Sitting across from my workspace while little thoughts are running down the lane. Many issues weigh a man down even on his workstation; challenges are one of man’s best friends, if not siblings, because they always get to him. Was so deep in mind wandering from one post to another when a colleague threw me off balance with a simple yet very resonating statement in quotes: "Usang, no disrespect to the social media space—Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and the rest. I miss the old Facebook platform; it was a thing on its own, an agora—less algorithm, more atmosphere." A digital era where the loudest people weren’t influencers. They were thinkers and great minds.
Taking a deep breath with such a statement that came in and disrupted my thought pattern, I reached out for a plastic bottle of water on my desk and took some gulps as its content rushed through my throat, providing a kind of half-satiation. I recall that era: the alchemy of the early 2010s—that sweet spot where the internet was fast enough to connect us, but not yet cynical enough to drown us. It was an internet culture on its own. The era when putting up a well-crafted post was literature and timelines weren’t a marketplace but rather a salon; we didn’t just post, we published.
Facebook walls were like open journals, and sagacity, wit, and long-form thought were currency. You follow people for their minds, not their morning routines. People who would drop an eight-paragraph post on heartbreak, politics, poetry, and governance, and you’d read every word because the punchlines weren’t for clout; they were craft. Opening the app was a thing of joy, not doomscrolling, because one is expecting to be challenged, amused, or wrecked by someone’s take. We made Mark Zuckerberg's creation our own metaverse; he built the platform, and we made it our playground. We used to have 'Walls' where we hung our thoughts like art; now we have 'Feeds,' and we are the ones being fed to the machine.
And then, before ‘content’ that’s flying around now, there was ‘expression’; before 'personal brand’ there was 'personality.' Before the skit makers, we had wordsmiths, but now the attention economy rewards the 8-second hook, reels, trends, and merchants' content as products, not expression, while the algorithm says be loud, be fast, or become shallow and invisible. The snaps and grams didn’t kill intellectualism; the incentives from the gatekeepers did. It tethered thoughtful peers to engagement metrics. Our minds never went blunt or blank, nor did our thought patterns change, but the space got colonized.
The platform decayed; I might be too rash using the word "decayed," but in essence, when a 3-second dance clip pays and a 300-word essay or poetry doesn’t, reasonability is sacrificed for incentives. Maybe the great minds didn’t vanish; they just got quiet and went underground. They refused to perform for a crowd that wasn't listening.
I really miss the old space where the hippie minds weren’t selling courses. Were we just happy while expressing our innate emotions? It used to be our virtual world. The art form needs a new room, away from the current pollution. "...Maybe it still can be, just not on Zuck's metaverse or terms. Zuck built the walls, but he never owned the spirit we brought to them. While we may still linger in his halls, we’ve simply carved out a sanctuary elsewhere. We’ve moved our true expression to a house where the windows are open and the metrics are silenced.
In Inskriba, we found love again. We found the chalk away from the noisy clutter. An abode of quiet parchment where the African mind can finally breathe and build; the stone and the stylus are used to carve perspectives that actually endure through an unfiltered lens.