“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.” — Jim Carey

As long as a society has fathers who don't hug their sons, that society is going to have a non-zero amount of people walking around who don't understand that no amount of money or status will ever make them feel complete; and who will work tirelessly to try and extract as much adoration from strangers as they can until, well, they die. Unless a society offers people whose fathers didn’t hug them enough something to do besides eat us all alive in their Sisyphean quest to feel whole, those people will eat us all alive in their Sisyphean quest to feel whole.

I’m no economist, but there’s a feature of capitalist societies that I do think is very clever. Capitalist societies —the theory goes— come with a sort of pressure-release valve for handling the people whose fathers didn’t hug them enough. You see, there are some nice human things (respect, love, emotional security) that can’t be purchased with money, but that fact doesn’t stop marketers and propagandists from LARPing the illusion that they can. And for some reason, people who’s fathers didn’t hug them enough fall for this illusion every single time. So in their aforementioned Sisyphean quests to feel whole, the people who’s fathers didn’t hug them enough will often try and fill the un-fillable void in their hearts with money.

There are no billionaires who feel whole inside. Anyone capable of experiencing contentedness would have reached that milestone long before the first billion dollars was poured into the void in their chest.

At some point during their Sisyphean quests (assuming capitalism is working properly) the people who’s fathers didn’t hug them enough will pay taxes on the money they collected before it gets tossed it into their chest-voids, and the rest of society benefits by spending that money on stuff like healthcare and bike lanes. By giving the ambitious but insecure people a path to high social status that doesn’t rely on creative talent or conquering anyone, it becomes kinda like the rest of us are exploiting their labor.

If you ask me (a low-IQ internet essayist), this hints at the actual root cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without an option to hoard rubles, the Soviet citizens who’s fathers didn’t hug them enough had to pursue social status and a sense of control in other more socially destructive ways, like politics. It doesn’t take a double polisci/psych major to see that a government operated by the most insecure, fearful and self-loathing among us is ripe for corruption, and a corrupt state can only last so long before imploding. Something that even a below average double polisci/psych major can tell you is what the Soviet Union very much did.

I have a personal rule when discussing politics. That rule goes like this:

“Any political theory that begins with the phrase ‘if only everyone could just…’ can never succeed in the real world.”

And yet, I can’t help but wonder- without a capitalist pressure release valve, if only every Soviet parent could have just hugged their sons… maybe their system could have sustained?

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Value Creation vs Value Extraction

The reason I (did something I swore I’d never do in this newsletter and) brought up capitalism in the opening paragraph is because there is one thing I just can’t get over when it comes to the “uses” of generative AI software. The thing that makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I read about what it can “do”. That thing —zoomed out and looked at from a macroscopic level— is that generative AI is really is only useful in specific economic microcosms where something called value extraction is involved.

Brief economics lesson: “value creation” refers to the process of making something more valuable say, transforming raw cotton into a cool shirt, or a toxic ex-boyfriend into poetry. Value extraction refers to the process of making an existing process more “efficient”, like instead of turning cotton into shirts, you buy an existing profitable shirt company and move production to a country with cheaper labor. Or, if you own a search engine company with 90% market share and no more customers to capture, you could make the search quality a little worse, so that people have to use it more and see more ads.

Consider that the slop an “AI” generator outputs is worth (financially, culturally) very, very little and dear reader, the reason is not “because the technology hasn’t advanced enough”. Slop is slop even when it gets the fingers right and even when it’s made by a human being in possession of a divine soul. But to my knowledge, there exist very few humans who would knowingly spend money on an LLM-generated novel, LLM-generated music, or a print-out of an “AI”-generated image (I like to say that the printer ink is more valuable left unused).

Now, there are other markets for generated content like AI-generated porno, boyfriends1, and chatbot-“therapy” but dear reader please allow me to remind you that we have a word for “repeatedly turning to a synthetic means of emotional fulfillment over human connection” and that word is “addiction” which I will expand upon later.

The point here is that generative AI isn’t “creating value” in an economic sense, it isn’t saving time for creators who care about what they are creating, and the claims that it can save time in the workplace while maintaining quality are dubious, with one MIT study finding that 95% of businesses that have incorporated generative AI seeing “little to no measurable impact on [profit]”, and another finding that AI coding tools slowed down experienced programmers (while indicatively, fooling the developers into believing they were faster). But generative software can save time time for some jobs, specifically those that involve trying to convince people of something (often, something to buy). Consider that there are really only ever two activities that humans really need to be coerced into:

1. Buying something they don’t need (or a particular brand of a thing they may need)

2. Buying into a narrative on which they didn’t previously have a position.

We already have words that describe the marketing of those things. For the first, it’s “advertising”, and the second is “propaganda”. Like generative AI, the ability of advertising and propaganda (manipulating people to believing or doing something) to do what it’s made to do does not rely on a relationship with the truth, or an accurate portrayal of reality, but purely in its ability to convince, i.e.: “bullshitting”.

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Fooling-complete Von Neuyman machines

Technology describes tools. Tools make jobs easier. The thing that an LLM-generator program is making easier, is not the “job”2 of “creating”, but “outputting images/text/sounds that are indistinguishable from human-made images/text/sounds”. Convincing.

Fooling, really.

Scientist/artist/philosopher Jaron Lanier put this idea really well recently on an episode of The Grey Area podcast, it’s a take I rarely see in mainstream conversations about “AI”:

The whole field [of AI] was founded by Alan Turing’s thought experiment called the Turing test, where if you can fool a human into thinking you’ve made a human, then you might as well have made a human because what other tests could there be? Which is fair enough. On the other hand, what other scientific field — other than maybe supporting stage magicians — is entirely based on being able to fool people? I mean, it’s stupid. Fooling people in itself accomplishes nothing. There’s no productivity, there’s no insight unless you’re studying the cognition of being fooled of course.

First of all, loving his comparison to stage magicians. Where have I heard that before? But I also like how he used the capitalist holy word —“productivity”— against generative AI, because it’s a very important talking point I’m often thinking but don’t often see: these machines don’t actually produce anything anybody who’s father hugged them enough actually wants to pay for.

