Are we better off-line?
How algorithms are stealing our agency and shaping us to engage with them in the way they want us to, not in the way we want to.
Artwork by the talented Comedian, Artist and former Tech employee Beth Knight
Have we traded ownership of our attention for access to something that no longer fully serves us, but instead exploits, manipulates and a monetises us?
The internet started as digital roadways between computers, a network of networks, a means to exchange information across the world at the speed of light. An undeniable leap forward for the human race’s collective knowledge and aspirations. Floating on top of that - the World Wide Web - the means to see pages when you’re online. Since the invention of these two technologies in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, the way we engage and use them has dramatically changed as technology has advanced from single household computers shared by a family to individual handheld devices that have become literal extensions of ourselves.
In order for the internet to get to where it is now it has had to go through several iterations. The first version of the internet was, for the most part, read only. A ‘static web’ where individuals could only view the content on a website, but not contribute to it. This was known as Web 1.0 and can be categorised as the internet of the 90s. In the 2000s we reached the “age of participation” on the internet and the birth of the follower. YouTube may have kickstarted this by encouraging users to “broadcast themselves” by enabling individuals to create and reach an audience on the internet who could subscribe to their content; other companies followed suit. This is known as Web 2.0 and can be categorise as the internet of the noughties. In the 2010s we saw the introduction of the next phase of the internet which we can refer to as “the decade of ranking” due to Facebook’s successful experimentation of taking social feeds, analysing them for engagement and then placing them back into your feed in order of engagement; it worked so well that other platforms shortly followed suit. Now in the 2020s we’re seeing the emergence of what I believe will be look back on as “the decade of distraction" where you don’t choose your feed anymore, it chooses you.
With these changes in technology has come a never ending race to understand how to monetise it beyond the initial Hardware. Software, e-commerce, online learning, banking, trading, dating, fraud, scams, manipulation, blackmail, extortion, porn and more have had investment thrown into them as part of the digital gold rush of the 1990s, 2000s and beyond. The resulting dot-com crash was perhaps an obvious inevitability as businesses raced to, perhaps prematurely, find ways to speculatively turn digital space into dollars; often based on nothing more than a good domain name.
As internet-accessible devices have moved from collective use to personal use, one thing has emerged as the underlying king of all online monetisation. Data. Your data. How you use the internet, where you go on it, what you search for, what you bought, what buttons you clicked, what personal information you gave, your IP address, how long you looked at something, what you commented on, what apps you’re using, how frequently you use them, etc, etc, etc.
On its own your data is probably mundane, perhaps a touch embarrassing, but when pooled together this data paints wildly accurate pictures of human behaviour and demographics. These can be targeted by businesses looking to sell their goods and services; an advertiser’s wet dream to be able to pick out only those who are highly likely to buy what they’re selling and serve an advert for their specific problem at the perfect time; even better when said adverts can follow individuals around based on their willingly given digital footprint.
So how did we get to the point where we freely gave up so much of our perceptively asinine data?
When the option became an obligation.
This thought I’m writing about is, in many ways, predominantly about the relationship between the Internet and social media; for many the internet is viewed through the lens of social media. In some ways it feels like it came out of nowhere; in other ways like it’s always existed - and for those born at the right (or wrong) time, it certainly has. The ways in which we’re being shaped by large data sets and algorithms may be most prevalent with social media but tech companies such as Amazon (1994) and Google (1998), financial institutions, retailers and more also operate on incredible amounts of user data in order to generate corporate value from their users.
The earliest seeded iterations of social networks were pre 2000s; Six Degrees (1997) and LiveJournal (1999) allowed users to friend each other and share journal entries, for example. But the 2000s was where things started to ramp up and we saw the birth of LinkedIn (2003), MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004, now Meta), Youtube (2005), Twitter (2006, now X), WhatsApp (2009, now part of Meta), Instagram (2010, now part of Meta), Snapchat (2011) and TikTok (2016); amongst many other experimental platforms.
Whilst in the very early days of the internet it wasn’t always so clear how to monetise specific users, it was clear that advertising was an obvious route to it. Each platform has faced its own unique demographic challenges in monetising its user base; the strategic approach of LinkedIn is going to be different to that of YouTube.
One of the first challenges these platforms face is repeated user engagement (the foundation of a users lifetime value). The flywheel has to be turned manually before it can start picking up momentum on its own. And once you have eyes on your platform, it’s easier to sell advertising space. For Facebook, they discovered quite early on that if a user got seven friends added within ten days, they were likely to stay engaged with the product. Because of this data-driven insight they focused on shaping their platform to ensure new users were as likely as possible to meet this threshold - a key insight for the business’s user growth. This early phase of growth is the only time where the users are most valued and where we blindly agree to reams of platform terms and conditions in exchange for access.
Upon the successful acquisition of users a platform can begin to move its focus to acquiring businesses; allowing the platform to monetise their user base by servicing business needs. Once again businesses blindly agree to the terms and conditions in exchange for access to advertise both organically and via paid means to the platform’s users. Once businesses are locked in, the platform can move to servicing their shareholders, the ones who ponied up the costs to enable the first two phases.
All of this happens slowly, but the trade of our ownership for access doesn’t begin when the platforms do, it happens after. With platforms no longer incentivised to maintain quality for users it can push all of its efforts to maximising shareholder value - the perceptive face value terms don’t apply anymore when there is a permanent search for marginal gains in extracting further profit. It seems the internet, and social media as a whole, was a good idea that has predominantly been in the wrong hands - but someone has to pay for it eh?
We are frogs slowly being boiled alive, so why aren’t we jumping out?
This writeup from 1993 on rewarding children with gold stars describes positive reinforcement as a tool for motivation. A concept mirrored in our interactions online where certain behaviours or actions are rewarded; nudging us to engage in ways a platform wants. Just as kids chase gold stars to feel good about themselves and show off to their parents, we chase likes, follows, shares, and views to feel better about ourselves and to show off to our peers for social status. This is where the foundations of algorithmic influence and the gamification of our engagement begins.
In order to hold long term user engagement there has to be the addition of negative reinforcement either externally or internally. If you read the full article I linked you’ll quickly pick up its notes about how rewards only create temporary behavioural change and as such there need to be consequences to not doing what a platform wants. This can be done through the creation of compulsion (or core) loops - a habitual chain of activities that repeated by the user will cause them to continue the activity. Typically, this loop is designed to create a neurochemical reward in the user such as the release of dopamine - but can be just as easily used to shape behaviour that mirrors addiction.
As we’re now so entrenched in these platforms, the consequences of leaving them is high (or at least perceptively). Leave LinkedIn and you may stunt your ability to find or land a new job - leave Meta (Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp) and you’ll stunt your ability to stay in touch with your friends and family. You may even become socially outcast as you miss open invites to events, parties and more. Add in the slot machine mechanism these platforms employ to fill your feed with “new” at the top, the endlessly scrollable page of content that prevents you from returning to where you left off and we’re in a world similar to the 24 news channels - where everything is important or breaking (no matter how mundane) and you don’t, or can’t, disconnect for fear of missing something important - FOMO is a huge driver of action and engagement.
