In the 2013 TV special “How Videogames Changed the World”; Charlie Brooker (of Nathan Barley and Black Mirror infamy) positioned SocMed as nothing more than a game. Players would jostle for attention, earning points by views and followers. The aim being to win regardless of what it takes to get there, with integrity and accountability the first hurdles to overcome.
All games need to keep score, and before retweets and ratios were all the rage it fell to an external website called (predictably) Klout to weigh one’s worth under the new paradigm. Measuring follower lists and comment counts to gauge influence, this proved an interest in metrics and statistical analysis which still exists today. Online micro-celebrities game the system for the highest score, even if these numbers are ultimately meaningless without independent verification.
In the age of the SocMed personality, building a brand becomes more important than being a person. Carefully cultivated best faces forward into the ring light, competing for clicks and clamouring to claim the “current thing”.
A new mindset emerges in the panopticon of peers. Sincere connection is supplanted by stunts and superficial compliance. Engagement becomes the new psychology. Brainrot the compulsion.
Rushing to pseudo-relevance, the swift snark of immediacy demands instant response, with words of depth rejected as tl;dr antiquity. Seeking validation in all things, they dare not deviate from trends in time and topic, disingenuously mewling for identikit attention through fear of losing those precious likes.
Or worse, excommunication from the holy algorithm. Invisible to the gestalt. Code expertly crafted to offer a skewed perspective on reality, burying balance and promoting partisanship – the antithesis of reason.
As more follow the exact same script to attract and distract, their all-important view metrics collectively lessen in value. Glibly grabbing at “gotchas” to gain ground on perceived foes, with anything of substance subsumed in a sea of slop.
All of this is bottable. All of this easily mimicked by AI-driven identities, deployed blatantly and surreptitiously to manipulate and manufacture consent. Invisible persuaders encourage and reward what is deemed to be correct behaviour by their puppeteers, indistinguishable from what passes as ‘real’ in the agora of grift.
The consumption of SocMed has devolved to complement the theorised Dead Internet it enables. No longer restricted to a filterable web browser, custom apps tightly control the narrative with nigh-constant notifications. Timelines no longer swell with tiny little truths and human moments from those we actively befriend. Now our feeds are filled with falsehood.
Adverts for mobile games bear no resemblance to the downloaded diversion. Unwelcome groups, posts and the ‘suggested’ stories of strangers intrude. Divisive content is prioritised to provoke lively, yet futile, debate. Pavlovian pablum churned to compel further scrolling, further faux-interaction, further attention, but returning no scrap of nourishment.
The crude psychology of Facebook’s first attempts to manipulate collective emotion has been honed and refined over the past decade. Designed to drive an immaculate wedge between friends and communities, with user behaviour judged by authoritarian edict. Enforcing an opaque global Community Standard to arbitrate all.
Disconnected from the people it condemns; the absolute judgement of the corporate overseer offers minimal means to appeal. Aided by an ever-eager army of lickspittle collaborators rushing to report wrongthink, it is an inevitable irony that the oppression they enabled now stifles them.
What was once a tool for connecting people has become an instrument to divide and isolate. SocMed, as it stands by this measure, is unfit for purpose.
Tech writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe such patterns, applicable to SocMed but relevant to the greater gamut. An online service starts off positively, nurturing network effect by warmly encouraging healthy community growth. Embracing interconnectivity with external sites through Application Programming Interfaces and direct deals, as well as a little adversarial interoperability. Evoking the hand-crafted spirit of the old Internet, the community is urged to build a robust social graph by connecting to these other services, with enterprising hobbyists further adding value by creating new opt-in applications to harness this data.
Once a community is locked in and their data harvested, outside connections are depreciated, disconnected and any innovation reimplemented in-house. Any useful charm swiftly degraded in the usual tiresome manners to appease shareholders and spite. The user becomes the product to be exploited and sold to the highest bidder. Yet unwilling to lose connections made by signing up in good faith, participants are too comfortable in their walled gardens to move on.
To counter this cycle, there needs to be a sense of individual responsibility and ownership. A will to cash out of the attention economy to create more than algorithm-exploiting irrelevance. A return to small-scale self-managed communities and individual, eclectic voices.
Collectively moving to an alternate centralised service is a stopgap measure. Centralisation tends to censorship, whoever owns the ad tracker, and the freedom to switch cages is no freedom at all. Many who make these grand gestures return to the largest audience after time, and it is hubris to demand others follow their vagaries en masse.
Perhaps instead of posturing to make a point, one could simply detach?
Next: Startin’ up a POSSE.