Again, the reason LLM technology is worth so much to investors is not because they believe it will create stuff that has value to humans, but because they believe it can make advertising and propaganda faster, cheaper, individually targeted, and difficult or impossible to identify and block. Investors believe that this tool will be a revolution for the ability of corporations (the real artificial intelligences here let’s be honest) to more efficiently manipulate minds and control consumer and citizen behavior with “dark patterns” too slippery and complicated for the human brain to outwit. That’s where they believe the value lies.

…assuming these company’s chatbots aren’t the only ones bullshitting, of course.

Secret Agents

AI companies claim that their chatbots will soon™ be “agentic” which implies they will be able to actually do something beyond turning dead dinosaurs into images of Jesus as a shrimp. And for the record, I actually have a high degree of confidence that an agentic “AI” is an entirely possible thing to create out of silicon and electricity3, but I also have a high degree of confidence that LLM technology —who’s approach to problem solving, again, is fooling— cannot actually lead to a place where the work of a machine is being done as if by a person.

Even if everyone in the audience is tricked, it doesn’t mean the stage magician actually sawed that woman in half. It just means they’re really good at tricking.

But also, even if agentic AI were possible, does anybody really expect a corporation-created machine to actually find them the best deal on a flight? Such a creation would reduce profit, which is the greatest fear of people who’s fathers didn’t hug them enough (not to mention something a corporation is physically incapable of doing without being forced).

Speaking of profit, there’s something else I don’t see mentioned very often; and that is that as far as I can tell, the only company actually profiting off of AI appears to be the chip maker Nvidia. Is this a bubble? Again, I’m no big city economist, but I find it unnerving that thirty percent of the S&P 500’s value lies with seven companies who (outside of Nvidia) are collectively investing billions into something not profitable and is plainly just not designed to do the stuff they claim. Is generative AI the corporate personhood version of an emotionally distant father? Where they’ll just keep pouring money into the hole and never, ever, feel better?

And if you haven’t noticed we’re already beyond “agentic” as the marketing buzzword du jour. As recently highlighted, companies are waging a branding war, coming up with ever more dramatic and unique names to describe their special little precious and unique chatbots that all largely do the same thing. Apple has “Apple Intelligence” (that still can’t, and probably never will, do the stuff Apple was advertising it could back in 2024), and Meta has taken to describing their chatbot as a “personal superintelligence”. Personally, I find it odd that a “superintelligence” can’t cite its sources but I’m sure that’s a teensy bug they can iron out, and definitely not inherent to how the technology works.

AI: Addiction Idealized

There is of course, another more obvious economic use-case for really really good fooling. And that use-case is creating addicts.

Something I'm always trying to highlight on this newsletter that if a product addresses a craving while not meaningfully satisfying that craving, then the company selling that product is trying to addict you. You see it everywhere today, from ultra-processed foods, gambling, and certain video games.

For some reason —resisting what tech companies themselves have been saying for almost a decade now— there is a hesitancy in the media to describe online services as “addictive”. I have long suspected this hesitancy is because professional media folks are largely still unwilling to take the first step and admit their own problem.

Twitter has always been really good at getting its hooks into the type of person who works in media. This is why Snapchat snaps are rarely ever headline news, but tweets frequently are, despite Twitter having fewer users than Snapchat since 2016.

Twitter to journalists is like junk food, it targets the craving of wanting to “know what’s going on” without ever satisfying their need for quality information about the world that created the craving in the first place. It’s no secret that Twitter does not provide its users with reliable information about the world. But that doesn’t stop users from coming back again and again. Imagine if heroin uniquely appealed to people in the media the way that Twitter does:

But that’s how addiction-as-a-business works. The cartels companies don’t target everybody, they find and target the specific groups of people who are really, really craving what they’re selling. And generative AI is their attempt to personalize and individualize addiction on a wide scale. Each of us fragile, soul-possessing creatures has some kind of specific weakness in our hearts that when prodded, can cause us to act irrationally. The advertisers’ “hope” is that generative AI powered advertising will save them time on finding and targeting (for example) gambling addicts. The idea is that a machine will quickly discern and generate whatever it can to prevent every user from looking away.

That’s the idea at least.

In Conclusion:

As I’m always saying, in the digital era, we need to be wary of “convenience”. We need to look at the services being sold to us and think about what activity that service is replacing. Social media companies pretended to connect us, while all the while making it easier to avoid catching up in person. Generative AI similarly claims it can help us create, but a work without work leaves us with nothing but well, slop.

As I’ve described in this essay, aside from government propaganda and a few fringe cases (like non-consensual porn) generative “AI” services only make practical sense in business situations, where money is involved4. A creator who enjoys spending time on the process of creating is a scary enigma to the tech CEO frantically shoveling more money into the Dad-shaped hole in their chest. A creator who’s livelihood doesn’t rely on a need to create faster will not see much value in a machine that offers to “extract value” from their “output” and “allow” them to spend less time creating.

The reason a machine that produces nothing but worthless slop can be worth so much is because the people who’s fathers didn’t hug them enough believe they can build a system that will make you feel just as not enough about yourself as they do all the time. They’re betting billions that they can dig a hole into your chest using computer programs personalized to your specific vulnerabilities, so that they may turn around and addict you to whatever it is they’ll claim is just as good but a lot more convenient as hearing your father say the words “I love you”.

Happy New Year Groundheads™, I thought we’d start this year off by reminding ourselves of all the cool stuff big tech has promised us that is totally not empty hype, totally real, and totally just around the corner. It’s 2025 now, and we’ve seen a lot of cool tech come out, but so far we haven’t seen…

Generative AI software that makes something someone else was willing to pay money for.

“Is someone willing to spend money on this thing” is not a perfect marker of what humans consider “valuable”. There are lots of things, from libraries to public broadcasting channels who’s value is not tied to their ability to turn a profit. But seeing what real people will plop down real dollars for can be a helpful indicator to see what “consumers”1 want. And as far as I can tell, nobody —like, nobody at all— wants to spend any hard-earned money on AI slop2.