The sad thing is that these platforms don’t have to work that hard in order to manipulate us into a type 4.5 fun relationship with them - clearly there is something about human psychology that makes it easy for the vast majority of us to be sucked into engagement; the data certainly supports it. If you’re not playing by the rules the platform wants you to, you’re not going to get what you want until you do. Youtube, for example, rewards creators who make longer videos, around 10 minutes, and punishes those who fail to meet this threshold - making animation on the platform difficult to approach and pushing content to be padded out far more than it needs in order to communicate its core message. They are not alone in this regard though, Meta punishes accounts that stop posting content on their platform by reducing their overall reach and engagement - they also rewards those who produce reels over imagery, pushing for users of the platforms to create content that fits their agenda and not necessarily the users.
These digital dictators can, at their will, completely change how we interface with our online worlds. For those of us who don’t understand how to use these platforms, don’t resonate with them, or don’t wish to adapt to the new changes, it can feel like one is shouting into an empty void - or worse, being ignored. Like an outsider looking in, one can become more desperate to be noticed - consequently this has resulted, for some, to search for, or be lured in by, increasingly extreme online communities that will hear their voice and echo their sentiments. It’s easy to get trapped in these online death spirals when the algorithms mirror your behaviours and feed more of the content you engage with back to you.
Personally I face the dilemma of posting to these platforms with my photography, professional work and thoughts (such as this). To share or not to share? For the right reasons or the wrong? Will I come across authentically or as self-serving? Will I be praised or criticised? Perhaps this has nothing to do with the platforms, maybe it’s a problem I need to work on within myself, but there is undoubtably a pressure created to engage with them both as consumer and creator.
Seeing it from the other side.
The internet has become one of the great levellers and we now live in a world with more information asymmetries than ever before. An individual with nothing more than a phone and access to the internet can radically change their life by using social media as a platform for ones own organic marketing (or at the very least educate themselves - assuming you don’t get distracted on the way of course). Individuals can more easily than ever create vast circles of influence far beyond what is normally possible. Engaging with both cold and warm audiences through the leveraging of not just their own network, but the network of others. As Kevin Kelly wrote in his 2008 essay 1000 true fans you don’t need millions of fans to be successful - very little demonstrates the compounding power of change that the internet can have on individuals putting stuff on it than the first 15 minutes of this video by the founder of Patreon, Jack Conte.
Businesses are also put in a similar position. With a lower barrier to entry to cultivate brand loyalty, they can directly communicate with their customers whilst also leveraging the extent of these platforms to find new ones. SEO has put businesses on the map and helped them grow with minimal ongoing costs, utilising the way search engines work to do so. These business opportunities have created jobs; new fields of specialty that can genuinely impact a businesses bottom line - predominantly through marketing, content creation and data. Stanley mugs, for example, created insane demand for their products through colour-ways, limited editions and most importantly viral marketing - resulting in a 10x on their revenue within 4 years from $73m to $750m - although one might want to look back to Chilli’s bottles for creating the wake of this new water flask movement that many have ridden on.
Despite seeing the value that is being created, my internal conflicts with algorithms have become increasingly divergent due to my work within in e-commerce (amongst other things). Never before has it been easier to sell almost anything when you understand how to use algorithms to your advantage (although typically this isn’t a place where most start from). From SEO, to organic social reach, to paid advertising, as long as you work with algorithms and understand how to use them, you’ll be giving yourself the best chances of coming out on top - with your own data to back it up it too.
I first experienced this when running FixIts and began to move my efforts from the foundational commerce and e-commerce issues of the business to generating sales through targeted traffic. Before Apple implemented the iOS 14 data privacy changes it was remarkably easy to generate sales via targeted adverts on Facebook and Instagram. These iOS 14 changes introduced stricter privacy measures, vastly limiting the data available to advertisers and making targeting more challenging (at least temporarily).
Remarkably quickly I saw the two sides of the algorithmic coin. On one side, the data made it incredibly easy to target potential customers and drive sales. On the other, I too was one of those people being targeted on the back of years of platform use. The thought has crossed my mind, many times, to delete my Facebook account (instagram and LinkedIn too), but it’s not so easy to do because in order to do my job I need to connect my Facebook business account to a real Facebook account; remove my real account and I can’t run adverts for my clients anymore - Quite the pickle.
The increasing push for consumer protection through data security I am grateful for (although I don’t believe it is enough and I often wonder about backdoors that may have been left for government security purposes). One only has to read up about Cambridge Analytica and their influence on political elections or Edward Snowden’s book “Permanent record” to know how dangerous these large data sets can be in both the right and wrong hands - the masters of propaganda and disinformation rejoice at their ability to target specific individuals without highlighting their efforts to the masses - and I shudder to think what is possible now given the increasing changes and advancements in social technology.
Consequently as data has become increasingly challenging to acquire off platform, corporations now work harder to keep everything on platforms they control. Most obviously by keeping you engaged within their platform. Instagram for example has gone through several iterations and changes as competitors have unlocked new ways to improve user engagement and threaten their seat on the throne. The introduction of stories (snapchat) and reels (TikTok) are clear evidence of this. With the introduction of the latter we have seen a shift away from our own curated feeds towards, primarily, content you “may be interested in”, suggested posts and of course adverts. Both X (formerly Twitter) and Threads have removed chronological timelines of posts from those you follow (a particularly anti-user-experience decision), peppering in other stuff in the hope that this scattergun content will grab and hold your attention. You’ll never be “caught up” and so you’re more likely to continue to engage. Add into the mix the data points that these platforms have on you and they’re more likely to be able to serve up things that are likely to keep you in a trance like state.
Whilst this has been a great decision for the business, for the creators behind them, the internet has become harder to use as they now fight against algorithms trying to shape what they make for it; and for the users, seeing the content they choose to follow has had similar challenges. The distribution channels have broken for both sides and the creativity that we used to see and enjoy in the early internet is now firmly in our past; it seems that optimisation models have trumped human preference and users are no longer at the centre of the internet (at least for now).
The only platform that hasn’t seemingly adopted this non-chronological approach is Reddit. The hive mind website that touts itself as the “front page of the internet” creates huge amounts of engagements as it acts as a centralised forum of forums and as such doesn’t need to resort to the same tricks the others do. It’s certainly not without its problems, manipulations or evolutions; especially as it has now become a publicly traded company - royally pissing off its user base in the process by locking down 3rd party tools through the limitation of their API and more recently by giving OpenAI free reign of their data. Despite their changes I find Reddit remains one of the few useful places to find answers for real and nuanced problems (assuming you can discern between genuine comment replies, rage bait and satire) - even Google is finding that to be true.
