The Metrics of Mattering

The internet used to be a place where people found each other across improbable distances and genuinely got excited about things that had no commercial value whatsoever. That world didn’t disappear—it just got buried under the other one, the one that runs on likes and follower counts and the low-grade anxiety of never having quite enough of either.

Nick Smith made a short video that captures this accurately and depressingly. The argument is simple: social media has reduced human expression to the pursuit of quantified approval. Likes, favorites, retweets, views, comments—a cascading economy of acknowledgment in which the number next to your face is the only reliable indicator of whether you existed today.

The thing that gets me isn’t the vanity of it, which is old and boring and human. It’s the performance of presence. We hold our faces to the camera—not because we’re having a good time, not because we want to remember something, but because the platform has been engineered to make the recording feel more important than the thing being recorded. We grin into our phones for strangers we’ll never meet while the actual experience sits in the background, unattended. The moment exists to become content. The content exists to become metrics. The metrics exist to tell you whether you matter.

I do it too. That’s the worst part. You can describe the mechanism in real time, understand exactly what’s happening, and post anyway—because the alternative, just being somewhere without documenting it, has started to feel like it doesn’t count. Likes. Likes. Likes.