Yes, deceptive “AI” “written” “books” are crowding out human authors on Amazon3, and Spotify is padding their playlists with “AI” “composed” “music”. But is this what consumers are paying Amazon and Spotify for? A lot of people and companies seem willing to pay for the ability to create slop, but is there, in economic parlance, any consumer demand for the slop itself? Not that I have seen! What’s confused me for a long while, is that if nobody wants the actual stuff that “generative AI” machines generate, where is the (in economic terms) value created? Why are investors pumping so much money into companies who’s only output is, well, worthless slop? Is it a bubble?

There’s an important distinction that’s not often made, and that’s that generative AI does not create valuable stuff, it creates stuff with the signals that humans typically associate with value. Here are some examples:

When we say an object is “art”, we’re using shorthand for “a work of art” (emphasis on “work”). Despite what CEOs believe, “art” describes the process —the work— of creating, not the output. The song/painting/sculpture is just a signal that the work was done. While cheap mass produced paintings exist, nobody would really consider them “works” of art. But seeing a painting exist is one pretty good signal that some human, somewhere, cared to dedicate some time and creative energy into it. An “AI” generated image, no matter how aesthetically pleasing, does not have value outside of the imagery itself.

To be clear, even without the effort of a creator, a pretty picture on its own has some value because people value pretty things. But for some creations their value stems purely from the effort that someone put into creating them. For example, job recruiters don’t read those cover letters because what they are looking for are signals that the applicant cared enough about the job opportunity to put in the effort. A cover letter communicates to the recruiter: “I am not robo-applying to 1000 jobs, what I want is this particular job, a lot.”

In the same vein, the value of a legal demand letter is not the letter itself, but the signal that the person who sent it can afford a lawyer. An “AI” generated demand letter, has no intrinsic value. As Cory Doctorow put it recently:

The fact that an LLM can manufacture this once-expensive signal for free means that the signal's meaning will shortly change, forever. Once companies realize that this kind of letter can be generated on demand, it will cease to mean, “You are dealing with a furious, vindictive rich person.” It will come to mean, “You are dealing with someone who knows how to type ‘generate legal threat’ into a search box.”

The fact that things like demand letters or cover letters remain effective indicators of effort in 2025 is only because not everyone is yet aware of LLMs. In fact, there are now bots that do all of the job hunting/applying for applicants meaning job recruiters will soon have their work cut out for them as their job (like so, so many others) increasingly becomes the job of a slop-sorter. Which brings us to the real reason financial investment in these “AI” companies is so sky high, and it’s not about creating value…

Imagine that you want to cancel your long distance phone plan you haven’t used since 1998 and you call a customer service line. After one ring, you immediately hear a perky, friendly voice happy to assist you. It could be a person (people are expensive to hire and so therefore a signal that this company values customer service) or it could be a chatbot who’s purpose for existing is to maximize customer retention. There’s no way to tell. A person has feelings and thoughts of their own. A person gets tired. A person wants to retain customers (they don’t want to get fired) but they also want to make it to the end of the call without getting yelled at. But an AI has no understanding or empathy for your situation. It does not tire. For every customer retained, its training model is updated, tweaking exactly the right phrases and vocal intonations it took to keep future customers from cancelling. The goal is not just to rip you off, but for you to leave the call believing that in this case being ripped off is good, actually.

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Generative “AI” is like the classic cup and balls scam. It doesn’t “generate value” for society. It is not a rational economic transaction. The “revenue” comes from someone who earned that money using (the only thing humans really consider valuable) human effort. The cup and balls scammer “profits”, not by providing a service, but by overwhelming the mark’s ability to track what’s happening. The most talented scammers can even temporarily bamboozle their marks into believing that they had fun “playing”, and therefore the “cost” was worth it.

If investors were legally allowed to invest into cup-and-ball “businesses” they all would. It is a proven money “maker” even if it creates nothing that humans value. Most investors in “AI” companies don’t actually believe that generative “AI” is creating economic value either. They understand that the fancy chatbots and short-form video generators are the misdirections of a skillful scam artist. What “AI” investors believe, is that generative AI will soon outperform the weak, empathetic human salesman at squeezing “consumers” for their money. Investors believe that software that can efficiently and mechanically overwhelm consumers’ ability to make rational economic decisions will make them rich. They’re probably right. And y’know, speaking of getting rich, it’s 2025 and we still haven’t seen…

A cryptocurrency that has utility beyond its function as a speculative asset.

A “speculative asset” is an investment that is purchased with the belief that its value (there’s that word again) will increase significantly in the short term. Despite more than a decade-point-five of crypto-boosters promising that Bitcoin (or Etherem or HawkTuahcoin…) will one day be useful (or at least, more useful than money) so far, every cryptocurrency has turned out to be a new twist on a “greater fool” (ponzi) scheme.

But —similarly to how we looked at “AI” slop in part one— if you want to get a feel for the value of something, take a step back and look at what goes into crypto (burned-up dead dinosaurs) and what comes out (a ledger). It’s money, but instead of being government-issued, it’s being issued by bros on Reddit and TikTok and hyped by your second most obnoxious family member at Thanksgiving. And with extra, more energy-consuming, steps!

I concede that crypto seems to work well for laundering money or buying illegal things over the internet. So it’s not entirely without utility. I’m not even trying to suggest that those use cases are bad, just that they don’t collectively represent a multi trillion-dollar industry. Crypto’s function as a money-anonymizer is secondary to its utility as a speculative asset. And speaking of things that we were told would be multi-trillion dollar industries by now, can you believe it’s 2025 and we still don’t live in…

The Metaverse

That’s right! I bet you almost forgot about The Metaverse! Honestly, picking on the Metaverse in 2025 feels unfair. I bet very few people, even people who work at Meta, still believe "The Metaverse" is going to be a thing, let alone The Next Big Thing™. But I feel it's helpful to bring up ‘The Metaverse” as a reminder that big tech companies these days just aren’t in the business of manufacturing products people want, what they manufacture is FOMO, and then apply it to whatever high-margin nonsense they can.

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I've talked about economic "demand" a few times in this post. Now is a good time to bring up a good quote from a good essay I recently shared on Flipboard written by a salesman who eloquently highlighted how artificial the concept of “demand” can be:

[Economists] think of demand as a vast natural force to be harnessed, like wind or oil. Sounds nice, but things look a little less elegant to the salesmen in the trenches. They know: Demand is more like blood, and it has to be mercilessly extracted, drop by drop, by an army of sweaty little goblins who don’t eat unless they hit their quotas. Suddenly, the economy looks more like an infinite series of tiny frauds than a harmonious ecosystem.

