Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people
I’ve now read several of these from wheresyoured.at, and I find them to be well-researched, well-written, very dramatic (if a little ranty), but ultimately stopping short of any structural or theoretical insight. It’s right and good to document the shady people inside these shady companies ruining things, but they are symptoms. They are people exploiting structural problems, not the root cause of our problems. The site’s perspective feels like that of someone who had a good career in tech that started before, say, 2014, and is angry at the people who are taking it too far, killing the party for everyone. I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with that perspective, but it’s certainly a very specific one, and one that I don’t particularly care for.
Even “the rot economy,” which seems to be their big theoretical underpinning, has this problem. It puts at its center the agency of bad actors in venture capital becoming overly-obsessed with growth. I agree with the discussion about the fallout from that, but it’s just lacking in a theory beyond “there are some shitty people being shitty.”
This is an interesting perspective, and I very much see how people can have it. Totally agree that the internet just isn’t like it used to be, arguably for the worst, depending on who you ask.
As much as I hate these big tech platforms, the issue isn’t that they’re doing what they’re doing. After all, capitalistic societies (especially the US) don’t just ignore it, they actually encourage this sort of “money above all else” mentally that a lot of these CEOs and shareholders have. So what platforms are doing shouldn’t surprise anyone. Maybe some of it should be made illegal, but I’d argue making new laws still won’t really address the problem.
The real problem is that we (everyday people) need to take more responsibility over the mental health of ourselves and our children and just stop using this brain-rotting software. We can complain about what they’re doing to humanity all we want, but if we continue to use these platforms, we’re just making it easier for them to do the bad things they do.