Ever since the days of MySpace, social media has become ingrained in the lives of billions of people. What Tom, and then Mark never understood when they started all of this was that while of course they could build these huge social media networks, but the real question was should they?

When you have so many people communicating out of context, in a medium that allows you to doctor that communication, copying and re-pasting anything they want to have happened in any order they can create, ranking their “top 12 friends” which in turn alienates their other friends, blocking people from communication indiscriminately, ghosting, silent treatments, anonymous bullying, harassment, stalking, screenshotting, call-outs, rants, anxiety, depression, mania, narcissism, victimizing and blaming, entitlement; the list goes on and on and on. There are so many horrible behaviors in this world and so many of them have either been created or exacerbated by the internet and especially social media.

How many enemies do we all have? How many friends do we really have though? Check your friend lists. I’m sure the majority of you all can see some people you either don’t really like, or know don’t really like you. These lines have been blurred because when someone blocks you on social media you don’t initially know it. You see your follower count go down and you don’t understand who on earth could actually hate you enough to block you. You feel hurt, or scared or confused by it. Maybe later on down the line you’ll see that person with that Add Friend button next to their name and you’ll get an OH moment. Then you’ll think to yourself, “well I didn’t really know them that well anyway”, or the ”What did I do?” moment, but mainly the “THAT BITCH, HOW DARE THEY???” kicks in. It’s that third reaction that cements them as an “enemy” in your mind. It’s fight or flight. It’s the “if they’re not with me, they’re against me” mentality.

Don’t even get me started on the people you don’t even know on your friend lists. The people you meet for a minute and then click Add Friend or accept an incoming request. Here’s a great example: celebrities. How many of you right now have some kind of a celebrity on your friend list? Now, how many of you are actual friends with that celebrity? How many of you have called them on the phone and had a conversation with them? How many of you have gone out for drinks with them? Been to their house? Hung out with them for around 3 minutes after waiting in line for an hour at a pop-culture convention to pay $100 for their autograph and a selfie? That last one is probably more along the lines of the people reading this. I’m sorry to say this to all of you but that celebrity, is not your friend. That person you met for five minutes and added you isn’t either. Acquaintance, minor at best, but if you believe those people are your friends, unfortunately you don’t really understand the concept.

So you have billions of people on the planet living on their social media. These are people’s lives. These are human beings. And in order for this entire network to run, you need support. Tech support of course, but that is all mainly algorithms and robots. You can shake your phone and report what isn’t working and that gets prioritized by an algorithm and may or may not get addressed in the next update.  But where’s the emotional support? Where are the humans behind the scenes helping the billions you assimilated into your network? You created this giant cluster hive of human beings and you never once thought humans should be running it? It’s self-sufficient, yes, but is it efficient enough to support the human race? All signs point to no. If you have this many people on your network you should have the biggest team of humans and experts of humanity on the planet running it. Why? Because people are literally losing their humanity to social media.

What does this have to do with The Variant? What does this have to do with comic books, or cosplay, or conventions? As a creator using social media on a daily basis I see all of this. As a 50 year old human being who has been around since before the internet, I’ve watched the slow (and then fast) decline in the humanity of not just people around me, but people in general. People are limiting their socializing to their phones. People aren’t communicating and when they do, most of the time it’s in a toxic way. People are losing their minds obsessing over social media. People are losing their humanity living in their little virtual bubbles, never learning how to properly communicate or deal with other actual human beings. There’s literal generations of humans on the planet that were and are currently being raised by robots, algorithms and AI and in turn becoming robots. When this was all created, when this was all started, it was the creation of someone who may not have been the best model on social behavior. Just because Mark Zuckerberg would behave this way doesn’t mean everyone should. Except they have no choice on his platform.

So where do we go from here? Do the Zuckerbergs of the world read this and decide to try and do better? Doubtful. All we can do is start the discussion and either decide collectively as a race to leave this platform or to demand this platform do something better for humanity. Even then the chances are slim to none that anything will ever change. When our humanity is circling the drain, there’s really only ever one outcome.