“To be “good” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded.”
– Ray Dalio

Social networks are a phenomenon that has existed for centuries. Humans are inherently social. We organize in tribes to collectively achieve ends for which we would individually not have the means. This includes hunting, protecting, and mating among economizing.

In fact, all these activities happen in networks. Mathematically, a network is nothing more than a set of objects that are connected to each other. And while animals usually stay in small tribes, humans have leveraged technology to build social networks with a cardinality in the billions.

And although the substance of social networks has not changed significantly, the form has evolved tremendously over the past decades. What onsite has been your tribe, online is now is the world.

An Escape Hatch from Reality

Falling for the hindsight bias, one could claim to have easily predicted social media. Evolutionary, as soon as humans got their physical and safety needs covered, they started climb further up Maslow’s pyramid of needs and engage in gossip. This is where we detach from reality.

Social media is the most efficient and scalable way to spread gossip and to fulfill humans’ higher needs of belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Everybody feels the dopamine spike when opening the news feed, receiving likes, or posting expressive content. Variable Reward Schedules keep us hooked.

When I was a kid, everybody was talking about Facebook. The platform that made the web social – or so we thought. Facebook started with dating, directly addressing our need for love, and belonging. Since then, social media has evolved, integrating evermore modalities, akin to current advancements in generative AI.

Facebook and services like the AOL Instant Messenger all started text based. Only the consumerization of cameras and the increase in bandwidth allowed it to both capture and retrieve image data. Instagram capitalized these inflection points, allowing us to share our photo gallery with friends.

Interestingly, while we try to capture evermore of the human experience in digital form, reality seems to be distorted. People apply filters, use the delta between capturing and posting media for content editing and only upload the best out of a dozen pictures they capture. Reality seems to change into pseudo-reality – or is this a new reality that we see emerging?

Reality is undergoing a Metamorphosis

Social media made explicit what has previously been implicit via the Social Graph. Instagram stores our private network, while LinkedIn takes hold of our business network. Thus, connections became an asset on the web, that can be monetized. This gave rise to many Macro- and Microinfluencers at the tail end of human interests which fundamentally transformed marketing.

What has been a hobby on land, can now become a career in the cloud. There are many examples of people making a living out of the smallest niches imaginable. Social media provides them a medium to promote their services and first foremost to self-promote. Furthermore, social media allowed us to feel close emotionally, even though we are far away geographically.

Whichever improvements social media may has brought, it is debatable of whether the net balance is positive. The movie “The Social Network” demonstrates this with statistics on increased suicide rates among teenagers as well as showcasing the consequences of isolation and miscommunication. Instead of reflecting reality, social media has become a platform for the fake – from fake personas to fake news.

Despite the emergence of counter-movements, represented by platforms such as BeReal, the main trend line remains intact. If the fake becomes our new reality (and Meta may pursue that), we will end up mentally ill and delusional, not being able to make thoughtful decisions in the real world. There is only one way to avoid this scenario: social media needs a reality check; in other words, it must be grounded in reality.

AR is Social Media’s Final Form

While AR will bring along the frontend revolution of this new social media, I want to point out that blockchain and AI will be important technologies on the backend to establish verification mechanisms. An early example of this can be seen on X with Community Notes, other examples are illustrated in one of my upcoming articles on “The Case for an Identity Layer on the Internet”.

Following the trendline of social media, I am confident, however, that the next big social network will be AR-based. Consumerization of AR glasses and higher bandwidth will once again allow us to capture and retrieve new types of content, thus creating new experiences. This is already starting, with the Apple Vision Pro being able to capture TrueDepth content as well as standards such as WebXR allowing to render 3D images and videos on spatial devices.

AR will bridge the gap between the physical and the digital. It will be the portal to a new form of a multiverse experience, finally merging the digital and real world after more than 40 years of parallel existence.