When I left academia I discovered quite quickly that (against the understanding of the entire universe to that point) actually no-one was really using Twitter dot com. No one I work with uses it, no one I meet is eagerly following or sharing tweets, no one looks at it. Everyone is a reluctant LinkedIn user. LinkedIn has a perverse evergreen-ness due to it being 95% utility: It doesn’t pretend to be a ‘marketplace of ideas’ or really even an actual community. Like a lot of the posts on it, it’s a cynical smokescreen for grandiose self-promotion and uninformed reckons pinned up on a monolithic noticeboard of job ads, job requests, prognostications about the future-of-whatever and the occasional glimpse of candidness and truth. I’m totally happy to suspend my pride and jump on that bandwagon when it suits because we all know we’re in the same game.
So LinkedIn will probably last as long as there is in fact jobs and pride because that’s what it’s for. For the others however, I’m sure you know it’s a bleak time: Facebook was for something that the people who got on it early (like me) have now grown out of; eg. engaging in voyeuristic social status battles. We deployed weaponised pictures of food, children, holidays and parties with abandon until it didn’t matter anymore and a sickeningly-sweet cream of ‘influencers’ rose to the top and colonised Instagram where they defined the psychosocial aspirations of the insecure generation left gasping for breath in the wasteland former battlefield of the early social networks.
Twitter was for tech people to talk about their mundane experience, became an academic and thought leader hot-takes roller derby that lowered the intellectual calibre of the world and is now twenty different things (most of them ugly) and is being busily killed off by a ‘genius.’ I’ve had some horrible experiences on Twitter, the niches and cliques and confirmation bias enabled and encouraged by an engine that drives conflict are the easily ignorable side of that horror. The abuse and violence others (particularly women) suffer is the worst of it. (Not to excuse LinkedIn from that either; anywhere men are strutting and butting heads will result in abuse directed at women.) Reddit I liked, I liked browsing it for random nonsense, but that too seems to have faced up IRL problems with how the hell you pay for this infinite scroll of stuff by, just like Twitter, restricting it.
So now everyone is looking around for the next place to get their hit. My chats last few weeks are filled with people sharing invites and tips on using the plethora of alternatives. For a while it was Mastadon but it was too complex to understand. Then there’s the Discords and Slacks but they’re invite only and tend to be about evangelising something. There’s a new one, Bluesky which comes from @jack who is far form innocent; Instagram is launching a Twitter-like feature (who the hell is the designer over there just sticking stuff on without regard like a Katamari?).
As Dave Karpf points out, this scrabble to claim a dwindling space everyone hates is all probably less about the ‘end of social’ than the end of the infinite scroll that has characterised the speculative business model of social networks (capture audience attention, provide infinite distraction with scrolling, pepper with ads: If there’s infinite content the chances of clicking on an ad is non-zero.) This makes sense: Content is expensive, energy is getting more expensive and all of a sudden generative AI crops up with the potential that instead of having to store and serve this infinite wheel of content from your warehouse in Utah to a phone in Peckham, you can just have an algorithm generate infinite content on the fly. Folks like Rob Horning and Charlie Warzel have written on this as a world where nothing truly ends.
The thing about all these new socials is they’re all clones of or variations on a theme; there’s nothing really new that I can tell. They’re limited in design terms by the muscle memory of the users eager for the next fix in the style of 2015-era Twitter and it’s easy to sate that by promising that nostalgic experience. They’re all working in the same constraints and so end up with the same problems. Or, as with Mastadon, over-complicate it for non-super-users.
So what if we just let the door quietly close on this chapter of online life. Social failed and irreparably damaged the social fabric of the world. The promised metaverse never arrived and was a colossal failure, Web3 is all scams. Just let it go: Resist the urge to find the next thing, to tip-off the next social network. It’s over; the anger is too real; the scars too fresh. We’ve been so gaslit into believing we need it, so addicted to the infinite scroll that we’re running gratefully into the arms of the next abuser. Just don’t.
I’ll be happy to see the notifications gradually decrease in urgency and to see my screen time come down. I have a phone battery that now lasts 24 hours. Of course, LinkedIn will remain because it’s more a service than a network, BeReal is still great and weird and we should have stopped and stuck with Ello when it was ships.
Upcoming
On 20th July at 1600 CET I’m doing a talk for Foresight Europe Network. I’ll be talking about design at Arup Foresight. Free to all and you can sign up here.
Short Stuff
- I’ve watched half the amazing Disco Elysium investigation from People Make Games now. The first half is very dense in financial and legal information which I thought I could absorb on background. I’ll be honest, he’s not a great interviewer; quite hesitant and doesn’t push the point with the various protagonists of the drama. But it’s exceptionally thorough.
- AI is a lot of Work on the Verge. It’s not news to anyone but this is a pretty comprehensive breakdown of the what an why of invisible labour in AI.
- I’ve been on a run of AI Art methodology pieces lately, which isn’t particularly productive when I thought I’d finished with my methodology. But here’s a good one from Crawford and Stark which examines a lot of the mid-2010’s surveillance/data art and the ethics of it.
- I read a lot about AI as you know and you can often find good criticism or good speculation but it’s rare to find them co-articulated very well together. This brilliant paper on ‘permacomputing’ (eg. computing within ecological limits) is a really good match. It offers a great analysis and critique of ‘techno-maximalism’ and the accompanying fantasies and visions of techno-futures but then pivots to proposing life in the alternative. It’s rare to see those together: “…when we talk about permacomputing aesthetics, it is not just about technical implementation, or about countering a broken maximalism with an exact opposite, such as an equally broken minimalism. It is about reimagining, dreaming, and experimenting with alternative ways of engaging with computer and network technology.”
- Daniel shared this podcast episode on the psychoanalysis of AI doomerism from Rendering Unconscious. I’m listening to it now. It’s good to hear the connection of ‘the promises of SIlicon Valley have failed’ with ‘we need a new wonder product’ with ‘we need a new narrative for this time we cry wolf’ with ‘how about “you have to deal with it or we’ll all die?”‘ with ‘yeah sure, also mysogyny.’ All put much better than I’ve been managing to.
- Go subscribe to Beth Singler‘s newsletter.
- Good summary from Dave Karpf on the inelegant ongoing Demise of Twitter.
I worry that my defensive knack for self-depreciation and unseriousness is damaging my career a little. I sometimes have the impression that I should take my work with a total seriousness. But I have always believed that work should be fun and also what I do is a bit silly. Mrs Revell does serious work. Everyday she directly and measurably improves the lives of the people she interacts with, to the point of saving them and she’s paid fuck all and is constantly getting abuse for it. So I will continue to take the serious bits serious (catastrophic collapse of the systems that support life on Earth) and the fun bits fun (reckoning and speculating).