Like that title? It’s my riff on Doctorow’s “platform decay” concept. Even before the Internet evolved beyond Web 2.0 into social media, people were already having second thoughts. Social media platforms make money off your unpaid content generation, personal data mining and keeping you inside the walled garden with the unthinking dopamine rush of empty engagement. In social media, controversy makes money not clarity. It’s vaudeville: as long as you keep the audience seated in the theater and paying for tickets, who cares what it’s about?
I’m hardly the first to make this connection but, I’d say the last 10-12 years of political theater in my country has been warped by social media.
Let’s talk about Bayesian filters for e-mail. A simple example of artificial intelligence, these things became important in the early aughts to automate the process of shutting out the exponentiating wave of spam that buried our inboxes. With enough training they became quite apt at shutting out the junk and noise.
You won’t find these things on most social media platforms, nor will you find any easy way make an FAQ. The last decade of troll farms have taken advantage of this to astroturf every political discussion on social media since Mango Mussolini descended that escalator. The naivete of 2011 is laughable now.
Anyway, it’s gotten so that most of my time is wasted on social media sending trolls, sock puppets, scams and spam to my block lists, our tech oligarchs aren’t going to fix this because that’s not how their business model works, that’s not how capitalism works.
I remember the hype in the 1990s, the Internet that was promised was going to be the great intelligence amplifier. Ha! Yeah, not so much. The fascist scamsters have used it to take over the planet, and as such, I have returned back this humble, decentralized, interoperable platform. It’s where it all started for me.