Trashtag - The Day Social Media Became Self-Aware

As you've all probably guessed by now, I'm a Star Trek geek amongst my myriad fandoms. But up until now, there's been one aspect of Star Trek that I have shaken my head at, thinking it was too unrealistic. Well, OK, besides the transporters, warp speed space travel, and Kirk is getting lucky with all those green-skinned space babes.

Beyond the advanced technology, which justifiably may or may not happen someday - never say never! - the one aspect of the Star Trek universe that always nagged at me is the economy of Starfleet. See, thanks to technology like the replicator, humans in this future exist in a post-scarcity utopia, wanting for nothing, and hence not motivated by money. So why work? Libertarian Capitalists have seizures at this thought.

The answer, we get explained to us, is that Starfleet members are all volunteers, just motivated to join for the pure idealism. Which is the part that loses me when I think of all those red-shirts who beamed down to an alien planet only to die in the teaser? Or when I think of Starfleet discipline: How can anybody be subject to court-martial when they can just get "LOL I quit!" In this perfect utopia universe, one of the few ways left to die is to go on daring adventures in space. 

Yes, I'm sure there are thrill-seekers now who would just as soon base jump off Vulcan cliffs for the hell of it, but that's a small minority. Most of us would rather chill in the Holodeck playing any game we can imagine while snacking from the replicator on any delicacy we can name.

But then I thought of social media and realized that people go to a huge amount of ugly, difficult, challenging, and even dangerous effort just for a few likes on Instagram. When money becomes obsolete, mere attention will be the new currency.

So yeah. Star Trek economics might just work after all. Maybe that's not such a sunny outlook though.

Honestly, I'm more disgusted by attention greed than I ever was by greed over money.

They will climb into an enclosure with a live jaguar for an Instagram photo. They will pretend to have an illness, not caring for the attention they take away from the genuinely sick. They'll claim to have been kidnapped by UFOs. There are people who stalk celebrities and marry buildings and will do crazy public stunts that get them arrested just so their mug shows up on the TV news. On reality TV shows, people will waddle in mud and eat worms for attention.

Would you believe, whenever there's a high-profile murder, one of the biggest problems police have to deal with is false confessions? As long as a crime is getting in the news every day, deranged people will run into the police station yelling "I did it! Arrest me!" Willing to fry in the electric chair. Just for attention. And failing that, there's the Truman Show delusion, an actual psychological malady where people imagine they're the star of a secret TV show. That's right; people are so starved for an audience that they'll make one up in their head.

The craving for attention is powerful. It's like cold fusion: figure out how to tap it, and you could move the whole universe around with the energy you'd release.

And lo, we come to another popular bid for attention, in a slightly more socially-condoned way: The Internet challenge. For years, the rest of us have sat back tweeting "smh" at these vulgar displays of attention-whoring that frequently led to injury for the participants. There's the infamous Tide Pod challenge, the Bird Box challenge, the Kylie Jenner challenge, and so on.

And who could forget this low-budget entertainment…

So why not put that force to good work? That was the inspiration for one guy to post an idea that caught on…

Yes, how simple. The Earth is littered with trash from generations of thoughtless people who treat recreational areas like one giant trash can. So while you're looking for the next Internet fad to hitch your caboose to, why not pick one that does some good for the world? And catch on it did…

Oh, there's no end to them! #Trashtag now has its own IMGUR folder, its own subreddit, its own Instagram section, and so on. Everybody is having a feel-goodies party about a social media challenge with a positive impact for a change. It's lit up all over the world.

It's also gotten a cynical, gloomy response from Progressive sites bemoaning how all the social media influencers in the world cannot combat the rising tide of plastic waste. Always one sourpuss in the crowd, isn't there? And it's not me for a change.

Yes, true, there is still pollution no matter how many bags of garbage we tweet, but the point is that somebody did something productive with their free time and their hunger for Internet points. It made some parks and beaches look better. It would be an even better world if people were motivated to take better care of it without needing online applause, sure, but just once let's be marginally happy with a non-negative outcome. We're literally seeing the Star Trek effect here. If we want to transition to a utopian society where we want for nothing and people do service labor for the public good just to go "Yay me!" this is one of the steps in that transition.

It's good exercise and gets you out in the fresh air for a while, right?

There's always the rubber duck squawk attack; we could be doing that:

I never did get around to asking a sound engineer why it is that one rubber duck sounds like a rubber duck, but a squad of them at once sounds like a choir of tortured imps screaming from the depths of hell.

There's the Naruto mirror run challenge, that one's running its course:

We could all do the Soy Boy Wii stupid faces challenge:

I can identify. I do the same thing in my office when I have a deadline approaching, and I'm stuck for an idea.

It doesn't help; it's just what I do.