“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”
–Cory Doctorow
“The Facebook feeds started off as exclusively content from people you followed, your friends. Then it was friends and creators.. And then the algorithm was showing you a lot of stuff you’re not following directly. Because, in some ways, that’s more interesting stuff than just the things you’ve chosen to follow.
The next step is content that’s generated by an AI system that might be something that you’re interested in.”
–Mark Zuckerberg
What is the point of a service that gives you a feed filled with stuff you didn’t ask for?
A feed designed to keep you scrolling, distracted, disconnected from your real life, one that reloads and hides that thing you just saw, hoping you’ll keep scrolling to find it again, but never revealing it.
What is the point of that feed which has given up trying to show you interesting people and things, and is now inventing out of whole cloth a make-believe world that no human ever breathed life into?
Are we so desperate to escape that we’ll drop a like and comment on literally fantastic bullshit? We’re paying with our time, slice by fractional slice of our lives, to see things painted without intent, without cause, without that spark of a dream that every creator grants to their art?
Max Read described this as ‘publishing demented nonsense into a void.’
Perhaps we need to leave the void behind, create our own world, and live in it.
Create. Be good to each other. Be human.
–NFG
fantastic (adj.) – late 14c., “existing only in imagination, produced by (mental) fantasy”
[Note: the Zuckerberg quote was paraphrased. The full quote can be found in <a href=”https://www.theverge.com/24253481/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-ar-glasses-orion-ray-bans-ai-decoder-interview”>this interview on The Verge</a>.