Once upon a time, I used to like titling posts with puns. In truth, I still do. This thought came to me before I went on my walk and I briefly considered delaying my walk to post it, but blogging is never urgent.

And I'm glad I did, because now I've read this post at The Verge:

It sounds a little like I’m advocating for the return of the ’90s, when the computer was a giant box that lived in a central room of your home and the only way to use it was to go to it. And to some extent, I am!

The thought that had occurred to me before I left was the notion of "critical mass," that social media networks always seemed to be striving to achieve a number of users and level of engagement that would yield a self-sustaining chain reaction.

Like a nuclear reactor.

I saw a video or a post somewhere about a new documentary called Join or Die, related to the sociologist who wrote Bowling Alone. In it, there was a graph that showed a decline in clubs or other forms of social activity, like bowling leagues, and it had been declining steadily. It must have been a video, because I think I paused it to look at the year 2007, when the iPhone was introduced. And I recall feeling satisfied that the slope of the curve increased (Decreased? Got more negative.) after 2008.

It's not just the social media platforms that alter our experience of one another, it's also the ubiquity of these always-connected devices.

We have this low-grade, yet self-sustaining nuclear (social) reaction going on, that's also creating a lot of radioactive waste that's hard to dispose of. It's funny how social media platforms are always talking about "moderation." You use a moderator in a reactor to control the rate of the reaction, absorb "excess" neutrons. The analogy is pretty sweet.

Combine social media with something that's always in your pocket and welcome to the hellscape of the 21st Century.

The whole damn stack is radioactive.

(And just because I like "explaining" my clever puns, perhaps you'll appreciate the fact that "radio" is what connects all these devices. Gosh, I'm witty.)

Anyway, I'm supposed to be playing with Automator right now. Carry on.