Unfortunately for us consumers, even if we don’t engage with these platforms, and despite the challenges of off platform data acquisition, we’re still leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs pretty much everywhere we go on the internet. More colloquially known as ‘cookies’, these digital crumbs allow us to be followed around. An easy fix if we’re able to keep a clean plate, but the internet’s cartels are already working on data acquisition in a ‘cookie-less world’ by expanding their network of ‘snitches’.
There are large financial incentives to creating more data points that can paint better pictures of user demographics. As such there are motives for businesses to share their data back with these platforms. For example, e-commerce stores track user behaviour within the sales platforms themselves (such as Shopify) in order to identify areas to improve profitability for the business. That could be through average order value, customer purchase frequency or simply time spent on the site. Platforms want this data that you hold and so they incentivise you to share it back with them. This is typically done through a small line of code called a ‘pixel’ that sits in the header code of a website. This line of code ensures page views, add to baskets, reached checkout, purchase data and more are shared back to the platforms. This exchange is symbiotic as the data shared can be used to optimise ads and push for better return on advertising spend for the business. Google, Meta, TikTok and more employ these pixels and a lot of websites rely on these platforms to generate sales or leads.
Beyond this, one has to be careful not just about what websites they’re visiting, but what software they’re using to do so as your browser may be sharing your data without your knowledge. Recently Firefox, an internet browser build on an open source ethos away from corporate influence pushed an update that turns ad measurements on by default, allowing data to be collected at the source.
Outside of direct digital interaction with a website, more interesting technologies can be employed that utilise the permissions granted through apps on your phone to deliver offers, emails, adverts and more. One of the most interesting ways this can be done is through the use of Bluetooth beacons inside of retail stores. These beacons are picked up by your phone and through the permissions you may have granted a fashion app, for example, they will now know you visited a store. Depending on how long you were in the store and how many beacons they have placed around it, they may have a pretty good idea of what you were doing there. Consequently you may find yourself shortly after with an advert or email offer to incentivise a purchase. This may sound a bit farfetched, but there are simpler methods at play too. If you’ve ever given your email in exchange for internet access, it’s because the business is financially incentivised to do so through the data that can come off the back of it. With that line of code platforms freely give businesses, the data always ends up back with them. Combined with the non-targeted ads we experience via billboards, broadcast television, in newspapers, at the cinema, etc, it seems that reading a book remains as one of the few ways left to experience a creative medium without seeing an ad (unless the book in and of itself is an ad of course).
As a society, can we, and should we, be allowing so much of our data to be collected, shared and freely put into the hands of these massive private corporations?
The evolution of engagement and the age of manufactured authenticity.
“Phones are the future of tv, even more so, the future of bad tv” a rather prolific message sent to me in late 2018 by a close friend of mine.
Humans struggle with boredom; a mechanism that prompts us to search for more meaningful stimuli that can hold our attention and interests. Humans also like to follow the path of least resistance and as such have found themselves in a constant drip feed of content. Optimised over a decade of data analysis, platform distribution and creativity - it’s akin to mainlining dopamine. Whilst previously the TV was a static fixture in our homes we are now only a reach into our pockets and few taps away from chasing our digital dragons. As networks have improved, our access has both improved in speed and remoteness. This combination of proximity and ease of use has resulted, in general, with humans forgetting how to be bored.
The phone is of course not the source of this distraction, merely a vector to the source of distraction; social media and the wider internet. The fast food for our minds; junk food that hits all the notes our dopamine desperate brains want. It has a draw that sucks us in ever tightening intervals, preventing us from consuming or engaging more nourishing things. Reading books, enjoying a movie, delayed gratification, just hearing the background of life. All things that have become increasingly difficult as our monkey brains fight against a daily obstacle course of distractions and notifications.
Social media, across the board, has evolved to become primarily a form of entertainment. This natural transition has happened, I imagine, due to the limitations of only seeing what your immediate connections are up to - most of our direct relationships probably aren’t doing all that much interesting stuff or sharing about it online on a regular basis. Dunbar’s number suggests that we humans can only really maintain 150 connections at once and yet the vast majority of us are following, being followed or engaging with far more than this (a practice I believe to be predominantly unhealthy for us).
The inevitable reaction to this is to push the incentives and approach for using a platform towards creating and sharing engaging content. This can be divided into people centric (like Instagram or LinkedIn) and idea centric (like Reddit). The former type, which treats the user as the commodity, fosters behaviours like polarising views and personal branding, while the latter encourages richer (though not necessarily higher quality) discussions, somewhat detached from personal identity. Whilst this can lead to a greater collective consciousness via these fast moving channels of distribution, helping with momentum on societal issues for example, it can also lead to a meme deep understanding of what it actually going on and the propagation of false information.
The most remarkable thing about all this content creation is how it’s been done without the platforms bearing any of the cost. The argument for the exchange of this free labour is that the platforms pay for the storage, the infrastructure, distribution and the opportunity that can come from that. Whether this exchange is currently balanced, I’m not so sure, but arguments have been made that all interactions on the internet that create data is free labour. This could be considered slightly too drawn out for some, but I do believe there is increasing merit to this viewpoint especially as corporations such as Meta and Adobe look to use our labour to train their AI models. Of course this is something that is likely going to end up in litigation and the big corporations are making their bets that the law will land on their side. But for the time being, one wonders if they’re willing to pirate our IP, why we can’t do the same for theirs?
The transition from social network to entertainment platform has been accelerated by the personalised nature of media consumption today. Unlike the past, where households shared a single television or newspaper, individuals now curate (to the extent the platform will allow) their media consumption through their personal devices. Even as many continue to engage with scheduled broadcasts or newspapers - often from conglomerate media empires - the dynamic of our interaction with media and its advertisements is evolving.
Historically, advertising has been about presenting an aspirational lifestyle or solution - a practice as old as humanity itself. Modern marketing has refined this approach to capture vast audiences through broad yet strategically placed ads. However, the advent of digital media has introduced more nuanced, data-driven insights that allow for targeted advertising, contrasting with the scattergun mass distribution approach of older methods, which can be prohibitively expensive for smaller brands. Clickbait might have been one of the first signs of traditional headline-grabbing techniques shifting to the digital space. Yet, the question arises: if we can choose what we consume, are we feeding our algorithm or is it feeding us?
Today, 'organic' content often serves as the advertisement itself. From product placements in movies to promotional segments on morning shows and professional YouTube reviewers, the line between content and commercial is increasingly blurred. Consumers seem to accept this kind of advertising as long as it appears authentic, fair, transparent and subtle in its underlying motivations. Consumers are after all looking for things to consume and, as such, expect a certain amount of product discovery in their lives. Adverts aren’t inherently bad things, they are simply vectors for informing us about a businesses offering, but the way in which they are employed can be bad.
