by Zoe from Menlo Park, California, asks about Santa and the Meta Culture
Dear Santa,
My name is Zoe and I am eleven years old. I live in Menlo Park, California, which is right next to Meta headquarters, which is the company that owns Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, and where my dad works, and where approximately half my school’s parents work, and which means that in my town everyone has very strong opinions about social media even though most of them are on social media constantly.
I have three questions.
Does the North Pole have social media and if so has it helped or made everything worse?
Why does everyone on the internet argue about everything all the time including things that do not matter?
My dad says Silicon Valley is changing the world. My teacher says it is ruining it. Who is right?
Thank you.
Zoe Elise Nakamura
Menlo Park, California
Dear Zoe,
Menlo Park, California, where half the parents work at Meta and everyone has strong opinions about social media while being on social media constantly — this is either the most self-aware community in America or the least, and I have been thinking about which one since your letter arrived. I have not reached a conclusion. Your letter, however, is excellent, and your three questions are the best questions anyone in Menlo Park has sent to the North Pole, which is not a category I invented for the occasion. Let us begin.
Does the North Pole have social media, and has it helped or made everything worse.
The North Pole discovered the internet approximately seventeen minutes after it became widely available, because the elves are curious professionals who adopt new tools with great enthusiasm and almost no advance planning.
Problems began when Elf Number 274 posted a photograph of Santa’s workshop. Within minutes, thousands of online commentators declared the workshop was “problematic,” “underrepresented,” “overrepresented,” “insufficiently inclusive,” and “obviously generated by artificial intelligence” — despite the picture clearly showing several elves arguing over a broken hammer, which is about as authentically handmade as anything gets. Soon the workshop wasn’t making toys. It was making reaction videos about making toys. The Quality Assurance Department became the Quality Assurance Commentary Department. Then the Commentary Commentary Department opened next door. By lunchtime nobody remembered where the bicycles were.
Mrs. Claus suggested I create an online presence. “It will help connect with children,” she explained. Unfortunately I misunderstood. Instead of posting cheerful Christmas greetings, I began uploading thirty-minute videos reviewing chimneys. “This one has excellent brickwork,” I explained to 8.7 million bewildered followers. “I give it four cookies.” The review immediately sparked fierce online debate between supporters of Victorian chimneys, modern gas flues, Scandinavian rooftop access, and a surprisingly aggressive international coalition representing decorative electric fireplaces. I disabled comments. The comments returned anyway.
Rudolph started a podcast called The Red-Nosed Perspective, covering leadership, aviation, weather, oats, and workplace bullying by other reindeer. Dasher launched a competing podcast. Prancer released reaction videos reacting to Dasher reacting to Rudolph reacting to comments about Prancer. Within two weeks the sleigh had acquired a communications staff larger than the actual flying crew. Christmas deliveries were delayed because everyone was busy recording introductions.
The elves eventually built an algorithm to recommend Christmas content. It behaved exactly like every other algorithm. Children looking for teddy bears were recommended survival gear. People searching for Christmas cookies received conspiracy theories about gingerbread. Grandparents researching fruitcake recipes somehow ended up watching twelve hours of documentaries explaining why snowmen secretly control world weather. I unplugged the server. The recommendations became even stranger.
To combat misinformation, I established an official North Pole Fact-Checking Office. Its first report confirmed: “Yes, Santa is real.” Immediately thousands demanded additional sources. Several insisted I submit peer-reviewed chimney statistics. One particularly determined blogger argued my beard changed length between photographs and therefore Christmas itself was fabricated. I sighed. I have survived blizzards, pirates, and fruitcake. I was not prepared for comment sections.
Mrs. Claus eventually called an emergency meeting. She unplugged every screen, confiscated every ring light, and banned the phrase “engagement strategy.” Then she handed everyone hot chocolate. Within twenty minutes the elves were laughing, building wooden trains, decorating cookies, and arguing about whether glitter counts as edible. Culture, it turns out, works considerably better when people occasionally leave the comments section. The North Pole’s official position is now this: social media may be entertaining, podcasts can be informative, videos are occasionally useful — but no amount of online engagement has ever produced a single teddy bear, knitted scarf, or gingerbread house. Those still require people to stand up, work together, and occasionally step on a Lego brick while saying words that immediately qualify them for the Naughty List. The elves consider this an acceptable trade-off.
