. Spaces that require intention to enter rather than an algorithm to stumble into and where attention is given rather than harvested.

So, who exactly are brands creating their social media content for?

There is a large audience of scrollers rather than buyers, algorithmically captured rather than genuinely engaged, slow to convert. Optimizing for their attention is expensive, ineffective and counterproductive.

More importantly, if being offline is the ultimate status symbol and the flip phone is a coveted cultural product, a brand’s aggressive social presence can read as both desperate and obsolete. Being everywhere on social media actively undermines its desirability.

Social media role’s in the cultural economy is progressively demoted from the center of gravity to just another commodity channel: noisy, crowded, and devoid of the actual community tastemakers who actively — and intimately — shape what everyone else eventually wants.

In the “where we think social influence happens” and “where social influence actually happens” dichotomy, there are two types of content: algorithmic and community-building.

Behind the paywall is the in-depth analysis of two types of content: zeitgeist-driven, responsive, algorithmic content and brand equity- and community-building content, and their strategic implications.