As consumers gravitate towards content that feels genuine and algorithms push it towards them, creators and brands are incentivised to produce what appears to be authentic, even if it is manufactured on a massive scale (and tested on an even larger scale - a read of Mr Beasts leaked “How to succeed” internal pdf is quite insightful in this regard). This is perhaps the underlying reason why ‘ugly ads’ perform so well. Paired with platforms pushing for certain content has led to an environment where social media actors (influencers or brand owners) increasingly play roles of authenticity to sell or garner views, and as originality isn’t typically rewarded quickly it is often replaced instead with the remixing of trends as platforms demand not just quality, but quantity of content that fits into its algorithmic box.
For the tech giant owners themselves it offers opportunity for their PR teams to work magic. Turning them from shady titans of industry into relatable everymans is not easy, but it is absolutely possible. Bill Gates might be the best long term example of this as our short term memories gloss over his past of monopolistic practices and financial bullying; whilst Mark Zuckerberg might be the best recent example as he has transformed from wide eyed robo-zuck to internet cool boy.
Whether individual, business or PR rep, in this landscape the creative (i.e. content) reigns supreme, but the underlying motive remains: to harness, influence and monetise user engagement through ever-evolving algorithms. This transformation of platforms into hubs of 'entertainment' and distraction illustrates a significant shift spurred by the changes in traditional advertising methods. Manufactured authenticity on any scale is a targeted pitch to get us to buy or act, masterfully crafted to resonate on a personal level whilst retaining platform engagement. We have become the creator and the engager, in both directions value is created for the platform - The attention merchants of the internet can have their cake and eat it too.
Perhaps the most perplexing merchant of them all, with baffling longevity, is LinkedIn - It is, I imagine, far from where it started 20 years ago; eroding its value as a pure business network to become, for most, little more than a glorified digital CV and newsfeed of toxic positivity, LinkedIn lunacy, circle jerking and bold faced bullshit. I’m not convinced it was designed to distract us from our personal goals nor for us to compare ourselves to the careers and possible lies of others so far removed from ourselves. But a professionally acceptable distraction? I’m not convinced.
The one area of our digital existence that felt free of all this influence was our email. Our digital mailboxes have the capability to be a sanctuary for highly relevant communication with us. Aside from mass distributed spam occasionally slipping through the gaps, we are in control. As the walls of our mailbox is high and governments introduce measures to protect it further (GDPR for example) a lot of work is put into acquiring our email addresses so that we can be sold to from it - I like to describe this as the substack spam we subscribe to.
It is of course not all spam, but email automations and newsletters are incredibly effective tools for user action. Within e-commerce, for example, they can represent anywhere from 20-30% of a store’s revenue and can go much higher depending on the industry. As such, it’s common to come across a squeeze funnel offering something of value to you (usually a pdf or a video sales letter) in exchange for your email address. At which point you will likely be taken on an email journey that will, hopefully for the sender, result in a transaction. As a general rule these squeeze funnels can be summed up with the following statement - the lies come free, the truth’s behind a pay wall.
Bigger platforms have pretty much all push and email notification on by default for continued engagement from the second you sign up to them. It’s easy to ignore the first few emails but it doesn’t take long for your email inbox to become a cluttered mess. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any legislation coming anytime soon that will force companies to make opt-out the default when signing up to a platform - at the very least I think they should be more conscious of how much they are reaching out to their users and whether it’s truly serving their benefit in the long run - especially as AI appears to be accelerating email content writing. As a response to this problem created by technology, technology is aiming to save it with services such as ‘leave me alone’ which will unsubscribe you from your emails for you; and even Google has features to filter all your emails by categories for you so that your ‘real’ inbox isn’t bloated with your subscribed to spam mail.
The increasing deterioration of the internet and everything else.
Enshittification is the movement of something designed to create value for the user, to something designed to create value for a business from the users, to something designed to extract as much value for shareholders from the businesses and the users. I would posture that we’re seeing this deterioration of product quality for users across most industries, not just online platforms and services but physical products too.
This movement away from product quality with the user at its centre is, for example, why some are noticing google results deteriorating in quality. One might think that Google can’t get search results right anymore, but that’s plainly not true - Google gets it right every time, just not for the person searching. Pandoras box may have been opened when page ranking became about all about SEO - keywords, backlinks and those who chose to dedicate their careers to getting a website to the front page.
A good example of this at work is recipe sites. Prefaced with some story that relates back to some memory or sentimental moment for reasons users can’t quite grasp as they aggressively scroll down the page as fast as possible to get to the actual content they’re looking for - the recipe. The incentives of ranking a site are skewed to creating content for machines and not humans, creating a downward pressure for more generic, non humanistic websites, structured the way google wants as websites increasingly fight for search ranking.
As a consequence it is harder to find what you’re looking for amid a slew of SEO optimised sites. Google (and many other platforms) often try to shake things up by changing their algorithm, but sooner or later the code breakers work out how to game it again and we’re back to where we started. Hopefully we’ll start to see an approach driven by value of content for humans rather than an algorithmic checklist, but it’s hard to believe until one sees it serve us better.
It wasn’t always like this though, Google’s search function was unequivocally better in the early 2000s, because it was balanced - a rising tide lifting all boats. But the tide has now come in and washed out a lot of what was on the shore. Those remaining are left to battle for the scraps as the internet’s middle men extract too much of the value - resulting in some barely navigable sites desperately utilising every pixel possible to generate advertising revenue. Seeing the writing on the wall, some are experimenting with new models. Medium, for example, has become a home for the ‘power of meaningful writing’; supported by its community of members. Many journalists have made their way here as news platforms continue to fold against the challenge of generating revenue outside of insufficient advertising sales. And whilst Medium seems to be making progress for independent writing, it’s clear they have their own challenges which I fear will echo the history of other platforms looking to get away from traditional social media.
In order to get back to where we were, the benefits need to be more evenly distributed. Could one weigh and bias against those with the most traffic against those with the least in order to redistribute the value (a kind of algorithmic digital tax)? Even if this were somehow implemented (and successfully) the damage to niche sites is already done and the graveyard of dead websites, webpages and links to them is becoming evermore apparent. It is somewhat mythologised that everything on the internet lives forever, unfortunately that’s not always the case. Despite the work being done by archive.org and others like it, much of the internet is disappearing and it’s looking like these big platforms are going to be the only ones left at the end of it - especially as acquisition, consolidation and deletion of existing sites grows.
Despite awareness that the experience of the internet is in decline; this may be being ignored on purpose. Google’s AI, Gemini, will eventually become their vessel for finding information by funnelling users to the answer without ever linking them off to another site. As such, Google (Alphabet) might be the biggest economic winner from the internet as they transition from deciding what websites get seen, to being the only one who does when used for search - cutting off the lifeblood of others in the process by turning themselves from middle man to main man. He who controls the spice search controls the universe internet after all.