Why does everyone on the internet argue about everything all the time?
This is your social studies question and the answer is more interesting than “people are rude,” which is what most adults say when they do not want to explain the actual mechanism.
The internet argues constantly for several reasons that work together. The first is that platforms are designed to maximise engagement, and the content that produces the most engagement is content that makes people feel something strongly — outrage, fear, indignation, tribal loyalty. Calm, accurate, nuanced information produces less engagement than infuriating, oversimplified, us-versus-them information. This is not an accident. It is the business model, and your dad’s employer has spent considerable resources perfecting it, as have the other platforms. The algorithm does not reward being right. It rewards being felt.
The second reason is that online communication strips away almost everything that moderates real-world disagreement — eye contact, tone of voice, the physical presence of another human being, the social cost of saying something genuinely cruel to someone’s face. What remains is text on a screen, which the brain processes differently than a real conversation, and which makes it easier to treat the person on the other side as a category rather than a person. Arguments that would resolve in two minutes in person last forty-eight hours online because nothing that ends an in-person argument — a laugh, a change of expression, the simple human awkwardness of sustained conflict — is available on a screen.
The third reason, Zoe, is that people are genuinely uncertain about a great many things right now, and uncertainty feels uncomfortable, and argument feels like doing something about the discomfort even when it resolves nothing. This is a very human response to a very human problem. I have watched human beings argue for several centuries and the topics change but the underlying discomfort driving the argument is usually the same: people want to know that they are right, that they belong to the correct group, and that the world is moving in a direction they can make sense of. The internet provides an endless arena for that need to express itself. It does not provide the resolution. That is the gap that keeps everyone in the comments.
Is Silicon Valley changing the world or ruining it?
Your dad and your teacher are both right, which is the answer that satisfies nobody and happens to be true.
Silicon Valley — the stretch of California from San Jose through Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and into San Francisco — has produced some of the most genuinely transformative technology in human history in an extraordinarily short period of time. The internet itself. The smartphone. Search engines that have made the accumulated knowledge of human civilisation available to anyone with a connection. Video calling that lets a grandmother in Manila watch her grandchild take their first steps in real time. Medical research accelerated by computing power that would have been impossible twenty years ago. Navigation systems that have made getting lost in a car something that requires genuine effort. I have an enormous amount of respect for what the engineers and founders of this region have built, and I mean that without irony.
At the same time, your teacher is observing something real. The same platforms that connect families across oceans have been shown to increase anxiety and depression in adolescents, particularly girls, who compare their real lives to curated performances of other people’s lives and find their real lives inadequate. The same information systems that put all human knowledge at everyone’s fingertips have also made it easier to spread misinformation faster than accurate correction can travel. The same attention economy that made your dad’s employer extraordinarily successful has restructured what it means to pay attention, in ways that researchers are still documenting and that thirteen years of data do not yet fully explain.
What I would tell both your dad and your teacher is this: the tools are not the verdict. The printing press changed the world and it also produced centuries of pamphlet wars, propaganda, and books of genuinely terrible ideas printed at scale. The automobile changed the world and also killed more people in the twentieth century than several wars. Electricity, nuclear power, pharmaceuticals — every transformative technology brings both the thing it was designed to do and consequences its designers did not design for. Silicon Valley’s tools are among the most powerful ever built and their consequences are still unfolding. The honest position is not “changing the world” or “ruining it.” The honest position is “changing it in ways we are still measuring, with outcomes that depend enormously on the choices made by the people building it, regulating it, and using it.” Your dad is part of that. So, eventually, are you.
Merry Christmas, Zoe. Log off for a few hours this December. Not because the internet is bad — it is not all bad — but because the things that still cannot be done online remain, in my considered view, the most important ones: sitting with someone you love, making something with your hands, eating food that took time to prepare, and going to sleep on Christmas Eve with genuine anticipation for what the morning might bring. The North Pole runs on all four of those things and always has. No algorithm has improved them yet. I consider this promising.
Your friend,
Santa Claus
The North Pole
P.S. Tell your dad the North Pole’s engagement metrics are excellent: one night, one delivery, zero push notifications, 100% open rate. Mrs. Claus says this is because we do not A/B test Christmas. She is, as always, correct.