Remember, Facebo Meta is an advertising company.

I'm still, years later, not clear on what "The Metaverse" was even supposed to be. A Facebook VR video game? Something to do with Crypto? I distinctly remember being told that I could soon buy “digital clothing” with bitcoins and “wear” it in every video game. The Metaverse felt nebulous and phony in 2021 and in hindsight well, that’s exactly what it was.

I do think it's funny how Facebook tried to sell The Metaverse so hard that they changed their name to “Meta”. Let the name serve as lasting monument for how much faith you should put into the promises of big tech. Especially when those promises use words like “open” or “decentralized”, because it’s 2025 and there’s still no sign of…

BlueSky federating with anything

If you’re not familiar, BlueSky, is the latest for-profit Twitter clone and (importantly) it seems to actually be catching on among the coveted demographic of Gen-Xers and Aging Millennials Addicted to Twitter But Who Also Feel Bad About it.

The thing that makes BlueSky different from Twitter is that they use the words “open”, “federated”, and “decentralized” in their press releases. BlueSky is (surprise) neither of these things. They are intentionally muddying the water surrounding the definition of those words, and yet journalists (good ones! Whom I respect!) continue to parrot these claims of “openness” without investigating. At the risk of sounding dramatic, I genuinely suspect this factual gap is a form of denial and willful ignorance emerging collectively from journalists desperate to get back the same high they used to get from Twitter without the guilt associated by supporting 𝕏 with their presence.

If you are curious to know why the social web being decentralized matters, check out the “Why Should I Care?” section of my simple guide to Mastodon. But what’s important here is that whatever you feel “decentralized” means, BlueSky is not it. It is a for-profit, centralized, social media company just like Twitter or Facebook. And sooner or later all of the journalists building a following there are going to find themselves trapped all over again when the investors come to collect their due, and the ol’ “engagement” knob gets cranked up up to “fighting equals profit” setting.

I actually don’t hate BlueSky. It represents an incremental improvement over 𝕏/Twitter. And I do understand the desire journalists have to recapture the halcyon days when it felt like the Internet had a “town square” (it didn’t, really) and they got to feel important by having large followings and rubbing digital elbows with celebrities and politicians.

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If BlueSky is truly decentralized as they claim to be —if it is not one one thing owned and operated by a single company— it would be very easy to prove-by-example with the existence of a second BlueSky the same way there are thousands of “Mastodons” all working in conjunction. And yet, it’s 2025 and we still don’t have…

A compelling reason to purchase the Apple Vision Pro

Putting VR goggles on to play video games is a fun gimmick! Strapping VR goggles onto your face to do spreadsheets is an idea only a corporate executive would love. Not even Apple’s storied marketing department seems capable of explaining why someone would want to pay $3500 to do spreadsheets in 3-D (wait, is that the metaverse??). Perhaps in the future apple will invent an AI salesman capable of convincing anyone to buy anything. But right now it’s 2025 and we’ve yet to see…

An actual self driving car

OK, so I admittedly can’t know for sure if this one is true or not. Companies like Tesla have totally, blatantly, lied in the past on this topic. But you have to admit- isn’t it weird that if self driving cars have been totally real since 2016 that they can only be experienced as taxis and not be actually, yknow, purchased? The reason I suspect is because if someone were allowed to purchase their own “self driving” car, they could theoretically drive it somewhere without Internet access, quickly exposing the deception that those taxis are not AI-driven at all, but operated by remote humans workers. In fact, according to the New York Times, at at least one “driverless” car company, it takes more than one person per car to replace a single human driver:

Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles.

(Emphasis mine)

The reason it’s cheaper to have one-point-five human drivers per car than the usual one, is because the “AI” companies realized that creating a real AI driver is a much more expensive enterprise than simply putting some cameras on an Internet-connected vehicle and outsourcing the labor of driving to places where labor is cheap.

Stuart McMillen wrote on the topic of human-at-a-distance “AI” back in 2019 using the spicy analogy that Thomas Jefferson didn’t install dumbwaiters to replace his slaves, but to hide them out of sight. Most of the time you see “AI powered” automation, from “self driving” cars, to “automated” checkouts, the work is not actually done by machines, but by hidden-away human beings in developing nations getting paid very little. I’ve read that there is a joke among these workers that “AI” really stands for “absent Indian”. Maybe next year the AI will work as promised, and robo-taxis won’t exploit people. On the plus side, it’s 2025 and we don’t have…

Limited options anymore.

Something I noticed more in 2024 than any other year, is that open, community-created software, apps and platforms are not only “more accessible than ever”, but just regular accessible. Signal is better than SMS texting while also being private, and easy enough that your grandparents will be able to use it. Linux on desktop has finally achieved (in my opinion) a better “just works” experience for most people than Windows or Macintosh, and Steam’s upcoming Linux-based OS could easily become the default option for gaming. Mastodon and Pixelfed provide a social web experience without ads, nefarious algorithms or venture capital investors eager to enshittify. Self hosting cloud apps is so much easier than it was even in 2023, requiring just a few clicks in most cases. You can self-host apps to replace iCloud, Google photos, Audible and streaming video. And there are also totally new things too, like an app to mute and auto-skip YouTube commercials on your TV! One day I will probably write about the world of self-hosting, but frankly it is all advancing so fast it’s hard for me to keep up.

The point however, is that having a cloud service for free doesn’t have to mean “ad supported” anymore. And while a lot of these apps aren’t as polished as the offerings from big tech, many have recently crossed the line into “perfectly cromulent” territory thanks to armies of volunteers collaborating openly and dedicating their spare time.

We’ve had options, but now we have good options. Wherever big tech is trying to squeeze you for pennies or attention, look to the open source community. Some programmer somewhere in the world was probably as fed up as you are and created a free (often better!) version of the thing. I have a hope that we’ll look back at 2025 as a banner year for advancements in alternatives to the big tech monopolies.

