- Twitter friends: Friends, on Twitter, who I left without telling them where I was going.
- Our social media predicament: Is it addiction, a you problem? Or does that distract us from the reality of monopolies doing a monopoly?
- The EU will force Big Tech companies to interoperate in 2024. It’s got one chance to show the world how interop can work. I hope it does.
A couple months back, I asked a friend of mine on Discord if he had an exit plan for when Twitter goes bust. I don’t remember my impetus for asking, but I was anxious. He has a lot of reasons to keep using Twitter, because it’s where his friends are, where his future friends will be, and it’s where he gets his feed of Kirby art. Twitter, to him, is an invaluable communication tool, and one that’s hard to give up.
Anyway, the conversation petered out. That weekend, we both had time off, so we played through the entirety of Kirby and the Amazing Mirror in one sitting. It hasn’t aged well. It’s confusing, there’s a lot of split paths that go nowhere, or take you back to a previous level, and if you get hit once, you lose your copy ability. Bar none, it’s the most disorienting mainline Kirby title, in my opinion. But I digress.
Faced with those words, “hard to give up,” one may imagine themselves in John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live, putting on the iconic sunglasses, and seeing, in bold black text on a white background, one word: “ADDICTION.” After all, Big Tech’s biggest clype is Big Tech, and they tell us social media was designed to be addictive.
When our experience with a social media platform eventually burns us out, and we tell ourselves, “I hate this service, but I can’t leave it,” their addiction narrative inevitably leads to the same conclusion, every time – it’s a you problem.
When Elon Musk buys Twitter, and twiddles every nob he can find (except his own), filling the ‘For You’ tab with a cavalcade of horseshit and posts from people you didn’t ask to see, that’s a you problem. When he decides to jettison any feature in clutching distance to keep Twitter alive, all while making the service shittier than it used to be, that’s also a you problem.
This is utter pish. See, whenever someone working for a social media platform has anything to say about its success, they’re talking not just to us end users, but business customers, too. In Twitter’s case, those are publishers and advertisers. Addiction sounds negative to us, but to them, it’s a positively salivating promise – “Pay us,” say the platforms, “and our algorithm will inject the most relevant ads into the eyeballs of our end users. It knows how to order them to buy your products.”
In other words, it’s a benefit to Twitter, Facebook, etc. if they can convince business customers that they’ve somehow cracked the code to mind control; at the same time, it puts out a narrative to us end users that they control. If this story would benefit the platform more if it were true, rather than its end users, err on the side of caution and call bullshit.
It’s contemptible that we should believe social media platforms are addictive in the sense that drugs and alcohol are addictive. My friend is not addicted to Twitter. My friend is a beneficiary of Twitter’s network effects. What makes him keep coming back to Twitter are the users he follows on the platform. He’s there because they’re there, and folks who come to know him may join him on Twitter and make the service better for him and themselves.
People make a service worth using. They make the service, not the other way around.
Perhaps that should be, made. Past tense. In the first stage of enshittification, writes Cory Doctorow, a service must attract users by making itself valuable:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
The second stage is abusing those end users and attracting business customers. Instead of concluding that social media is addictive because “it just makes sense,” we ought to be asking why we lose connections when we choose to leave – why we don’t get the option to receive a list of our followers and posts that we can export and import on another site. Social media companies claim we can check out anytime we like, but our data can never leave.
My friend is a hostage. He cannot simply leave Twitter without losing connections, nor can he get all of his followers to agree on where to go. Twitter won’t let him, not because he’s been brainwashed, and not because it’s technologically impossible, but because Twitter’s a private company that takes money from business customers by locking in users, and enforces how they experience its platform. It being so difficult to leave creates what economists call a ‘collective action’ problem.
Competitors in the UK Smash community know these problems all too well. Folks traveling to unfamiliar cities – at home, or abroad – often go in groups for familiarity and safety in numbers. They will have to agree on travel times; accommodation; and where to eat. Everyone in the group has to either convince everyone else on where to eat, or forfeit their say and go with the consensus. I don’t think I ever once ate dinner at a place of my choosing – what mattered was my friends were there.
When you leave social media, you either convince your hundreds of followers to go with you, or forfeit your connections with them. Both are high-cost decisions, because the Big Tech companies operating these social media platforms want to keep your experiences confined to their platform for as long as possible, and don’t want you to take your connections with you when you leave. Really, “social media” is just a flimsy cardboard facade – the IndieWeb project prefers the term, ‘silo:’
In recent years, Smash Ultimate players have faced another collective action problem – the game itself. On the back of Ultimate’s success, the platform fighter genre has seen new challengers take to the ring: Rivals of Aether (the Switch version, specifically), Rivals 2, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (and its sequel), Fraymakers, and Multiversus. When Smash has been the only series in town for over twenty years, you don’t just simply get to sit at the same table.
