Ask yourself this. When was the last time you were excited (not motivated by fear or disgust) to visit a social media website? Any website?
Or this – name one corporation that you really love and think is doing good things for the world.
For me, it’s been a long time since either of these was true.
There’s a concept that was pioneered by Corey Doctorow a few years back in an article about the TikTok website, but it has since become broadly applicable to many sites on the web.
In a nutshell, he observed that TikTok had burst onto the scene and had quickly locked in both viewers and advertisers with lots of traffic and good deals. Then, once people were hooked on the service, the company slowly began to extract more and more revenue from both sides, ratcheting things up just a little at a time and figuring out where people’s pain points were – how bad would it get before people would still keep using their service. They even went so far as to reward certain users with extra traffic, for a time, to create “success” stories on the site, before withdrawing it later.
Since my eyes were opened to this tactic, I’ve seen it everywhere.
A classic example of this is Amazon, which started by selling books, and then expanded to just about everything. They got the whole world hooked with Prime, and then got the advertisers locked in too, putting a number of competitors out of business. Then they tightened the screws, raising prices and demanding a higher percentage of their vendors’ sales. The basic service itself has not changed or improved in years – it’s still the same experience you had a decade ago. With one important exception – the search has become a bit of a joke. More and more, what you see on the site is what Amazon wants you to see and what makes them the most money, with little regard for what you are actually looking for. And don’t get me going about all the AI slop that fills this platform, and many others.
Facebook is another great example. It started as a place where you could meet friends and family, share photos and other social content, and even sell a book or two. Over time it has degraded. Many of its features simply do not work right anymore – Facebook messenger has had issues for more than a year that haven’t been fixed, and there’s a brand new glitch this week where photos uploaded to a post end up getting dropped into a messenger chat instead. Nevertheless, Facebook just informed me that my Author Page is only allowed to post two links a month, and if I want the privilege of posting more than that, I need to start paying them a monthly fee. This is apparently in part a way for Facebook to recoup some of the billions of dollars it basically lit on fire in pursuit of “AI.”
In addition to squeezing blood out of a stone in search for ever larger products and letting their platforms slowly stagnate, many of these companies have been shifting work over to their users. They make us spend our time fighting our way through “AI” assistants. They add additional unnecessary steps to processes we do every day, wasting our precious time. And they make us continually find workarounds for when their aging and broken sites don’t do what they’re supposed to.
Most corporations have become little more than money vacuums, sucking it up whenever and wherever they can, with little regard for the user experience. In the process, they are destroying other firms and livelihoods.
My Amazon sales in general have gotten progressively worse. Facebook ads rarely work for me anymore. And Google destroyed a good chunk of the business Mark and I built over twenty years, taking our information and giving it to their own visitors while slowly starving our sites of traffic. Something which has only worsened with the advent of so-called AI.
So where does this leave us?
Small sparks of hope abound, if you know where to look. People are finally starting to see how they are being treated by these corporations, and are demanding something better.
They are seeing through the sugarcoated promises of “AI” to what it really is – a machine built on theft and lies that excels in transfering money from the poor to the rich.
They are fighting data centers and Flock cameras in their communities, joining hands across the political spectrum.
And they are looking for ways to make things better.
Where will all of this lead? I wish I knew. I see a spark in the hunger for book festivals around California. I see a spark in the renewed desires among friends and family to make connections with people around them. And even in the nascent movement to digest ourselves of smart devices.
What am I doing about it?
I am calling out AI, whenever and wherever I see it. I am finding ways to root myself in community, reconnecting with friends and family, and with the things that matter most to me – my relationship, my family, writing, and voting. It’s so important to vote, both in elections and with our feet.
I am spending more time on social media that’s not controlled by corporations, like Mastodon. Even though it’s sometimes harder to use, it has news you won’t see anywhere else, intermixed with moments of pure joy, creativity and the beauty of other human beings.
I am hanging out with actual humans whenever I can, and reminding myself that there was a world before the Internet and social media, and it was pretty great.
And I am finding time to write, to share my own joy of words with others, people who appreciate things written by humans, not computers.
And finally, reminding myself that this too will pass.
There are things that can’t be enshittified, after all.
Sending you all love, humanity, and beauty to sustain you!