--- title: "The Last Days of Social Media." date: 2026-09-19 description: "But something in them is dying. The original promise is already dead. The illusion of authenticity is already dead. The idea that the algorithm is your friend i" author: "Petru Cojocaru" categories: - name: "Social platforms" url: "https://cojocarupetru.info/social-platforms.md" --- # The Last Days of Social Media. **The Last Days of Social Media. Or: What I Saw From My Window in Botoșani** --- My father died without ever having had a Facebook account. Not on principle. Not out of some considered conviction about the nature of the digital age. He simply never got round to it, or never felt the need — he was the sort of man who sorted things out face to face, with a hand on a spanner, a direct look, and a word given that stood in place of a written contract. Mechanics of his generation had no use for an "online presence." They had something more durable: a neighbourhood reputation, built decade by decade, from work done properly and from word of mouth. I think of him now when I unlock my phone and see what has become of the social networks in which I once, for a time, believed there might be something genuine. There isn't. Not any longer. --- **The Feed as Visual Desert** In the morning, before my son wakes and before I make coffee, I pick up the phone out of an inertia I no longer manage well. It is more muscular reflex than intention. Thumb on glass, scroll, scroll. What I see resembles a conveyor belt transporting identical goods repackaged in slightly different wrapping: ten posts featuring the same stock portrait and the same breathless "click here for something free," three replies from filter-smoothed avatars with identically inflated lips directing me towards "exclusive content," an advertisement for a cashback crypto card, a football clip in which the players move awkwardly, like puppets whose strings have been poorly calibrated. Between them, rarely, something human. A friend from school who has posted a photograph of his garden. A neighbour announcing he has changed his car. An acquaintance from the industry writing something about a project. These fragments of actual life are drowning in an ocean of content produced by algorithms, bots, and people who have adapted so thoroughly to the logic of machines that you can no longer tell where the person ends and the automation begins. This is what we are now: content among contents. Social networks were built on a romantic promise — that your friends who couldn't attend would see your wedding, that grandparents would know their granddaughter had taken her first steps into nursery, that people whom distance would otherwise have separated could remain in touch. It worked, for a while. I have my own memories from 2009 and 2010, when Facebook felt like a provincial market — crowded, noisy, but full of familiar faces, real conversations, a certain communal warmth that you could not have manufactured. That's gone. What remains is a visual desert with false oases. --- ## My Neighbours and the Gig Economy I live in a block of flats in Botoșani. Not in the centre, not on the outskirts — somewhere in the middle, in a transit neighbourhood where people have always worked hard and earned little. I know what my neighbours do because, in blocks of flats, privacy is partially illusory — conversations carry through thin walls, you notice the hours at which lights come on and go off, you meet people at the letterboxes or on the stairwell. Marius on the second floor gave up his job at a builders' merchant two years ago. He now delivers for a courier platform. He leaves at half past six in the morning with a thermal bag on his back. Sometimes I see him at ten in the evening still in his delivery jacket, climbing the stairs with heavy legs. I asked him once how it was going. He said: "It works, if you respect the algorithm." He wasn't joking. He spoke seriously, as one might speak of a creature with whom one has an unwritten arrangement. The algorithm rewards you if you are available during peak hours. The algorithm penalises you if you decline orders. The algorithm decides how much you earn on a Friday compared to a Monday. Marius has no employer. He has an algorithm. Ioana on the ground floor started doing manicures at home during the pandemic and discovered that if she posted attractive photographs on Instagram, clients came to her. So many that she left the salon where she had worked for eight years. She is now independent, but "independent" is a word that conceals a more complicated reality: she must post constantly, respond to messages at any hour, track trends, produce visual content that performs well within Instagram's algorithm. She told me she spends more time photographing and editing than she does actually working. "If I don't post for a week, I disappear," she says, with a matter-of-factness that I find quietly alarming. Dani on the third floor, directly above me, does graphic design as a freelancer. He takes commissions through international platforms. I sometimes hear him speaking English on the phone at eleven at night — clients in other time zones. He is good at what he does; I've seen his work. But he earns less than he would at a studio, because the platforms connecting him to clients take a commission, because he competes with designers from countries where the cost of living is far lower, and because he has nobody to negotiate with when rates drop. Three people, three versions of the same phenomenon: the gig economy, which promised