On Twitter, however, the response to these games at launch has always seen an exodus of players from Ultimate to the new game (not just because they may dislike Ultimate). They bolt for the exits, get into the new game for a couple of weeks, and then user numbers decline as they slowly drag themselves back to Ultimate.
The reason they switch has nothing to do with their skill level or frustration at the game, as much as it seems. Likewise, the difficulty in sticking to that switch has nothing to do with how quickly they can git gud. To switch to that other game, and continue to play it regularly, you either have to convince a number of people in your local community to switch with you, or forcefully sever what could be the most important connection you have to them.
It’s possible to play two games at a competitive level simultaneously, but you only have so much time, and that amount of time depends on other commitments you may have – school, University, your job (or jobs), children, pets, yourself, your neighbourhood, and so on.
Smash is a multiplayer game. The players make the game worth playing. There may be money on the line, there’s squabbles, and it’s not a perfect community, but the power of network effects will always make people go to your local to the same reason – they just want to settle it in Smash, for God’s sake.
I knew this so-called ‘social media addiction.’ It’s an apparition of the mirror world, a broken and warped conspiracy that promises to make sense of this as a societal issue, and to soothe us by assuring that Something Will Be Done.
When our back is turned, thinking it’s safe, we log in, but our reflection in the black mirror, drowned out by the Light theme of the platform’s UI, starts to thump. LEDs flicker and create a ripple effect across our monitor, but goes unnoticed as we turn our heads to face another screen.
And then it reaches through. It throttles us.
In harsh, hushed tones, it screams:
“You gave us this disease. YOU gave us this disease.”
It doesn’t stop screaming.
Its true nature manifests: the society angle was just a lie. There is no such thing as society, only the individual and their own moral failings. Man up, take a sabbatical, maybe some cold showers, or accept that you, yes, you, behind the bike shed, you’re a fuckup. From arse to mouth, bean to cup, you fuck up.
I swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. I believed Twitter’s algorithm was a mind control ray, designed to addict and harm. I bolted for the exit. And came back again. Several times, as a matter of fact. Every time was a missed opportunity to think about what made Twitter worth using.
I joined Twitter because of him. I remember my first DM was to him, asking if he was going to a tournament in Aberdeen, so we could meet up in person. I stayed on Twitter because of all the people I met that day. The discussions to be had there made the site worth using. At the end of the day, I wanted to engage and connect with people. I was not addicted.
In a statement given in response to the widely-acclaimed film The Social Dilemma, Facebook argued:
…It gives a distorted view of how social media platforms work to create a convenient scapegoat for what are difficult and complex social problems.
https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/What-The-Social-Dilemma-Gets-Wrong.pdf
They’re not wrong. They’re also not entirely right, either. When someone blows the whistle on Google or Facebook for their predatory practices, we shouldn’t roll over and believe everything they say just because they were once lost, and now they’re found.
Again, an appeal to the addiction narrative is an appeal to business customers – you have to wonder if they’re being sincere, or playing it so straight as to avoid sounding sarcastic. The ex-tech workers who appear to warn us of predatory practices are what Maria Farrell calls the ‘prodigal tech bros:’
https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/
If you’re going to tell on yourself, platforming prodigal techbros is really convenient: you don’t have to platform people who’ve been directly affected by their actions. Those who don’t have the time nor energy to commit to research have to blindly trust that the techbro knows what they’re talking about, because ‘they were there,’ and ‘they know how it works.’ Never mind asking the opinions of those who don’t work in Big Tech – social scientists, legal experts, activists – they don’t get it.
https://privacy-network.it/the-harmful-narrative-of-the-social-dilemma/
The real question is why Facebook – Big Tech, in general – gets to be the unelected arbiter of these ‘difficult and complex’ social problems. The World Wide Web was founded as an open and transparent platform that promised end-to-end communication – it couldn’t promise your blog an audience, but it could promise you an avenue to put something online, and have it stick around long enough for others to find.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/
https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful
The web was intended to disintermediate us from inescapable middlemen. In 1984, a decade prior to the emergence of the first websites, a company called Prodigy got its start as a prototypical internet service. It acted as a middleman that connected people much the same way that AOL would go on to do.
Prodigy was kitted out with its own email and chatroom-like services, revolutionary for the time – you could even get set up with another user as a kind of e-pen pal. There was no instant messaging in the 1980s and early 1990s, so this was the best you could get.
Folks loved using Prodigy to communicate. It was, for all intents and purposes, a free communication service, added on for flair. Prodigy didn’t like that, and as the middleman between writer and reader, they could do something about it. As author Cat Valente remembers, an article in her dad’s morning paper laid Prodigy’s stance firmly on the nose:
PRODIGY SAYS: STOP TALKING TO EACH OTHER AND START BUYING THINGS.