It’s safe to say that SEO has ruined a lot of things, but it is preferable to a world answered through a modern day magic 8 ball. Fortunately (at lease for now) the resulting Gemini generated search responses are rather hilariously backfiring as it struggles to understand the difference between useful information and internet shitposts satire; recommending one adds craft glue to their pizza to prevent the cheese falling off, or that the best place for a steak sandwich in London is The Angus Steakhouse (it’s not). It does beg the question, who will be fact checking the AI when it’s learning from an ocean of content filled with trash?
Interestingly (or perhaps depressingly) one of the ways in which this trash is being generated is through bots, which currently account for an estimated 50% of internet activity. With the addition of AI some are estimating that 99% of internet activity could be bots by the end of the decade. These bots are already being used, by those with agendas, to water down any real human sentiment through disinformation campaigns. As AI gets better at acting as agents for foreign, domestic and private interests, we will see fuel poured on the fire of what is already an unprecedented era of propaganda, societal divide and apathy - perhaps the previously mocked dead internet theory will turn into a reality. Whilst technologies upper class claim that it can save us, I’m not convinced it can save us from itself when it appears to be consuming fruit of a poisoned tree. It’s certainly hard to trust it to act in our best interests when it’s at the whims of few individuals who wield control of its executive functions.
The limits of digital enshittifcation don’t begin and end with my somewhat hyperbolic statements about Google though (who are currently under investigation for breaking antitrust laws). We might be watching the IBMification of tech giants in realtime. Much like car companies of the 1970s, tech companies are starting to become, or are already, bloated and unresponsive. Offering worsening products and little reaction to competitive threat other than acquisition with little intent to implement - the only innovations seem to be cost cutting and copying each other. As they become increasingly desperate and scammy (or outright fraudulent as we’ve seen with the collapse of FTX), pushing overhyped or unfinished products, we are starting to see some movement from governments to act. The Biden administration for example has made shutting down consumer fraud a priority; as a response, rather than dial it down with humility, the tech industry is turning to Donald Trump to save them.
The prevalence of the problems we’re experiencing now aren’t limited to our digital existence. We are getting less back in exchange for our time and money (alongside a convenient scapegoat called inflation). We can somewhat easily relate this to fast food’s increased in price against a decreased quality of product; so much so that its not making as much financial sense for consumers given the market it is supposed to service. Chipotle, as an example, has been doing an exceedingly good job at demonstrating this as they’ve been on the firing line as consumers record their measly burrito portion sizes (nothing that any other publicly traded would likely be doing differently btw - raise prices, reduce costs). They are not the only ones though, both McDonald’s and Starbucks (who just hilariously fired their CEO and hired Chipotle's) have reported declining sales as consumers push back against the increased costs of their products.
Sitting between our digital and physical realities, Amazon is also experiencing a fall from grace. The once centralised home for e-commerce has become saturated with dropshipped products that clog up reams of pages, making it more difficult to search or discern trustworthy brands from those that are just looking for a quick buck. The decline in experience both digitally and physically has resulted in established brands questioning the value of remaining on it, and for consumers the value of ordering on it. One only has to look at how amazon processes returns, simply weighing boxes rather than opening and checking them, to see that quality control and service are in decline. Unsurprisingly investigations into Amazon’s practices show similar endemic issues with their operations that leave a rather bad taste in the mouths of anyone willing to pay attention. Whilst the financial results may support a percentage of refunds for bad returns and a counter PR budget, the long term damage created by eroding consumer and business trust is hard to gain back. Unfortunately for consumers going elsewhere for their buying needs has become increasingly difficult as Amazon (et al) have run many out of business. Whilst platforms such as Shopify offer independent salvation by fueling an independent ownership renaissance, replacing the organic search traffic generated via these massive marketplaces presents its own challenges.
The problems facing us may very well be the internet’s own version of climate change. Similarly it seems to be the symptom of a bigger problem surrounding growth and a thirst that cannot be quenched. There is an expectation and pressure to beat quarterly earnings by shareholders; every quarter, forever, in a finite world. Growth for the sake of growth is the underlying ideology and it is an ideology shared with that of the cancer cell. Whilst we may be feeling sick, the (market) beatings will likely continue until moral improves. This is likely due to the mechanisms put in place to keep checks and balances on these corporations having either been removed or not operating in a meaningful way. When technology moves this fast and forms an integral part of many people’s lives (and perhaps more importantly, investment and pension portfolios) it’s hard to see how to unravel the knot without causing catastrophic economic damage whilst committing political and party suicide.
Interestingly the larger family owned brands that can carve their space against the conglomerates have the opportunity to govern their business with more equity and equality. This typically enables them to side step the problems I’m outlining as they’re not subject to the same external market forces; they are able to plant trees whose shade they may never sit under (although they still may choose not to). Conversely those who view their returns quickly may find themselves repenting their losses in leisure as they kill the goose that laid golden eggs.
The Fracturing of our attention.
From school children who can’t get through a single class without using their phones to movie theatres peppered with bright screens; adding to the cinematic ambiance. It seems we can no longer go without being connected, or perhaps more appropriately, distracted. Recent studies show screen time in the USA are averaging 9 hours per day for 11-14 year olds and Globally over 7 hours between the ages of 16-24.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that as third spaces within society have decreased, internet usage and engagement has gone up as a supplement. Which happened first could be seen as a bit of a chicken and egg situation, though I suspect it is more likely the latter. We may only now be experiencing the consequences of relying on the internet and social media to fill the gap created by the loss of in person social stimulation. Whilst an undeniable blessing for the isolated, medically vulnerable and disabled who otherwise would have no routes to a life outside of their own four walls; relying exclusively on it as an alternative to an in person community is unlikely to result in a stronger society (perhaps quite the opposite).
Simple brick phones for calls and text messages have morphed into devices so far removed from their namesake. Whilst they still exist in developing countries or perhaps as a burner for your favourite dealer (this may not even be necessary anymore with virtual sims, vpns and end to end encryption) the fundamental difference in the way they are embedded in our lives is quite stark. No doubt born from the innocence of a designers mind out of the sake of experience, convenience or branding; their evolution and expansion has meant they now demand more of us than we do from them.
Mobile usage plays a central role in stealing our attention and it hasn’t taken long for us to be conditioned into responding to our digital dog whistles. Their prevalence and associated haptic feedbacks has brought about a collective psychosis in the form of phantom vibrations - triggering us to check our phones even when they request nothing of us.
Beyond personal applications; Teams, Slack and other ‘work’ based applications have become online memes as individuals find themselves triggered by their auditory notifications due to the perma-availablity demands that underpin them - on a personal note I have experienced intense auditory hallucinations during particularly stressful work periods where communication has been through these instant messaging apps. Whilst I do get their mantras of being better than email, and in some ways they are, I find their demands at the whim of a push notification, on balance, more disruptive than helpful.
