The Illusion of Private Social Spaces

A quick note: I recently read an article about Gen Z’s shift away from public feeds to private social spaces. In these private spaces, their shopping behavior is being redefined, from brand discovery to sharing recommendations with friends.

The key point here is that there’s a subtle shift away from traditional social media. When I envision the future, I’ve always imagined a return to more private networks, especially considering the limited number of major social networks. These networks primarily differentiate themselves based on generational factors, which makes sense. Even as these networks introduced features for curating networks and protecting privacy, I still anticipated a shift where society as a whole, who have been fully engaged in this public social networking experiment for the past two decades, thirty years, and possibly forty years since we connected our computers to the internet and formed online networks, would eventually move back to more private spaces.

However, it’s important to note that there’s an assumption that these newly created private group chats are inaccessible, as if they’re only invite-only. This false assumption is supported by the illusion of privacy and inaccessibility, and this assumption is far from the truth, even if the group chat is “encrypted.”

I follow a simple rule guided by the principle “just do it,” which translates to “just publish.” Even before I publish this post on my website, I know that my work is being published in real-time on the cloud. Therefore, with each character I type, I’m publishing on the cloud, the internet, and this content is being processed by AI system(s) of some sort.

In fact, every document I create, before I jot down any thoughts or information, includes a copyright notice. I’m aware that even as I type, this is being monitored by some system. So, my rule of thumb for privacy and any private network or information is to keep it to myself. Literally.

I love these tools. They make me feel incredibly secure because they’re monitoring everything. However, I don’t fool myself into believing that anything that doesn’t remain in my own mind and body is truly private. We all live in the public sphere due to the pervasive nature of artificial intelligence. As my colleague once said, this is the worst this technology will ever be. Meaning, it’s only going to get better and more pervasive. Therefore, I simply publish. I keep truly private things private, and everything else might as well be shared publicly because the robots know all our secrets.

What I would love to see, and I’m witnessing some of the foundations being built for it, is what I refer to as Our Social Meta.

Look up in the sky it’s a bird, it’s a plane, nope. It’s a satellite. It sees everything. 📡

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