freedom and delivered precarity — exactly as social networks promised connection and delivered exhaustion. The coincidence is not accidental. --- ## Technology as a Promise with Small Print There is a pattern which, once you have seen it, you cannot unsee: the major technology platforms enter people's lives with a generous promise couched in the language of freedom and community, and they exit — or remain — as extraction infrastructure. Facebook promised to reconnect you with lost friends. True, partly. But at the same time, it stole your attention, sold it to advertisers, manipulated your feed to keep you on the platform as long as possible, and now, in 2025, your feed is a carpet of content generated by bots and accounts optimised for engagement, not for you. Uber and Bolt promised the freedom to work when you liked and as much as you liked. True, partly. But at the same time, they transformed you into an employee without an employee's rights — bearing operational risk without the guarantees of an employment contract, dependent on an opaque algorithm that can cut your rates or suspend your account without any real right of appeal. Instagram promised Ioana she could build a business from her talent. True, partly. But at the same time, Ioana entered a visibility race that never ends, in which she must produce content not because she has something to say but because the algorithm penalises absence. My father would have spotted the scheme immediately. He knew — from mechanics, from neighbourhood life — that any business offering you something excessively generous at the outset has small print you read too late. There was a saying he had, the sort of thing you hear in rural Moldova and nowhere else: the ice man comes in autumn with sweeties and leaves with your purse full. I did not understand it as a child. I understand it now every time I open the app. --- ## The Bot-Girl and the Economy of Simulated Intimacy I will say something that may sound harsh but is simply an observation from reality: on today's social networks, a significant proportion of sexualised interactions — and I am not referring to explicit pornography but to that entire semi-world of attractive female accounts that follow you, respond to you with half-messages, and direct you towards paid content — is automated or semi-automated. This is not a hypothesis. It is a documented fact. Thousands of accounts on X, formerly Twitter, use photographs generated by artificial intelligence. Many content creators have automated their direct messages or delegated them to AI systems that simulate personal conversation. Some operators of such accounts work from places like Myanmar or other low-cost zones, managing dozens or hundreds of profiles simultaneously. The platform does not intervene so long as engagement remains high. This is, in truth, the gig economy taken to its extreme: you are no longer selling a service with body and time; you are selling a simulation of intimacy produced at industrial scale, with AI calibrating emotional proximity to precisely the degree required to keep the subscription active. But I want to pause before rushing too readily into moral condemnation — not because there is nothing to condemn, but because the story is more complicated. There are real women in this system, women who chose this path for reasons of economic survival rather than vocation, women trying to navigate a workplace without protections, without unions, without sick pay, without a pension. The platforms profit from their labour and offer nothing in return beyond access to a market. This is the gig economy with its face unmasked. And the men who enter this market? Many are genuinely lonely — not from some personal failing, but because loneliness has become a structural epidemic in our societies. The platforms did not create this loneliness. But they monetised it with a cold efficiency. --- ## Marius and the Courier Algorithm: a Parallel I return to Marius in his delivery jacket and to Ioana with her nails photographed in the natural light from her window, and I think that their story and the bot-girl story are not so different as they first appear. All three — Marius, Ioana, the content creator who may be a bot or may be a real person from Moldova managing ten accounts simultaneously — are caught in the same logic: a platform that has eliminated the friction between supply and demand, but has done so for its own benefit, not theirs. Marius optimises his schedule according to the peak hours of the courier algorithm. Ioana optimises her content according to the whims of the Instagram algorithm. The adult content creator optimises her simulated affection according to the data that maximises subscription retention. All three work harder than conventional employees. All three earn less than they would under a collective bargaining agreement. All three are instantly replaceable — Marius by another courier, Ioana by another nail account, the content creator by an account generated entirely by AI that neither sleeps nor asks to be paid. Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification: the process by which platforms first attract users with generous conditions, then attract business partners, and finally extract value from both categories whilst the quality of the service degrades progressively. Facebook applied enshittification to users. Uber applied it to drivers. Instagram is now applying it to Ioana. My father had a phrase for this kind of arrangement. He would have recognised it at once from the mechanics of it. --- ## Engagement in Free Fall There is a statistical detail which strikes me as significant beyond its technical figures: posts on Facebook and X now average a 0.15 per cent engagement rate. A fraction of a percentage. Which means that of a thousand people who see a post, one and a half interact with it. And yet people continue to use the platforms. Continue to post. Continue to consume. Not because they receive something in return in the traditional sense, but because the feed has become a mood-regulation device — you use it not to find something specific but to avoid something specific: silence, boredom, the thought that presses. My son is fourteen. I watch him sometimes with his phone, and I recognise in his expression something I have seen in my own: not joy, not curiosity, but a kind of functional numbness. Scrolling is not an activity; it is an anti-activity — a way of not being anywhere in particular. I talked to him about it. He said he knows it's fake, knows that most of the influencers he follows produce calculated content, knows there are bots everywhere. "And yet you keep going?" I asked. He shrugged: "It's easier." That is it exactly. It is easier. The platforms have invested billions and the sharpest minds of his generation in making it easier to stay than to leave. Non-participation has become, as one researcher puts it, a form of self-exile available only to those who can afford its costs. Marius cannot afford not to be on the courier platforms — that is where the work is. Ioana cannot afford not to be on Instagram — that is where the clients are. My son cannot afford not to be on TikTok — that is where his generation's vocabulary lives. This is the enclosure of the commons. The marketplace of ideas, the labour market, the market of relationships have relocated to private properties called "platforms," and if you are not there, you do not exist in the senses that matter practically. --- ## What Has Actually Died It is not social networks that are dying. They die slowly. They continue to exist like shopping centres from a transitional era — somewhat populated, somewhat dead, haunted by ghosts of interaction. What died earlier is the promise. The idea that the social internet would be a space for authentic encounter, undirected and unconstrained by commercial interests. The idea that the algorithm is your friend, that the platform is your tool. We now know that the algorithm is an optimisation system designed to maximise a metric — time spent, engagement, clicks — and that this metric does not coincide with your wellbeing. Sometimes it is diametrically opposed to it. I think of what Shoshana Zuboff argues: surveillance capitalism is not about providing you with services; it is about modifying your behaviour in ways that generate profits for others. You are not the platform's customer. You are the raw material. And Varoufakis adds another layer: technofeudalism, a structure in which the major platforms have transformed themselves into digital fiefdoms that collect "feudal rent" from everyone who operates on their territory. Marius pays rent through the commission on every order. Ioana pays rent through the attention she delivers free of charge to the platform in exchange for access to the client market. Even we, the ordinary users, pay rent with our data, our time, our attention. We believe we are using the platforms. The platforms are using us. --- ## Dani and the Value of Invisible Work Dani on the third floor showed me last week a proposal he had received from an international freelancing platform. An American client was offering for a graphic design project a budget smaller than the minimum hourly rate any comparable designer in Romania would accept. The reason: on the platform he competes with designers from Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan — countries where the same budget represents a decent income. The platform does not resolve this. The platform facilitates this global compression of prices, takes a commission from both sides of the transaction, and has no incentive to change the arrangement. Dani can accept the low rate — and in doing so enters the race to the bottom — or he can decline and lose the project. He has no third option on the platform. The third option would be to leave the platform, but that is where his clients are, where his visibility lives, where his portfolio is validated through reviews. It is the same trap as Ioana's with Instagram: you cannot leave without losing what you have built. This is, structurally, the same mechanism as in social networks. You build something on a property that does not belong to you, and at any moment the owner can change the rules. Facebook reduced the organic reach of business pages, forcing companies to pay for advertising. Instagram changed its algorithm multiple times, reducing the visibility of accounts that had built organic audiences. Freelancing platforms can at any moment change their commissions or ranking algorithms. Marius might discover tomorrow that the order-allocation algorithm has been adjusted and his monthly income has dropped by twenty per cent. This kind of power — the power to change the rules of the game without notice, without negotiation, without right of appeal — is the new feudal power. Varoufakis is not exaggerating. --- ## Weeds in the Digital Garden: a Brief Theology of the Desert There is, in the Orthodox tradition I absorbed involuntarily — through the atmosphere of Moldova, through Easters at my grandmother's, through the Sayings