I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of moving our brains away from giant for-profit sanity-munching machines and onto quieter, community run software that works for us, not the other way around.

Not because it is easy, but because I am tired.

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Welcome to a Stay Grounded newsletter! Yes, I occasionally post actual newsletters. Usually these are a perk for premium subscribers, but this one is free for everyone! These newsletters are where I share tips n’ tricks, meta content, and other stuff that generally is too short to warrant its own post. In this issue we’ve got:

• An interview (of me) on The Realists!

• Some good Flipboard Magazines

• A reminder about how cool RSS readers are.

• Substack does a Ticketmaster

• A good video breakdown of why the Internet sucks now

Special thanks to all my current and future premium subscribers for supporting!

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I gave an interview!

I gave an interview to filmmaker Elena Rossini, director of The Illusionists documentary, and the woman behind the Realists and it’s accompanying newsletter. If you like Stay Grounded, you’ll probably like her newsletter too.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun! I have never been interviewed before outside of a job. We talked about making friends via the internet, what happens when good journalism collides with social media algorithms, and why despite what you may assume, I am not really much of a “self-help” or “wellness” sort of person, and certainly not a productivity junkie. You can read it here.

I Made Some Flipboard Magazines

Flipboard is a website and app where people can easily curate feeds (they call them “magazines”) of content they like, and those feeds can be then followed by other people. The killer feature about Flipboard IMO, is that you can follow “magazines” with the RSS reader you probably already have (meaning you don’t even need a Flipboard account) though admittedly their proprietary app experience is pretty slick too. The CEO of Flipboard is also a big advocate for decentralized, open social media like Mastodon, which is uncommon and nice to see.

I often come across good stories and so I created a few Flipboard Magazines I would like to invite you to follow:

“SG Recommends”

Link to Magazine

This magazine is where I share articles that are similar in spirit to what you’d find on StayGrounded.online, with a mild emphasis on smaller publications and lesser-known writers. It could be old, it could be new, it could be long-form journalism or a video essay, it doesn’t matter. I only add to this on average 1-2 times a week (not trying to add more noise to your digital life) and everything shared here I have personally read in full and deemed to be of quality.

“Thoughtful Reads”

Link to Magazine

This Magazine is for longer-form content that has nothing to do with tech but I think is neat. In the past six months I have added three things, including one just today so don’t expect too much from this feed. It goes without saying the same standards of quality apply to this feed too.

“Stay Grounded”

Link to Magazine

These are just Stay Grounded posts in case you have a Flipboard account already and want to follow this newsletter that way.

Mastodon & RSS

In addition to the new Flipboard magazines, I have a Mastodon account where I also sometimes share fun stuff I find. A cool feature of Mastodon is that unlike most social media, you can follow accounts from an RSS reader. It’s like if you could following someone on Twitter without a Twitter account. If you’re confused by Mastodon, I get it, it’s simpler than you might think. I’ve previously answered some common questions about it here.

I’ve mentioned RSS feed readers a few times now. It’s because I love them. If you don’t know what they are, I highly recommend setting one up. It’s kinda like a podcast app but for reading. Podcasts actually use the RSS protocol for distribution, which is why no one company owns or controls podcasting (though Spotify’s tryin’). RSS readers are a wonderful “whole grain” app for making your screen time healthier and reducing it overall. I like Inoreader but there’s a lot out there. Check out my post for more info:

Substack takes a page from the Ticketmaster playbook

Lastly, I wanted to share some thoughts I’ve had on Substack’s newish “feature” and the danger I feel it poses to free speech and independent writers. Because some people have asked, I am in the (slow) process of moving Stay Grounded to its own website, and moving payments off of Substack too (I’ve set up a Patreon here in anticipation of this). It’ll be a while though because y’know, life.

When I chose to start publishing with Substack it was because Substack was (and to be clear, remains) a really solid newsletter-sending service that is worth the cut they take from paid subscribers. But Substack has made some moves lately that give the impression that they don’t want to be the best newsletter service, they want to be a below average social media app. The new(ish) “followers” “feature” allows Substack users to follow writers using the Substack app, instead of doing it directly (via email)1. On the surface it sounds innocent enough, but remember that locking audiences and creators to a single platform is exactly what allowed Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and many other companies, to enshittify themselves for profit. If creators and audiences can’t connect directly, middlemen can insert all sorts of junk into their interaction, and even de-prioritize showing audiences content from writers the middleman doesn’t like.

I have 144 followers right now, which isn’t a crazy amount compared to email subscribers, but it’s not nothing. It’s clear Substack would prefer users followed instead of subscribe because the narrower the gap gets between followers and subscribers the harder it becomes for writers to not be dependent on the company. If the only way for a creator to access the audience of people who specifically requested to see their stuff is via a middleman, it means they are pressured to do and write what the company wants of them, instead of how capitalism should work where companies are incentivized to keep their customers (in this case, writers) happy. It’s the Ticketmaster model. An anti-competitive move, a trap for small and new writers, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they start forcing ads into free posts or remove the ability of newsletters to be added to “recommended” lists if they don’t let them take a bigger cut of the money or something.

Look, it’s not the end of the world but after what we’ve seen with Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Amazon and YouTube lately, I think we all know where the path of “locking everyone to your platform” leads, and it’s not good. Thankfully open protocols like email and RSS exist!

A Good Video

I’d never heard of this guy (Mrwhosetheboss) before coming across this video, a quick poke though his history looks like he mostly does highly produced but still clickbaitey stuff like buying a bunch of luxury items and unboxing them on camera. Also all of his videos are in that hypercharged Mr.Beast-esque quick-cutting-never-staying-still style that give Millennials anxiety but Gen Z seems to think is normal (boomers will throw up).

So while I can’t really recommend the channel, I’ll be god-freakin-damned if he doesn’t give one of the clearest best-explained breakdowns about how and why Internet services have been rapidly declining in quality lately. (He doesn’t explicitly mention Substack followers feature but it’s totally there in spirit!)

That’s all for this issue, thank you being a subscriber (or fine, a follower 😉) . Don’t forget to like (that cool bird you’ll see when you go on a walk without your phone) comment (on it’s lovely plumage) and subscribe (to the idea that you are still a complete human without being constantly connected at all time).

