Imagine a world where every day every human gets better at something. Imagine social-media addiction went away because we had a better alternative. Imagine waking up and having a five minute conversation that quantifiably steered you towards becoming an expert in whatever you care about. Imagine being able to remember every song lyric, every chess opening, every seemingly impossible fact between you and being able to explain rocket science, or every strategy for growing your small business.

This is the vision. A world where we supercharge our brains instead of handing them over to social media giants. Where we reverse engineer the tricks used by apps such as Instagram that keep you hooked, to make the global population smarter.

We're all addicted to our smartphones, but what you mightn't realize is that your smartphone is killing your memory the same way taking too many amphetamines will. You might say "Well I don't need my brain anymore because I can use Google or ChatGPT" but this isn't what I'm talking about. If it was, I'd have said "Google is bad" and not "social media is bad".

Social media is considerably worse than using a search engine and damages your brain by hijacking it into always wanting to be on their apps. Without going into too much detail, it stops your dopamine from being released for everyday life events and only releases it when you use social media. The problem with this is that dopamine is needed for memory development - if you don't release dopamine during a conversation, you probably won't remember that conversation. If you don't release it in school or the first time your daughter takes a step… you get the picture. Googling something stops you using your brain, but social media stops you being able to use your brain. You literally get dumber. As an experiment, compare your recall ability against previous generations and ask the question (which should have an obvious answer of "no" if you're under forty), "has my memory gotten worse over the last 5 years?". If it has, you now know why.

The end outcome will be a generation who are helpless without their phones, unable to remember anything, and show similar symptoms to narcotics withdrawal when their phones are removed (severe anxiety, mood swings, irritability). Yikes.

There are two problems to solve here:

Somewhat discouragingly there is no great movement to mass boycott social media - we can safely assume it's here to stay. Assuming this to be true, the only way to solve both the above problems is to fight fire with fire and design a social media that's good for you; defining "good for you" as "makes you an expert in anything, aiding your memory and social relationships rather than damaging them".

This is a tall ask but not impossible if we think outside the box. Let's approach this from first principles, does the concept of a screenless social media exist? Not currently, but that doesn't mean the concept is impossible or even crazy, it's just not the norm. Extending this, consider a social media that doesn't have a screen, facilitates interaction beyond likes and comments and makes you a genius.

OpenAI acquired a company called LoveFrom for $6.5B and this is a big deal because the CEO of LoveFrom is Jony Ive, the man who designed the first iPhone. Before Jony we had buttons, everything that's come since is a direct descendant of his critical question - "what if the experience was different?". Our lives revolve around our smartphones, an experience invented by Ive. The relevance of this today is that Ive is rethinking this experience again from within a new company owned by OpenAI. It's not fully clear what this experience will look like yet, but it's been hinted that the device will be closer to a sleek earpiece or eyepiece than a smartphone. Whatever this device will be, all we know is that it centres on the human interaction patterns of audio and vision, likely without touch.

Extrapolating, OpenAI's new experience will likely have apps and an ecosystem. What does social media look like in this brave new world, is it one big persistent voice chat or video stream directly into our retinas? Who knows. The point is that phones won't be around forever and that our benevolent social media of the future might be audiovisual with minimal screen interaction patterns.

If you think this sounds alien I'd ask you to consider the perspective that it's a lot closer to real life than Instagram is; you can't hear your friend's laughter from an Instagram comment.

Imagine a world where the morning doomscroll is replaced by conversations - which aggregated over time make you an expert. The magic is reducing this amount of time to a week or two, and making these conversations engaging. How cool would it be to respond to complaints such as "I don't read as much anymore", "I hate doomscrolling", "Instagram is toxic" with "have you tried this new app? I've got my screentime down to under 15 minutes but like, I feel like I talk to my friends more. My mom's been pestering me to pick up quantum mechanics with her but I don't have time - maybe next week after I've finished rocket science". To which they'd respond "yeah I've no real interest in science, but that app's made me a fiend at karaoke - turn the lyrics off and I'll still crush it!".