The power of mobile engagement can be seen from Facebook’s early IPO days. 11 days before going public they issued an S-1/A revision, slashing their revenue projections because they weren’t yet monetising any of of their mobile usage; and users were flocking from desktop to mobile. But as soon as they resolved this, they reported making over a billion dollars from mobile alone at their next quarterly earnings. A glimpse of what was to come for mobile based engagement as platforms drove eyeballs to them.
Mobiles and social media have evolved a lot since then and whilst I believe the most vulnerable to the strings of internet influence are children, I’m not convinced anyone else is much wiser or safer. With the Truman show-ification of children by their parents, their parents subsequent divided attention for their children and “YouTuber / Influencer” being the most desired job amongst them, it does feel like we’re setting things up for disaster. For all the faults I have with the CCP they seem to be doing right in this regard by limiting under 18s use of social media to 40 minutes per day between 06:00 and 22:00. Conversely in the west tech executives are preventing their own children from using social media whilst the companies they work for fight to prevent regulation that would protect everyone else’s. The future, it seems, is looking like a society further divided not just by wealth but by the addition of those who have control over their technological distractions and those who don’t.
Our collective ability to focus and form critical thoughts is being impacted as we are bombarded by endless torrents of information from all angles. We are fighting against experiences designed to distract us with features, such as instant messaging that are hidden behind a wall of content you have to get past first; often wiping one’s short term memory. Consequently we are entered into a state of divided attention; and as Huxley wrote, it appears we have been given so much that it is reducing us to passivity and egoism whilst the truth drowns in a sea of irrelevance. More modern interpretations seem to refer to this as ‘brain rot’ or being ‘cooked’, the prevalence of which appears to be increasing as we notice a digital culture that not only feeds us our desires (such as overly sexualised content) but demands a presence, opinion and eyes on just about everything.
Like counts, follower numbers, video views and other publicly facing data available to us add to the metrics by which we measure our place online, and as much as we might try, they’re hard to ignore. The vast majority of platforms show many of them publicly, but some are starting to change that as the measurability of this online data can be linked to online bullying and the viralification of people’s personal moments. For children growing up now I wonder how much stress it must put on them to know that anything they do could be filmed and distributed for the entertainment of audiences around the world almost instantaneously; often for little more than internet clout. In the other direction Youtube decided to remove the dislike count for videos some 2 or 3 years ago, a decision made likely for the right reasons as viewers are disconnected from the impact their negativity might have on creators, whilst X (formerly twitter) has removed being able to see what other users have liked, a decision made likely for the wrong reasons. One platform championing a forward thinking social media without public facing data is snapchat. With their recent advertising campaign highlighting “less social media, more snapchat” it’s obvious that it’s not just the consumers who have noticed the need for a more grounded online experience.
The lies technology sold us.
The idea that technology will improve the working person's life is a tale as old as time. The ongoing premise behind technological advancements is an increase of output for a similar or decreased input; resulting in the ability to reduce the working week and create more free time with no negative consequence to worker salaries or business bottom line. Unfortunately theory and reality don’t always collide, and the benefits are not typically distributed equally. Wealthy elites, money owning interests (in politics and work culture) are typically the only ones who benefit from such advancements. There’s a book called Power and Progress that highlights how the progressive movement got its roots in identifying this.
Converse to past industrial leaps forward, the benefits of modern technology on individuals is becoming harder to pin down. A study on how much time the internet actually saves us resulted in a surprisingly low two weeks. This study doesn’t measure the impact of additional time we waste on technology, and as such, I wonder if it really provides a net societal benefit.
The anxious generation by Jonathan Haidt highlights how much technology is impacting us, in particular smart phones and social media from 2010 onwards on younger generations. As I’ve argued already, the internet is reprogramming us and creating internal tensions; pushing us to measure ourselves through metrics we are not choosing, distorted realities through filters, easy access to overly sexualised content and a barrage of polarising view points. Technology exists in a dichotomy that sells us the idea of coming closer together through greater distances and a reduction of effort but conversely supercharges individualism, contrarianism and a personality based economy. Great for those that thrive in this environment, but for the rest this combination is spreading a digital sickness and I wonder if we have created a sad generation punctuated by happy pictures that try to present a permanent ‘best life’.
Beyond the innocence that social media markets itself as, there are those who use it with malicious intent. The intellectual dark web types; YouTube finance gurus, get rich quick grifters and life contrarianists prioritise their own wealth over the well being of their audiences though content that often takes the truth with a fist full of salt. Both Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate immediately come to mind, but there are many other unsavories who fit into this demographic. Dig a bit deeper and you’ll find criminal organisations using the internet and its platforms for their financial gain to distribute child porn, launder money, co-ordinate human trafficking and more. Though the tech giants seem to bear little responsibility for the damage they enable.
It does seem that the technology industry is able to sidestep the issues it creates, leaving the burden to society. On an individual level, one may find products that they bought suddenly become obsolete as companies decide to kill off software necessary to its function. This has already happened with Spotify’s Car Thing and may even happen with Amazon’s unprofitable Alexa range (although they may view this as a loss leader). Beyond technology stopping because of software, everything from cars to computers, more often than not, now come with warranty tape (not necessarily unreasonable under the terms of warranty) and software locked components that prevent or make it much harder to repair through anyone other than an authorised brand service centre. For products that are now technologically obsolete, reappropriating them into something else seems to also be a non-starter as corporate decision makers put themselves in the way of internal or external initiatives to make use of their old technology.
10 years ago I wrote my dissertation on the planned obsolescence of technological products and the relationship repair has in our ownership of what we buy. I wrote about the mountains of hidden e-waste that our generation will inherit, and it seems we are doomed to do the same to our children, especially as we have little agency over our stuff’s usefulness once ‘broken’ or ‘obsolete’ - something that seems to be happening at an accelerated rate. Whilst I continue to repair what I can, I fear we are now in a world where the transaction is somewhat irrelevant to the legal definition of ownership as viewed through the eyes of the manufacturers.
A change is coming.
We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of modern technology and the Internet as we have come to know it. Perhaps not functionally, but certainly perceptively. As it increasingly removes its own value from our lives and tech corporations buckle under the weight of their own bloat I think we’ll start finding ourselves peddling backwards - naturally against the wills of our techno-feudalist lords who may struggle to accept that it is no longer socially destructive for us to stop using their products.
The word ‘Online’ comes with the implication that there is an Offline. And whilst there certainly is, it is seldom a place the vast majority chooses to (or have the choice to) log in and out of. I used to feel sorry for those who didn’t connect with technology, who shunned it as something they didn’t understand, connected via literal tethers of life and not just what is behind a screen. As someone who has experienced both a life before the internet and after, I very much envy them and pity the young who may never know a way of life without it; what it’s like to be unplugged. Because of this I believe we’ll start to see technology come into play that works to remove itself, and us, from being fully connected.