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
The web disintermediated us. Then these silos came along and reintermediated us. Facebook is now positioned as the middleman between three billion senders and receivers, trying to actively engage in ‘difficult and complex social problems,’ in nearly every country on the planet, in almost every language spoken today.
Intermediation isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. A writer wants the novel they’ve written to reach their readers. But the words they’ve written need to be edited, printed on paper, bound in a book, published, and put on shelves in a bookseller. Editors, publishers, and booksellers act as the writer’s intermediaries. Not everyone has the time to set up their own website, even if they do get badgered by Squarespace sponsors on YouTube.
Intermediation turns sour when we are forced to rely on a select few companies, who would rather not compete with each other, but also have a lot of buying power, and so do everything they can to keep users locked into their platforms for as long as possible.
If a new platform enters the competition, and it catches on, why compete with them when you can buy them with impunity? Google buys companies like eviscerating family-sized bags of crisps – to this day, its only successful AND original products have been Google Search, and Gmail, which was technically a clone of Hotmail (sold to Microsoft in 1997 and later renamed Outlook).
Every successful Google-branded service you enjoy today was bought, YouTube included. Most products that Google builds in-house run for a few years at best, before the plug gets pulled:
And then, of course, we have the czar of Czars, the self-styled Roman emperor, Caesar Marcus Augustus Zuckerberg.
…basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace (…) What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today (but) that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.
https://theconversation.com/mark-zuckerbergs-admiration-for-emperor-augustus-is-misplaced-heres-why-108172
Caesar Marcus Augustus Zuckerberg, who, when buying competitors Instagram and WhatsApp to boast his company’s superiority over the market, said “It is better to buy than to compete” one year, and “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us” the next:
Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?
Let’s not give his perception of emperors past too much credit. Roman authors would portray emperors they didn’t like as arrogant, depraved hedonists, sadistically cruel to members of their government for no reason other than the holy trinity of ‘why:’ “I’m bored, it’s funny, and I hate you.”
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/
To literate Roman readers, history was more fantastical, dramatic and scandalous than it was factual. If Zuckerberg was a real Roman villain, to paraphrase Spencer McDaniel for a moment, he would probably be portrayed as boasting of his own superiority, comparing himself to deities, handing out Meta Quests to the poor, and sadistically torturing shareholders and board members in increasingly horrible ways.
What we’ve really got here is your average run-of-the mill oligopoly, where the intermediaries that connect us are in the hands of a few large companies, who claim that there are no alternatives. My hope is that this will not be the case for much longer. Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop, and that ‘forever’ date is March 2024, when the obligations of the EU’s Digital Markets Act will start to apply:
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en#what-does-this-mean-for-gatekeepers
In a previous post, I highlighted the boons of interoperability, and why, when someone goes to buy a computer, they don’t have to worry about it not having the right hardware to run the operating system they want:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/06/windows-10-end-of-life-and-what-comes-next/
To force Big Tech platforms to interoperate means developing standards to allow people on different platforms to communicate with each other via an interface. This interface would, for example, allow a Twitter user to send and receive DMs from Facebook users, request access to a group, and so on. Overall, it will empower end users to leave one service if they don’t like it, join another, and keep their connections to their friends’ accounts and posts, who will be notified of their departure.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides other scenarios of what interoperability could look like for you:
https://archive.org/embed/interoperable-facebook-fictional-scenarios
As a personal scenario that hits closer to home, I’ve mentioned my Dad’s work in a previous post:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/07/tinker-tailor-painters-eye/
Dad’s interaction with the digital world doesn’t stop at colour – for the past four years or so, Facebook has been the main intermediary that connects him to his customers, and vice versa. Plenty of customers get in touch for a quote via phone and email, but interoperability would allow small businesses like his to expand and be reachable on other platforms.
To claim these standards will be ready to roll out in under two years is a tall order, on account of them not existing yet. There’s a lot that could potentially go wrong if it’s not thoroughly privacy-hardened – impersonation and private messaging leakage chief among them.
The UK government believes interoperability to be a step in breaking up monopolies and encouraging ‘competitive, innovative ecosystems.’
All across Europe, interop is being given one chance to show it works. I want to connect to my friends on Twitter again, without using Twitter. I left without telling them where I was going until after the fact, and I paid the price for it. I can only hope that no matter how far Big Tech drags its heels, they will get that chance to experience the boons in all their glory.
Oh, right. Just one more thing. My friend’s exit plan. He’s probably going to start checking Discord more. Y’know, Discord – yet another billion-dollar Silicon Valley venture capital startup, that fashions itself as ‘just a casual chatting app,’ that got as big as it has through network effects. The same app that, eerily reflecting Facebook’s anti-MySpace campaign, attracted users by not being Skype, or Teamspeak:
https://web.archive.org/web/20151225064513/http://discordapp.com/
That’s where his friends are. It’s where I am. It’s not where we’re going to be forever. But that’s a post for another time.
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