See you next week!

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“A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.” ― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

Lately, you’ve probably been hearing folks say things like: “As AI gets better, we won’t be able to tell what’s real!” There is a fear that as generative AI technology improves, our feeds will clog up with misleading, low-effort, shallow and manipulative content that’s hard to distinguish from the authentic stuff. That in order to find something real we’ll have to wade through mountains of mass-produced clickbait, ragebait, engagement bait, ads, and millions of other posts attempting to do something other than educate us or connect our souls with that of another human.

People are deeply concerned that this might happen.

If you are one of these people dear reader, allow me to allay your fears! The world of social media you so are afraid of —where images and video can’t be trusted to represent reality, where psychological manipulation is paramount and propaganda is the rule, not the exception— that world is not approaching fast on the horizon!

It’s here! Y’all living in it!

In this essay I hope to make clear these three points:

1. Social Media is not “the Internet”.

2. There has never been a strong reason to trust without verifying anything posted to social media.

3. Advances in generative AI will not change points 1 and 2.

Let’s begin!

A Bullshit History Lesson

The following statistic is completely anecdotal (which means you can’t tell me I’m wrong) but there was a brief period of time from the birth of “Web 2.0” to until about 2013 where a critical mass of the content found in the “main” feeds of the various social media platforms came with no overt reasons to doubt the earnestness of the person posting it. As evidence that this time indeed existed, here is Buster Baxter in 2005 completely shook to his core by the idea that someone might fabricate an “Am I the Asshole” ragebait post on Reddit to stealth advertise a new dating app:

When the World Wide Web was new, the grown-ups were extremely skeptical of it. This is because they understood how easy it would be for someone to Go On It And Tell Lies. It took some years before it was able to gain society’s collective trust. People used to say “Where did you read that? Wikipedia?” as a fun way of saying “You are an ignorant fool to believe such nonsense” but over time we learned that just because someone could tell lies, most people didn’t, and when the studies showed that Wikipedia was actually pretty trustworthy after all, the techno-optimists among us celebrated. It seemed that left to our own devices, humanity is mostly good! Rock n’ roll, baby!

This era of (false) trust in platforms led to complacency. While the Web had liars lying on it, the amount, fashion and tellers of the lies more or less mirrored what one might expect to encounter in the real world. Everyone surfin’ the Web was already well aware that politicians spun facts and advertisements glorified the products on display. In other words: The Web had an amount and manner of lying that a well-adjusted, reasonably cautious person was already equipped to handle.

Internet platforms and their users were equipped to handle occasional liars. What they were not equipped to handle was constant streams of bullshit.

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Bullshit is not “lying”. In order to be a liar, one must know the truth. Liars have a relationship with the truth. But bullshit requires no such relationship. A bullshitter, as described by Harry G. Frankfurt in his 2005 book On Bullshit:

…is neither on the side of the true or the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Here it is again in meme form for the kids:

For a while, the for-profit social media platforms that I’m always complaining about —while not without problems— were actually semi-decent places to connect with like-minded strangers and have constructive conversations. The algorithms, inasmuch as they existed back then, rewarded “engagement”. Back then, “engagement” almost always implied some form of two humans interacting authentically. Remember when the major complaint about Instagram was how so many people posted pictures of their food? When Instagram’s biggest annoyance was that people were being too authentic? Posting a photo of one’s dinner plate to Instagram these days? It feels charming in its naivete!

When a place is full of people behaving authentically it becomes open season for the bullshitter. Remember, the goal of the bullshitter is not to spread lies, but to overwhelm the means of communication. The goals of the bullshitter are unrelated to the thing they are bullshitting about. Their words can be a glue trap that authentic people get stuck on.

This means that a bullshitter, unlike a liar, cannot be defeated or shooed away with Facts And Logic. To engage with a bullshitter is to create more bullshit. And because the social media platforms’ profitability was/is tied to engagement, they were/are unable to do anything about bullshitters lest they risk the waking nightmare that is “making slightly less money”.1

The only reason corporate social media “worked” for the time it did was because platforms relied on human-made content, and that’s just not something they rely on as much anymore. Because most people are mostly authentic most of the time, most of the content was mostly authentic too. That gave the public an impression that the platforms were places of authenticity, when in reality any authenticity was only a byproduct. And as platforms shifted from being “socially-sorted media” to “algorithmically-sorted media”, the majority of authentic content (that again, was never the real priority) fell by the wayside.

A few platforms held on longer than most. Wikipedia has managed to stay mostly-good, and that’s really just because its nonprofit status presents different financial incentives that don’t require “engagement” (meaning its value is maintained no matter how quickly or slowly users add data). Also on Reddit, human volunteer moderators were able to recognize and remove bullshit on a scale automated systems could not manage. This is why for a while you’ve been able to add “reddit” to your Google search in order to find more authentic results. Even Google recently acknowledged the value of this and is giving Reddit a bump in its results:

Reddit plays a unique role on the open internet as a large platform with an incredible breadth of authentic, human conversations and experiences […] Over the years, we’ve seen that people increasingly use Google to search for helpful content on Reddit to find product recommendations, travel advice and much more.

Of course, Reddit —the company— also hosts entire “communities” dedicated to spreading bullshit. Combine that with the fact that Reddit itself is inserting more algorithmically-chosen content into feeds, and an increasing amount of that content is AI generated spam, and you get the dying mall it is today.

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Automated Bullshit

“Truth” cannot be automated by machines. This is because what people consider to be true requires a person to consider it. Do not take this in a woo-woo “reality is what you make of it” sort of way. Instead, recognize that “truth” is not just another word for “the facts”, but is an interpretation of them made for humans. Because the act of interpreting requires an interpreter —a person— to do it, “the truth”, unlike “a fact”, cannot exist unless it is being told.

Let’s use journalism as an example to explore this a bit more. When we say we “trust” a journalist, newspaper or other publication to report the news, we are not saying we expect them to only deliver perfect facts with unwavering consistency; we are saying we expect them to be honest with us about their perspective. Even some quasi-dishonest messengers, such an actor acting, or a billboard advertising, can still communicate useful information as long as we know who it’s coming from. Furthermore, a human being —honestly describing reality as seen from their perspective— will always be telling the truth; no matter how misguided their reasoning or completely incorrect they may be about the facts.