of the Desert Fathers which I read with half my attention in my early twenties — there is an idea of the desert as a place of struggle. The Desert Fathers did not go to the Thebaid to escape the world; they went to understand more clearly what they were struggling against. The desert was the place where you could see plainly what you were, without backdrops, without distractions. Social networks ought to be the opposite of the desert: places full, noisy, coloured, populated. And yet they produce the same state of discomfort that the monks describe when they speak of *acedia* — that torpor of the soul which is neither sadness nor joy but a functional void. I scroll and feel nothing in particular. Or I feel something vaguely negative — a slight irritation, a slight unease — that I cannot locate precisely. I do not know whether it is dissatisfaction with the content, or with myself for consuming it, or with the system that produced it. It is a diffuse condition from which you escape neither by continuing to scroll nor by stopping. Barsanuphius of Gaza, a desert hermit of fifteen centuries ago, said that the most dangerous demon is not the one that attacks you directly but the one that causes you to feel nothing. The *acedia* of your particular demon is deep boredom, the loss of meaning, the submersion in empty activity. I am not saying that social networks are a demon. I am saying that they produce a condition functionally similar to what the Desert Fathers described as the most dangerous: the condition of being simultaneously occupied and hollow. --- ## What My Father Saw and Will Never See My father repaired cars. Not new cars with complicated electronics and digital dashboards — old cars: Dacii, Romane, and later a few Volkswagens from the nineties. What he knew about cars was that you understand how a system works when you understand what happens when it fails. "Mechanics doesn't lie," he would say. "If something makes a noise, something's wrong. If it makes no noise but still doesn't work, you dig deeper." Social networks make a great deal of noise. But the noise is designed not as a warning signal but as background music. It keeps you in the waiting room, won't let you leave, and never calls you through to the surgery. My father would have repaired this. Or, more probably, he would have said that some things are not worth repairing. They deserve to be replaced. --- ## What Grows from the Ruins Somewhere, something different is already being built. Not one thing, but many small things: newsletters with loyal subscribers who read carefully, Discord servers with a few hundred people who actually know one another, federated platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky where the rules are transparent and portability of identity is possible, Substacks generating enough from a restricted community to sustain the work. It is not a revolution. It is more as though people, wearied by the crowded and noisy market, have begun seeking smaller, more specific markets where you know who is selling and who is buying. Ioana told me that most of her clients now come through direct recommendation rather than Instagram. She has started investing less in social media content and more in relationships with loyal clients who in turn bring other clients. "It's slower," she says, "but it's more stable." Marius has also joined several WhatsApp groups with other couriers from Botoșani, where they share information about good orders, clients who don't answer the door, the hours when the algorithm is more generous. They have created a human network laid over the algorithmic one. Dani connected through a colleague with several direct clients in Germany, for whom he now works without an intermediary platform — less certain, more cumbersome to manage, but with better rates and a direct relationship. All three — without having read any essay about "architectures of intention" or "de-enshittification" — arrived empirically at the same conclusion: direct relationships, however inefficient they may appear at first glance, are more durable than relationships mediated by a platform that wants something from you. --- ## Digital Literacy as Public Health My son knows that TikTok manipulates his feed. He knows that many of the influencers he follows produce calculated content and have no personal connection to the products they promote. He knows that photo filters alter faces and that what he sees is not reality. He knows all this and still watches. Two years ago, before he knew, he watched more. This is, I think, at least a form of progress. It does not solve the problem but it changes the relationship with it. There is a difference between being manipulated without knowing and being manipulated whilst knowing — you are no less manipulated in the second case, but you have a point of resistance, however fragile. The best thing I have been able to do with my son is talk to him concretely: how the recommendation algorithm works, why he sees what he sees, who profits from the time he spends on the platform, what data is collected. Not to frighten him, but to give us a shared language for a reality we both inhabit. Digital literacy is no longer optional in the sense that it was once not optional to understand how a contract worked before you signed it. We live in environments built by systems we did not choose, with metrics we cannot see, produced by companies whose interests we do not share. Understanding these systems is a form of public health, like vaccination or basic literacy. It does