Whilst studying at university the phrase ‘internet of things’ was commonplace. That interconnectedness has shown to have relatively limited application in our day to day lives some 10 or so years since I graduated. As time has moved forward we have instead experienced an increase in the convenience of direct connection as we’ve moved from wifi dependence to 5g mobile data; enabling a reliance on our phones that if suddenly removed would now leave us feeling rather lost. This endured convenience, and its subsequent exploitation of us, is leading to a pressure towards ‘things off of the internet”. It could be part of the reason why retro 80s and 90s tech is having its own renaissance. Film cameras, old digital cameras, technology designed to do one thing well without reliance on an internet connection or supplementary software subscriptions - providing little distraction, more purpose and better value for money. This retro movement is proving to be particularly popular with the new generation of YouTubers who are not only defining their aesthetic through its native stylisation, but also by focusing on long form content and storytelling (the creative outcomes slightly ironically distributed through social media).
Few modern day companies have been able to maintain the magic of purposeful distraction free experiences, particularly in tech, mainly because not adapting to the times usually results in loss of marketshare and inevitable business failure - the innovators dilemma Kodak experienced and their subsequent ‘corporate Darwin award’ is a good example of this. These magic experiences are why I fell in love with design as a child. The CD players by Bang & Olufsen in the late 90s and early 2000s would open up when you got near them, and their TVs that would rotate towards you when they were turned on. These experiences became cemented in my mind as the perfect balance of technology, physical interaction and intangible delight. Whilst many companies have successfully innovated and moved forwards with technology, few have been able to maintain the magic of a pre touch screen world like Nintendo. The counter-culture kid of the gaming world takes a ‘fun’ first approach to their work, rather than competing on specs, they remain one of the few manufacturers that prioritises bringing everyone into the same space rather than playing remotely with strangers; enabling them to consistently recapture nostalgia in a way that few other brands (perhaps other than Lego) can.
As much as one might long for the way things were, it’s unfortunately hard to imagine a world where we go back, it’s just too impractical. Instead we are seeing a design movement emerging that could be described as some kind of retro futurism; blending the beauty of purpose driven functionality with modern day technology. The style of work coming out of Teenage Engineering and even Hyundai are pointing towards a movement driven by retro sensibility with modern capability. Slightly more abstractly one could relate this push and pull between our past and future to the removal of tactile dashboards in favour of large touch screens in cars. Having realised the consequences of leaning too far into modern technologies, some manufacturers are seeing the impracticalities and are pulling back to find a balance between the intuitiveness of physicality and the versatility offered by screens. Even Apple are starting to experiment again with tactility outside of the screen, most notably with the iPhone 16 action button and camera control input.
It is perhaps no surprise that we are seeing the cresting of ‘dumb phones’ that very purposefully do less amid a growing desire towards the exploration of regressively progressive technological experiences that promise to be a carte blanche to free us from our digital shackles. An observation heavily noted whilst I was working at Kyunas from 2022, where we theorised that the future of personal technology (what comes after the smartphone) was going to be increasingly screen less. Experiences that didn’t require looking at a screen in order to interact with it in a focused, meaningful and distraction free manner. If we could remove the necessity of a screen perhaps we could regain control and move to a world of softer digital interactions. This resulted in us creating a tactile prototype that allowed a user to navigate and use Spotify without touching a phone, speaking, or looking at a screen.
The hunger for what comes next has been somewhat premature so far, at least from a hardware perspective. Perhaps naive attempts by the likes of the Ai Pin and Rabbit AI leant a touch too heavily on AI technology to do the heavy lifting for their products; proving that wider day to day on device capabilities of AI are still in their infancy. Despite these early faux pas, many believe this is where our future lies and have accepted that there will be failures on the way to a presumed inevitable success. There is no doubt that the introduction of ChatGPT to the world brought about a sudden gearshift. Brewing in the background for several years before surfacing, amongst others such as Midjourney, capturing the zeitgeist (and rather sizeable investments). Whilst the limitations of the large data sets that underpin ChatGPT et al appear to be slowly revealing themselves, it doesn’t remove the incredible technological and scientific achievements that may still come.
For now I worry that it’s running faster than its legs can carry it, and we may be heading towards a future that has equal probability of landing us in a Star Trek Utopia as it does a Blade Runner Dystopia. Will AI save us or enslave us is something that we will only be able to answer in hindsight, but for now, it seems unlikely that political leaders from around the world will ask for it to be ‘turned off’ or ‘slowed down’ even in the face of potentially environmentally disastrous energy demands. Perhaps as the aforementioned bad actors of the internet increasingly use this novel technology we will see action from organisations to prevent us all from entering a collective state of distrust. For now though, sentiment amongst ‘everyday people’ towards the AI hype seems to have been elegantly captured with the following viral sentence - “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
In reality I think it’s more likely that AI will disappoint us. There are false promises being made in this new age gold rush that LLMs (large language models - essentially auto finishing engines) and the allure of AGI (artificial general intelligence - some kind of computer God) won’t be able to live up to. Far from ending their development, I think we’ll find their application in the micro scale rather than the macro. With the quality of input directly related to the output we will find that in order to remove hallucinations from AI, we must feed it reliable information and create tools that are specific to use cases - ASI (Artificial Specific Intelligence) - so that we can use them as tools for us, rather than as an all knowing box. As much as we may fear being replaced as humans by AI, I don’t think it’s going to happen and ultimately we’re still going to have to interact with other humans to get on with things.
With approximately 2.9 billion humans alive today having never been online (as of data collected in 2021), tech still has huge room and more than enough appetite to grow. It has the ability to help us as a species, but like a plant being overwatered, we need to slow things down for our own sanity and productivity. The challenges we’re facing, and the change that needs to come, will centre around the big tech and the finance world’s addiction to efficiency and wealth accumulation - something I noted in my 2021 project what it means to be rich. In order for tech to prevent itself from collapsing in on itself, its relationship with humans has to change.
Can we fix the internet?
Our modern lives are saturated by technology, the internet and their underlying algorithms. We are in an evolutionary mismatch between what we have created and what created us. The book “Why we sleep” by Matthew Walker covers one instance of this particularly well, highlighting the dichotomy of modern living against the evolution of sleep. As adaptable as we humans may be, we are simply not designed for this much input and ignoring that is more likely than not to result in exacerbating the issues our ancient bodies are experiencing in this technological world.
Tech isn’t the first industry to face problems of its own creation. Much like the natural cycles the earth uses to regulate herself on a global and local scale, industries often prove that they too need checks and balances. Cars, tobacco, oil and more have faced regulatory challenges as they prove incapable of managing their own momentum. Far from ending them, they adapt, learn to work in these new environments and continue to thrive. Unlike these other industries, tech evolves, deploys and globalises at a pace so rapid that it can be hard to realise what is actually happening until it’s too late.