The news media frequently struggles with this. Is someone who makes no effort to know the truth a “liar”? Technically no. But that doesn’t make such a person honest either. In technical terms, such a person is a bullshitter.

And while we’re technically speaking, generative AI is a bullshitter too2. No matter how advanced the technology becomes, no matter how indistinguishable its outputs get from what a human might say, generative AI can never honestly tell you why it said what it said. It can never honestly say “I don’t know, but here’s a guess” or answer a question with “based upon my understanding” it cannot share its perspective of reality because it has no perspective.

The biggest problem facing using large language model AI’s use as fact-giving machines is that they sound convincing even when incorrect. When I first learned about GPT my thought was “Golly, if they can figure out how to make AI not hallucinate, this is world-changing!” But this “problem” of “hallucinating” is not a bug, it’s central to the process of how the technology works. What the companies call “hallucinating” is just a PR-friendly way of describing “bullshitting”. Sometimes it outputs facts, sometimes it doesn’t, but “truth” is unrelated to the purpose of its “speech”. The bullshitting “problem” is fundamental to the way LLMs work. They simply cannot fact-check because to do so means analyzing one’s own thought process, something it doesn’t have (at least not in the way a person does). In order to fact check, there needs to be a checker. A checker cannot exist without a perspective to check from.

Adam Savage of Mythbuster’s fame gave one of the best summations of this I’ve yet seen when asked how he felt about the use of generative AI in film making:

The only reason I’m interested in looking at something that got made, is because that thing that got made was made with a point of view. The thing itself is not as interesting as the mind and heart behind the thing. And I’ve yet to smell in AI what smells like a point of view.

Because generative AI cannot have a relationship with the truth, because it has no perspective of its own, it cannot tell the truth. It can say facts, but it cannot tell you why it believes something to be a fact. It does not understand what a fact is. This is why generative AI definitionally cannot be honest or lie to us. It can only produce bullshit.

In this post I attempted to illustrate in easy-to-understand terms how generative AI software like GPT and Midjourney are not programmed to communicate, but to “bypass our bullshit detectors”, check it out! It may clear some things up.

So how can we know what’s real?

The way we always have! Trust your senses and trust places that encourage people to be authentic. Listen to them. Ask questions. Bullshit is by definition hard to detect, so don’t get your sense of reality from places that tolerate it.

Do you think (real) news organizations just pluck a video from Twitter and proclaim its contents to be factual? No, they send out cameras of their own, investigate the sources and seek third party confirmation because trust is more integral to their business model than engagement. Even Wikipedia (not a traditional news publisher) has explicit standards for what they allow to be posted. And it works pretty well. Though it remains to be seen if a few well-funded bullshitters using generative AI might be able to post their BS faster than Wikipedia’s human moderators can detect and remove it.

But this isn’t just about the news. Netflix recently aired a documentary that used AI generated images to “enhance the narrative”. Is it lying? Not exactly. But it is some bullshit. Does it mean we should dismiss everything Netflix publishes? Probably not yet. And while this incident certainly has affected my trust in them, I, being a person who basically never blindly clicks “play” on whatever is suggested, was not expecting rigorous levels of truth-telling from a low-budget Netflix documentary to begin with.

I also think we are lucky to be able to experience AI software in an “imperfect” state, because it allows us to more easily notice when it’s being employed. In the case of the Netflix documentary, we are easily able to identify the hallucination bullshit because of, as usual, the hands:

The companies that make this stuff claim that one day it will be indistinguishable from human-made content. I still question that claim, but if it turns out to be true, my concern is not that humans won’t be able to smell bullshit, but that a majority of people won’t even try.

While biggest purveyors of bullshit by volume —social media companies— will probably collapse as a result of its accelerating automation, something I’ve learned about the Internet this past decade is that a distressing amount of real people will willingly consume the bullshit if it conforms to their preferred worldviews. Human-powered systems like democracy simply can’t function as intended if a critical mass of participants are unwilling to accept the same reality. But I think (hope) that most people, most of the time, want to know the truth, even if the truth is unkind to them, or forces them to reevaluate their opinions.

Which means that the problem we face is not that humans don’t posses the capability or desire to tell what’s real; it’s the people don’t seem to know how to do it. In 2020 the percentage of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok was 3%. By 2023 it quadrupled:

Their news. Their interpretation of reality and the world around them. They get it from TikTok. This is, IMO, not a great trend. And frankly, I don’t know how free society can correct course, besides teaching their citizenry critical thinking skills3 and regular folks regularly pointing out that TikTok’s business model (along with all the other companies) just does not rely on a relationship with the truth. Algorithmic media does not lie, but it is not honest, either. It should —like “reality” TV— be viewed with an understanding that it is entertainment. But not everyone seems to view it that way. Yet.

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One Last Thing So We Can End Optimistically

I know this is a long post, but I have one last interesting thing on the subject that gives me a bit of hope: Facebook recently did an accidental experiment wherein it tweaked its algorithm to de-prioritize news and politics. This had two interesting effects: One, it made Facebook into a weird AI-garbage filled space (As I predicted would happen) which isn’t great but also oh well. But the second thing it did was completely destroy the traffic —down 90% in some cases— to a lot of political websites that exploited Facebook’s algorithm’s penchant for “engagement” to boost their (let’s be honest) ragebait-style propaganda. Now, your first thought might be that Facebook is “censoring” or “punishing” these websites, but remember, all links to news and politics were de-prioritized, and yet the “boring”, non-sensational news outlets were minimally affected. This implies that most of the traffic to the propagandist sites was coming via Facebook, not from people directly seeking it out. Without Facebook forcing button-pushing ragebait right in front of users’ faces, 90% of the them didn’t care to find it on their own.

This gives me hope that a lot of the divisive vitriol we see shared online is just, well, bullshit. And that most of us appear able recognize it as such, even if it’s sometimes hard to ignore. Facebook’s “experiment” shows that most people given a choice, don’t want to seek out that kind of material, we’re just really bad at ignoring it when it’s put in front of us. It appears like the business model of “make up a bunch of triggering bullshit because it drives traffic to your website where you can sell ads” doesn’t work so well without The Algorithms™ to force that content upon users.