not protect you from every ill, but it changes the balance of forces. --- ## The Small Utopia, or: What My Father Would Build If my father had lived in the era of social networks and had come to understand them — I am not fantasising that he would have used them; I am trying to extrapolate his operational logic — I believe he would have said something like: Sort out your relationships directly, not through an intermediary. The intermediary takes more than it's worth. Mechanics, in its pure form, is direct: the problem is locatable, the solution is applicable, the result is verifiable. The social media feed is its opposite: the problem is diffuse, the solution is sold as a service by others, the result is defined by others as "engagement." The solutions being born now from the disillusionment of social networks carry something of the directness of mechanics. The WhatsApp groups of the couriers in Botoșani have no algorithm and charge no commission. Dani's direct clients pay without an intermediary platform. Ioana's word-of-mouth clients are more loyal and less unpredictable than those who arrive from an Instastory. At greater scale: federated platforms, independent newsletters, small communities with moderated access, independent governance boards for platforms serving the public interest — all of these are attempting to reconstruct something of the directness that a face-to-face relationship has always had. It will not be perfect. Nothing is perfect. But it can be less extractive, less opaque, less structured for converting human attention into fuel for profit machines. --- ## Ruxandra and the TikTok Account of the Bruschetta One last story. Ruxandra lives in the block next door. She makes bruschette. Not restaurant bruschette — home bruschette, with tomatoes from her parents-in-law's garden in Dorohoi, mozzarella from a local producer, and basil she grows on the balcony. She makes them for family, for friends, occasionally for gatherings. Someone told her she ought to post on TikTok. That it might "go viral." That other people making simple food earn money from views. She tried. She filmed. She posted ten videos. Three got a few hundred views. One exceeded three thousand. She spent hours in front of the screen watching the metrics, reading comments, trying to understand what "works" and what "doesn't work." She began thinking about bruschette in terms of content rather than flavour. She deleted the account after two months. "It wasn't mine any more," she told me. "The bruschetta wasn't mine any more. It had become a pretext for something else." She had grasped, empirically and without any technical vocabulary, what enshittification means when applied to daily life: the process by which a platform transforms something authentic — a recipe, a relationship, a craft — into content optimised for a metric, and in doing so takes its soul. Ruxandra's bruschetta with three thousand views was worth less than the bruschetta without views that we ate together on the block's front steps last summer, with a cold beer and a real conversation. --- ## The Last Days and the First Days Social networks, in their current form, are in their last days. They will not disappear tomorrow. They will linger for a long time, as transitional-era shopping centres linger — somewhat functional, somewhat dead, haunted by ghosts of interaction. But something in them is dying. The original promise is already dead. The illusion of authenticity is already dead. The idea that the algorithm is your friend is already dead. What remains is an extraction infrastructure that continues to function for as long as a sufficiently good alternative has not yet appeared. And the alternative is appearing. Slowly, fragmentarily, imperfectly — but it is appearing. In the couriers' WhatsApp groups. In small newsletters with loyal readers. In federated communities where moderation is human and the rules are transparent. In the direct relationships that Dani and Ioana are building patiently outside the platforms. It is not a revolution. It is a gradual and intelligent withdrawal from the space that extracts you, towards spaces that represent you. The last days of social networks as an economy of extractive attention might be the first days of a smaller, slower, more intentional web. Or not. Perhaps people will continue to scroll indefinitely, tolerating ever greater quantities of slop for ever rarer moments of genuine connection. Perhaps the bots will become so accomplished that we will no longer be able to tell the difference and will no longer care to. Perhaps we will comprehensively normalise the idea that digital space is simply an attention market and nothing more. I do not know what will be. I know what I prefer. I prefer Ruxandra's bruschetta without views. I prefer the couriers' WhatsApp group without an algorithm. I prefer Dani's direct client without the intermediary's commission. I prefer the conversation on the block's front steps without engagement metrics. I prefer something slower that does not extract me over something fast that consumes me. My father would have said he knew what I was talking about. He was never on social networks. He sat on the front steps of the block, with the neighbours, with a beer or without, and talked face to face. He did not know he had invented the alternative. But he had. --- *Petru Cojocaru writes at cojocarupetru.info about technology, society and the provincial everyday. His texts are partially assisted, a fact declared transparently. The opinions expressed are his own.*