The Sacred Cow and the High Church

To honestly analyze the most popular social networks that exist today is to recognize their blasphemous attitude toward authentic connection (mutual attunement, reciprocal attentive presence in shared time, with minimal third-party mediation).

It will not cease to amaze you how readily an active participant will admit that something is attacking their connection; little dialogue is needed to convince them. Yet few are moved enough to reject it outright and opt only for authentic modes of connection. To many, the platforms are nearly sacred, and their loyalty follows suit, curating an emotional attachment just as much as an identity attachment.

The dualistic threat

If profanities are spoken against the platform in a way that rejects the user's religion, they face a dualistic threat: they must defend two facets of themselves at once. On one end, they reject the critic by discrediting his identity, for he is a rough man who knows not the true nature of the platform he speaks ill of. On the other, they reject the words themselves, for the words invoke fury and guilt.

It is as if the user is dismembered, and he cannot invite movement to these parts of his being anymore. His heart is sealed.

Pulling someone from these depths is seemingly impossible. Two of the most potent aspects of their being have been seized, and the clutch constricts with nearly every interaction with the platform. Blatant abrasion is futile against such circumstances.

Trivialization, not confrontation

Our nature as humans to trivialize, to downgrade the perceived status and utility of past experiences that no longer serve us, is what will reestablish the veneration of authentic connection. One man's trash is another man's treasure. No one efficient sets out to accumulate trash; it is acquired only when a superior alternative makes the old habit feel wasteful. In practice, trivialization happens when something better makes the old behavior feel wasteful, of cognitive load first, but also of status, time, and attention.

Hum intends to shift status, reciprocity, and time-to-reward by making nearby human presence legible and rewarding, at lower attentional friction than a feed. The goal is to trivialize anything less than the baseline of inherently natural, authentic human connection: to lower the yield of the feed until the objects that claim to connect us feel low-yield by comparison. That, not confrontation, is the only effective remedy.