From social media challenges to mass formation
From social media challenges to mass formation
The atomization created by addictive social media like the 'Roman Empire trend' is a direct threat to our survival.
Poor, landless men in ancient Rome were known as the proletariat. The word literally translated to “producers of offspring”. Proletariats were not slaves; they were, however, the lowest-ranking Roman citizens.
Slaves did most of the work, leaving the proletariat with little opportunity for productive employment. To keep them appeased, Rome’s leaders offered the proletariat free food and diverted them with entertaining spectacles. Hence the term “bread and circuses”.
But chances are — if you’re a straight, white, American man — you already know this. Chances are you think about the Roman Empire all the time if a new social media trend is to be believed.
In the trend on TikTok, women record interactions with their husbands or boyfriends in which they ask them how often they think about the Roman Empire or to share the last time they thought about it. Based on their answers, if you haven’t been thinking about the Roman Empire as frequently as every day or at least three to four times a month, you're doing it wrong. The men in these videos are serious in their answers, attempting to defend their responses as completely normal when their partners are shocked to learn what a huge part of their interior lives this historical period plays.
The whole thing seems to have started with the following post in August, leading to hundreds of millions of views on countless creators’ accounts.
We know… it’s stupid, right?
Trends like these are today’s bread and circuses. In fact, if you’re familiar with post-modern concepts, you might even consider this ‘meta’ bread and circuses. That is bread and circuses about bread and circuses. Jean Baudrillard would likely be quite enamored of this.
These simulacra distract us from our mundane existences, from the ever-tightening control grid, and from the constant whittling away of our decency, liberty, and justice.
While this trend is just asinine, other social media “challenges” have been far more sinister, pushing boundaries in absurd and dangerous ways in pursuit of likes and attention. A young man apparently recently lost his life from eating a spicy treat for the Paqui ‘one chip’ challenge.
Why do people participate in social media challenges, even when they border on the bizarre or dangerous? The answer often lies in basic human psychology. The quest for social validation, peer pressure, and the desire for attention play pivotal roles. Maybe they need the dopamine hit that comes with likes, shares, and comments or they cannot resist the allure of online fame and recognition. Maybe it’s all just a data collection psy-op.
Psychologist Mattias Desmet talks about the digital depression of lonely masses. “In the digital society of the future – in some respects, the near future – people work, party, play and make love online, and even eat digitally printed food,” he said in a June 2023 Substack post.
Desmet describes the “insidious toll” that replacing real social situations with artificial ones has taken in recent centuries and decades. ”It is responsible for the most destructive psychosocial phenomenon of the Enlightenment: it ‘atomizes’ the human being, disconnecting us from our social and natural environment and plunging us into solitude.”
This is more than just sad. This atomization is a direct threat to our survival.
Desmet says:
Isolated, atomized subjects tend, especially under the influence of media and social media narratives, to suddenly coalesce into a new kind of group: a mass. This kind of group formation makes people radically incapable of thinking critically about the stories presented to them, willing to radically sacrifice everything they hold dear, and deeply intolerant of any voice that deviates of what the masses believe in.
The masses of yesteryear (i.e. the crusades, the witch hunts, etc.) were physical masses – the masses consisted of a group of people physically coming together. The current masses, on the other hand, consist of individuals who, each in digital solitude, are infused by the mass media with similar representations and stories. It is this lonely mass that, together with its leaders, forms the backbone of the ultimate symptom of our rationalistic society: the totalitarian state. The big question we have to answer as a culture is therefore this: what can transform the lonely masses into a society in the true sense of the word – a group of people connected from person to person; where the collective does not destroy the individual, but guarantees a space in which it can flourish as a singular being.
What can you do today to prioritize real human connections in your life? How many meaningful, offline relationships do you still have? Answer honestly, then do something to strengthen or build those bonds today. As Desmet says, “Not only are we replacing human interactions with digital ones; we are replacing humanity itself.”