What happened to social media?

My feed has become content… not community. I barely see what my real friends are going on about and I’m more frequently seeing ads or posts from people who I don’t know, but the algo thinks I’d be interested in. I’ve been thinking about this even more since reading James O’Sullivan‘s essay, The Last Days of Social Media, in Noema. His argument isn’t that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn or X are disappearing… it’s that they’ve become something fundamentally different from what they originally promised… I feel that too. We used to log on to see what people were doing… now we log on like it’s a TV show.

The feed used to be people… now it’s a machine.

There was a significant shift when social media moved from the social graph (people we know and follow) to the interest graph (content the algorithm believes we will find interesting). It was a remarkable technological achievement. Platforms became extraordinarily effective at predicting (and learning) what would keep us scrolling. They became entertainment engines… advertising platforms… influencer marketplaces… and now, distribution networks for content created by machines.

The social part got lost along the way.

Brands and creators have been complicit in this transformation. For years, we’ve been chasing the same metrics the platforms wanted us to chase. More followers… impressions… views… engagement. We built marketing strategies around the same traditional metrics we used from the mass media era. And here we are… the platforms won the attention war… but may have lost the relationship. And now AI is making this all impossible to ignore. We’ve entered an era where machines can generate content, create synthetic personalities, populate comment sections and manufacture engagement at a scale that’s difficult to comprehend (if you haven’t read about how Michael Smith used AI-generated music and armies of automated bots to manufacture billions of streams… and millions of dollars in fraudulent royalties across streaming platforms, you need to). The Dead Internet Theory (which, at one point sounded like a conspiracy) now sounds like a description of user experience. Search results filled with manufactured content… social feeds overflowing with AI… automated comments… fake followers… synthetic influencers… real people pushing rage bait or click nonsense… the list goes on and on… everything is a hustle.

The internet still has real people… the human signal is simply getting harder to find.

Which brings me back to The Intimacy Economy. For the past two decades, we’ve largely operated in an Attention Economy. The objective was to capture as much attention as possible and then figure out how to monetize it. Bigger audiences meant bigger opportunities. Scale was the prize. But what happens when engagement becomes increasingly easy to manufacture? What happens when content goes infinite… and engagement becomes increasingly disconnected from human interest? This next phase isn’t just about reach… it’s about context. We’re moving from attention to intimacy… scale to trust… … audience size to audience fit… virality to belonging… public performance to private relationships… and algorithmic discovery to human recommendation. From “how many” to “who” (a concept I shared in my first book, Six Pixels of Separation, circa 2009). We’re already seeing hints of what The Intimacy Economy looks like… people are finding connection in newsletters… WhatsApp groups… Discord communities… niche forums… direct messages… private networks… local gatherings… and hybrid experiences that begin digitally but become meaningful in person. These aren’t new technologies. Some are really old ideas wrapped in digital interfaces. What makes them interesting is that they’re often more intentional. You choose to subscribe… you choose to participate… you know who is in the conversation… or want to meet other with that interest.

Context is becoming incredibly valuable.

I’m not suggesting that smaller automatically means better. A community of fifty people can be completely disengaged. An audience of millions can have an extraordinary relationship with a creator or brand. Intimacy isn’t about the size of the audience. It’s about the strength of the relationship. We’ve spent years asking how to reach more people. Maybe we should be asking whether the people we’re reaching actually care? Whether they trust us? Whether they would notice if we disappeared from their feeds? Whether the relationship exists beyond whatever an algorithm decides to show them?

The future isn’t necessarily less digital.

It may simply be less public… less performative… and less dependent on the feed (which warms my infovore heart). It’s a normal reaction… the more synthetic our digital experiences become… the more valuable genuine human context becomes. And, yes, AI can help a brand scale and deliver a much more personalized and relevant message to a massive audience… that’s one opportunity in The Intimacy Economy… but personalization and intimacy are not necessarily the same thing.

The other big opportunity is figuring out how to matter more to the right people.

This (and some other topics) is what we discussed on CJAD 800 AM this week.