With these massive tech companies forming such huge parts of global economics, regulatory intervention can be tricky. There are some hints that governments are starting to pay more attention as they realise their mistakes from acting a touch late with social media; the EU bringing in stricter data protection through GDPR, regulating the use of usb-c to reduce e-waste and the recent AI act are steps in the right direction as they catch up to the lag between development of emerging tech and regulating - especially when some of these companies have more funds and knowledge than the states themselves.
In America, courts are also noticing and even their wildcard state Florida has passed a law that requires under 14s to have parental consent to use social media - hardly much of a preventative measure given how easily parents bend to their children’s wills, but the seed is there. Australia too is planning to ban social media use for under 16s to mitigate the impact of social media on Australian children. Bringing in more meaningful legislation feels like its going to be an uphill battle when Big Tech wields so much global political and financial influence; but beyond it there could be huge knock on effects on normal people through regulating or not regulating that are hard to predict - this is especially true as putting up walls could create impossible hurdles for startups and small businesses.
What has become rather hard to ignore is the centralisation and consolidation of power that Big Tech has been brazenly wielding on an increasing basis against competition and individuals - market domination through merit is not illegal, but market abuse certainly should be. Whilst they’re happy not taking responsibility for what happens on their tech or platforms, they are happy to profit off it and use it to their benefit; allowing individuals at the helms of these giant tech companies to act as if they were sovereign states, enacting influence on the general populace without any of them being elected officials. Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, Zuckerberg’s majority shareholding of Meta, Bezos’ control of the Washington Post, Trump’s “Truth” Social and Murdock’s media empire are obvious examples of modern Ozymandias’, but there are likely more sitting outside of the lime light.
Whilst we as societies look increasingly desperately towards our politicians to face the colossus we all seem to forget that the internet is still relatively young and its cycles of change are fast paced.
What started off as a light pinch of salt that enhanced the flavour of tech has become more like a fistful; and everything just tastes of salt now. Even with the huge amounts of wealth these platforms wield they are not immune to disruption and, true to its nature, and, despite what tech corporations may have you believe, the internet still exists as a place where rebels can be rebels and the process of working out what the next phase of it will look like has already begun. The “Blockchain Bros” have certainly been on this idea for a while, with the term “Web 3” coined by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014 as a reference to a “decentralised online ecosystem” (based on blockchain). Whilst visions for this next iteration of the internet are a bit murky, decentralisation and an open source approach could be the route to repairing our relationship with it - this is what the next wave of tech companies will be focused on as they try to move us towards an internet without, or at least with less, middle men.
One early answer to this is the Fediverse (a portmanteau of “federation“ and “universe“), a decentralised social media protocol that allows users to communicate across different platforms via a single account that is linked to but not centrally controlled or owned by a platform. This framework allows different platforms to communicate and interact together, and is a way to bring some humanity back to the internet; away from the algorithmic influence of mega tech platforms. Some are already building on this already, Mastadon and Blue Sky are decentralised feeds that have been getting more notice since Twitter started degrading under the stewardship of its new owner, proving the damage that giving one person’s control over an algorithm can have. Others such as Flipboard, Wordpress and Ghost are also moving towards this model; helping to build out this experimental future for the internet. In some ways this protocol is a modern interpretation of an RSS feed, but there is still a lot to work out with user experience and getting that right will likely be crucial to its success.
For social media users, this is the beginnings of a way to take back the internet for themselves, to have an identity and connect with the things that are important to them online. Clearly users are hungry for this as platforms such as Cara find themselves gaining explosive growth from users seeking meaningful interactions and content that they can’t find on the giant walled garden that is instagram. The future of the internet, or at least the social side of it, is going to be driven by deeper connections as opposed to more, the separation of discovery from reach and the return of a curated internet that prioritises quality over quantity. If these protocols work, it will result in something that feels closer to the earlier experimental days of the internet - The biggest problem the rebels of the internet will have to solve is working out who’s going to pay for it all, and that may be the advantage that big tech has over defining the future of the internet.
Ultimately the vast majority of people don’t really want to understand how the internet works or who owns it, they just want it to work. Even if Google continues to decline in quality, most are going to be happy with whatever it gives them - likely lifted from countless websites without payment, royalty, or other compensation.
Digital colonialism is here.
Whilst the Information on the internet is free, its sincerity is not and I do believe that AI has pushed us towards the necessity for ethically sourced data, especially as there are invisible disinformation wars being fought online. With 15% of daily google searches having never been searched before and social media’s increasing impact on democracy, we need to gain greater clarity behind what went into producing what we engage with. From the answers themselves to the images we see, a digital nutrition label for the content we interact with online is likely necessary. Meta data that travels with what we engage with, locked in citations that bring trust (akin to Twitter’s community notes) and allow us to develop detection systems to know if something is reliable, or even real.
There isn’t going to be one solution to fix everything wrong with the internet, but it’s clear that it needs regulation, intervention, cross industry collaboration and moderation to prevent it from becoming worse. We need to get better at understanding what is a healthy technological experience and what is not whilst dismantling the centralisation of power exerted by these corporations to bring more equity and equality back to our online experiences (The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake goes into great depth in regards to this). The internet has become an essential to modern life, it is a utility now and Governments need to start treating it as such. By designing an internet that is forced to put humans and society over data we will end up with something that may be harder to measure, but will likely be far more effective. Whilst the narrow-minded technocratic powers will argue that regulation and change will prevent corporate value from being generated, I would argue that it will save them from themselves whilst also making the world a more enjoyable place to exist in.
For time being I think we should be more conscious of putting our phones, tablets, laptops and TVs away more often so that we can recalibrate ourselves and contemplate the role tech should have in our lives.
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I started writing this in May of 2024 to address thoughts I’d be having in regards to my work within e-commerce and its relationship with social media. What began as a 2000 word piece has evolved into a 12,000+ word essay that has required not just my time, but the thoughts and conversation of many other people. To those who spent time reading early iterations of this, to those who listened and challenged me, who provided me with further information, got me access to relevant conferences, thank you!
There is no doubt in my mind that I could be absolutely wrong about many of the things I’ve written, I’m sure in some ways I will be as my views shift and change whilst the world around me does too. I write because there are things I feel I can only gain clarity from by going through the process that creates this outcome - I’m certainly not being paid to write this. It is very much a mirror of things I see within myself as much as within the wider society and each topic and reference here deserves its own essay. Finally, this is in many ways a bit of a rebellion against the rise of short form content that seems to be so prevalent on social platforms at the moment, where thoughts are surface level sound bites and not much more. So, if you have spent your valuable time reading the entirety of this, please know I appreciate that you did and I hope you take away something of value from it.
You can always let me know in the comments below, or by emailing me.
