bombs in bottles
...I'm doing hyperbole in that title. But not by much.
Read this New Yorker piece over lunch:
New Yorker: Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media is Over
There are two comments in this by Kyle Chayka, the article's author, that struck me as worth unpacking.
Tl;dr In Meta's antitrust trial, the defense - that is, Meta - is arguing that Meta hasn't violated antitrust laws in part because it is not a "social media" company as the FTC defines that term.
Maybe it was, ten or fifteen years ago, say Meta's lawyers. Today, though, Facebook and Instagram are the same endless-scroll, crap-filled feeds with an occasional post by someone you actually asked to follow, as a treat:
The company also used smartphone screenshots from the various apps to demonstrate how they’ve gravitated toward common formats: short video clips look similar on both Instagram and TikTok; messages look essentially the same in Instagram DMs as on Apple’s iMessage.
Chayka continues:
Even as such similarities serve as helpful evidence for Meta’s defense, they also demonstrate how stultifying the entire online ecosystem has become. While in 2012 Facebook may have seemed singular and inescapable, now it looks like part of a crowded marketplace of apps competing to serve the same purpose.
Here's my question: Are they competing, though?
From the apps' perspective, they are competing over a particular resource: User attention. While one *could* open every app at once, similar to that multi-screen TV setup in Back to the Future II, in practice people don't use social media apps this way. They check one at a time.
From the users' perspective, however, whatever "competition" exists among social media apps is good for the apps, not the user. Social media apps' staunch resistance to interoperability and the utter inability for us to own our online identities means we have to sign up for *all* the apps to keep up with friends, advertise our small businesses or "side hustles," keep track of local events, or otherwise reach the audience(s) and information we want and need.
Such "competition" is good for the apps, not for us. Our techno-fief overlords have parceled out our attention among themselves. Meanwhile, they're all free to race to the bottom - because what are we going to do, leave for a better app?
I've tried. Actually, I've left social media entirely, at least for personal use. Yet not two months after deleting my last personal account, I was forced to make a Facebook account with my name on it for work - so I can run the library's social media pages. I can limit what Facebook knows about "me" by limiting my use of this profile to work devices and work topics, but I cannot leave completely.
(The good news is that Meta doesn't automatically win if all other social media sites are considered its competitors. The defense's "they all look the same" slide can also be interpreted as evidence of collusion among "competing" firms to corner the market. We'll see whether the FTC makes this point or not.)
Later in the piece, Chayka throws out this comment:
[T]he social-media landscape today is arguably in the midst of a dramatic overhaul. TikTok may ultimately be banned; generative A.I. may supplant the existing model of an open, user-generated internet.
..."generative AI may supplant the existing model of an open, user-generated internet"? Supplant it with what?
I ask not because I am incredulous but because I am disturbed. A generative AI-driven Internet is one where generative AI hoovers up and remixes AI-generated content, forever. There are only two models here. Either human beings generate the content of the Web or gen AI models do; either AI bots crawl human-generated content to remix or they crawl AI-generated content to remix.
Yet humans are the ones who *use* the information on the Internet. Of what use is a wholly AI-generated Internet to human beings? It gets stale, fast. Its information gets outdated or hallucinated beyond usability, fast.
If we are "supplanted" from "an open, user-generated internet," we'll still need communication networks that allow us to make and share knowledge. Humans have had libraries and postal systems for millennia for this reason. Will we really allow our digital versions of that to be eaten alive by slop?
I assume no. I assume the Internet is simply too valuable to us to cede to generative AI crawlers and their defecations. But the mere thought of that future gives me the creeps.
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