Goodbye Facebook, We Can Only Hope
20 years after Facebook promised to connect the world, the social media era increasingly feels culturally exhausted and creepy.
Social Media's Evolution
One of my first postings on this site asked a simple question: why create another corner of the internet at all? Facebook, and later the broader social media ecosystem it inspired, promised universal connection, infinite sharing, and frictionless community. Two decades later, the results appear far less utopian. Social media normalized surveillance as entertainment, replaced conversation with engagement metrics, and transformed public discourse into a continuous performance shaped by outrage, clicks, and algorithmic visibility.
Early defenders of social media argued that these platforms would strengthen democracy, reconnect communities, and democratize information. Some of that optimism briefly appeared justified during the late 2000s. Long term outcomes, however, proved far more corrosive. Local newspapers weakened as advertising revenue consolidated into platform monopolies. Public discourse fragmented into algorithmic tribes. Rage consistently outperformed nuance. Attention itself became the product. Social validation turned quantifiable through likes, shares, followers, and engagement loops engineered to maximize time on platform rather than civic or personal well being.
Attending AI+ Expo 2026 this week felt symbolic in that context. Booth after booth from OpenAI, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Google projected momentum, strategic clarity, and institutional scale. Artificial intelligence was framed as infrastructure, scientific acceleration, enterprise transformation, national competitiveness, and industrial capability. Massive language models, sovereign AI systems, robotics, and next generation compute dominated the exhibit hall. NVIDIA in particular exerted a gravitational pull, surrounded by discussions of superchips, AI factories, and strategic partnerships with Google that reinforced who currently occupies the center of the AI ecosystem.
Then there was Meta.
In a hall defined by frontier models and industrial scale infrastructure, Meta felt oddly muted and surprisingly small. Demonstrations focused on Ray-Ban smart glasses and experimental “smart concrete” concepts. The technology itself was sophisticated, yet strangely disconnected from the broader energy of the conference. A noticeable unease surrounded the exhibit booth. The glasses especially felt less like a vision of the future and more like a reminder of how normalized surveillance has become. Cameras embedded into ordinary social interaction no longer inspire wonder. They inspire caution.
Part of the discomfort came from the sense that the social media era may have reached its own form of peak cringe, a stage where technologies once marketed as liberating now feel performative, intrusive, and culturally exhausted.
Curiously, Meta’s potentially most important AI contribution barely appeared visible at all. Llama and the possibility of powerful local or institutional AI deployments may ultimately matter more than social feeds, smart glasses, or metaverse ambitions. Colleges, governments, and enterprises increasingly seek privacy, sovereignty, governance, and independence from centralized AI platforms. Yet Meta seemed unable, or perhaps unwilling, to articulate that larger institutional vision. In retrospect, the company that helped define the social media era may now struggle to explain its role in the next one.
Former Crystal Ice Manufacturing and Cold Storage Building, later the original Spaghetti Warehouse restaurant, Columbus, Ohio, 1891. Photograph by Eric D. Lipschutz, 2024. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
That contrast may reveal something deeper than a weak conference presence. The social media era appears to be ending not with dramatic collapse, but with cultural exhaustion. Younger users increasingly retreat into private group chats, niche communities, and fragmented digital spaces disconnected from the giant public feeds that once defined internet culture. Public posting itself feels diminished. Corporate brands still maintain social media accounts, yet the sense that these platforms shape a shared democratic commons has faded considerably.
Historically, major technology firms often lose cultural legitimacy before they lose revenue. Facebook remains enormously profitable, yet the company no longer appears to define the future in the way it once did. During the 2010s, Silicon Valley treated social connectivity as an unquestioned social good. By the mid 2020s, many people increasingly associate social media with anxiety, manipulation, polarization, performative identity, loneliness, and institutional distrust.
Ironically, artificial intelligence may accelerate that transition. AI systems increasingly mediate information directly rather than routing users through social networks. The center of gravity shifts away from feeds and toward agents, models, and conversational systems. If the smartphone defined the social media era, AI may define something closer to a post social media age.
One of my first posts questioned why one would deliberately create a smaller, quieter site in an internet dominated by massive platforms. The answer feels clearer now than it did then. Smaller spaces allow for reflection rather than performance. They encourage continuity rather than virality. They preserve authorship in a digital culture increasingly optimized for engagement extraction.
Perhaps the age of social media does not end with regulation, collapse, or scandal. Perhaps it simply fades into irrelevance as people quietly grow tired of it.
Further Reading
The Harvard Crimson (2003): “Hot or Not” Website Briefly Judges Students
The Harvard Crimson (2025): “Facemash Reloaded” and the DNA of Social Media
Futurism: “Meta Has Entered Its Death Spiral"
IBM Technology explores llama.cpp