InfoSubstrate Social Platform (1995)

Class card for the DM-Day social-media and algorithmic-feed info substrate (~1995–2025): the dominant civilizational means of producing, curating, and distributing public information after the World Wide Web broke the broadcast OPP. The typology break from InfoSubstrate- NewspaperBroadcast fires on three patterns: (1) substrate_replacement — the production infrastructure flips from corporeal (printing presses, broadcast towers, cable plant) to incorporeal (server farms consumed as cloud substrate, TCP/IP protocols, browser runtimes); (2) input_set_replacement — professional editors and wire services are replaced by algorithms and user-generated content (UGC) as the dominant curation mechanism; (3) output_category_replacement — the shared public news agenda (everyone watches the same evening news) is replaced by personalised engagement-maximizing feeds (everyone gets their own algorithmically curated stream). Succession window 1991-2007: World Wide Web (1991), Mosaic (1993), Netscape (1994), Yahoo (1994), Google (1998) establish the static-web phase; Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), iPhone (2007) consolidate the social-graph + mobile-first phase. The machine aggregates Meta, X, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, WeChat as class instances. emergence_subtype: algorithmic (TikTok-style recommender, dominant 2018+) AND crowdsourced (Wikipedia-style UGC, dominant 2001-2010) — dual-mode emergence; both subtypes present across the class trajectory, with algorithmic becoming structurally dominant post-2018. dm_current = late_modernity (energetic_zombie pathology): massive DAU and ad revenue with declining evolutionary intelligence post-Cambridge Analytica (2018) + trust collapse + content- moderation contestation + LLM-disrupted-content environment (2022+). Motor = push (DM canonical); algorithmic feed is the paradigmatic push-motor — the platform independently pushes engagement-maximizing content to each user, not responding to a user telos. Note on meta-social-media-platform-2004: Meta is the canonical flagship instance of this class card; encoded as parallel_class intra-DM coupling (NOT cross_era_couplings, NOT lineage). Meta is an instance promoted to standalone; this card is the class.