As AI advances, the volume of bullshit will likely continue to grow. But if you’re worried about being able, or unable, to know what’s real, stop worrying. And not because we’ve already lost, but because you already know how to win. The important thing to focus our attention on is not who’s lying, but who’s being honest. Identifying those people is a skill, it takes patience, effort, and critical thinking. It’s also nothing new.

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“Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.” — Rudolf Spielmann

Lately, admirers of culture have been justifiably worried that human-made content on the Internet is on its way to getting crowded-out by a looming tidal wave of AI-generated crap. As “AI” “content” becomes cheaper and easier to produce, it does appear like crap waves are in fact, a-comin’, and will threaten some beloved institutions like Wikipedia, but I’m increasingly convinced that the only parts of the Internet facing a truly existential risk are the parts that gamify human attention for profit. And that the ruination of those places may actually in the long run improve Internet culture, similar to how journalism has been improving after everyone had to stop pretending Twitter was ever a town square.

For decades, media —especially “social” media— companies, have been blurring a line between content created to meaningfully connect with an audience and that which is created to influence consumer behavior. Social media platforms allow anyone (anything) to post, and reward with money and attention those posters who best enable the platform to profit. It stands to reason that if AI-generated content one day becomes indistinguishable from human made content (not a foregone conclusion but let’s assume) then any place that:

1. Publishes user submitted content

2. Does not put a strong emphasis on curating, editing, or otherwise moderating that content

will be the most vulnerable to the AI-hypercharged late-stages of enshittification. Generative AI will not break “the Internet”, it will only go where it’s allowed (Weather.com, presumably, will be fine). But if the big platforms don’t fundamentally change how they operate, “AI” could very well break the business models of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and others. Or if not break exactly, at least reveal what they offer for what it really is: an addictive product more akin to gambling or smoking than it ever was to “connecting” people.

In this essay I want to explore what I feel is the logical conclusion of what happens if these “AI” programs manage to live up to their hype, gain the ability to create actual content instead of just stock media, and make the task of achieving virality on social media so convenient that anyone with a computer can out-attention grab the world champion grandmasters of attention-grabbing: social media marketers. But before that, I want to talk about a different kind of grandmaster, and more specifically, what makes them so interesting in the first place.

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Part I - What’s Interesting?

Last month, OpenAI revealed “Sora”, its video-generating software. It’s really impressive and if you ask me, also extremely creepy. There’s something about the inconstant, unpredictable nature of the videos, and their fluid, dreamlike visuals that —for me at least— put Sora’s outputs right in the bottom-bottomest pit of the uncanny valley.

But Sora is impressive. Like all of this new generative AI software, the actual stuff they produce is only interesting insofar as how wholly uninteresting so much of it manages to be. It’s not interesting that Sora does what it says on the tin. What’s impressive is that people are building machines that can do this:

In my last post I talked about “convenience” and how shiny new tech often “makes convenient” activities everyone liked spending their time on. As an example, imagine if some startup invents a “meal in a pill”, and within a few years it puts restaurants out of business and also workers won’t get lunch breaks. But hey, so convenient right? Towards the end of that post I had this to say about generative “AI”:

The reason work doesn’t decrease when productivity increases is because companies understand they’re not paying workers for results, they’re paying for effort. Effort is the thing that humans find valuable, and making a task more convenient by definition decreases the effort that task takes. This is why clicking a button on Facebook does not make you friends with someone. It’s why we still have chess competitions despite computers far outperforming the greatest grandmasters.

Nobody is directly impressed by the chess abilities of a computer when it’s doing what humans designed it to do. What is interesting about a chess-playing computer is not that it’s good at chess, it’s that it exists at all. The interesting thing about a chess-playing computer is that some former tree-dwelling primates arranged tiny bits of metal and silicon in such a way as to coerce the universe into playing a game better than any other tree-dwelling primate could dream to.

“Interesting” and “impressive” are not properties inherent to the universe. They are concepts humans made up to describe things in relation to ourselves. The words don’t apply if life is not involved. Venus’ “ability” to go around the Sun is not impressive, but put a couple of former tree-dwelling primates into a capsule and land it safely on the Moon? (i cri evrytiem). Anytime you see the word “interesting” or “impressive”, especially when describing tech, (and gawd, especially “AI” tech), add the words “to humans” after. Dall-E is interesting to humans. Sora is impressive to humans. Without humans to be impressed, these things are just objects following the laws of physics.

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When Gary Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997 —the first defeat of a world chess champion by a computer— it was a significantly more interesting event (to humans) than Deep Blue losing to whatever better chess-playing computer came next. Notice that Wikipedia has a list of “Human vs computer chess matches” but not a list of “Computer vs computer” matches because Wikipedia is made for humans and computer-computer matches are just frankly not very interesting. The computers themselves are interesting, because they were built by people. But the fact that they are obeying the laws of physics is not. In fact, in 2006, less than a decade after Kasparov lost that landmark match, the New York Times reported on computer chess’ rapid decline into uninterestingness:

Today’s outcome may end the interest in future chess matches between human champions and computers, according to Monty Newborn, a professor of computer science at McGill University. Professor Newborn said of future matches: “I don’t know what one could get out of it at this point.”

Computers playing chess was very interesting (to humans) until they got consistently better than us and it suddenly wasn’t. These matches at the turn of the millennium represent the pinnacle of public interest in the sport after which it rapidly declined. “Less convenient”, “Inferior” Human vs human chess, of course, lives on, and is arguably more popular, more interesting, than ever. To paraphrase professor McGill, there’s still a lot to get out of it.

II - The Rules of the Game

The stuff that appears in our “For You” feeds appear organic. When we see “viral” content we assume that the reason it’s popular is because, like a natural virus, a large number of humans were not immune to it(s’ charms). “Going viral” implies randomness —a gene mutation that translates into a competitive edge— but it’s not how attention works on social media. As researchers at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure discovered, it’s not random evolution that causes virality, it’s intelligent design:

Popularity [on YouTube] is almost entirely algorithmic: We found little correlation between subscribers and views, reflecting how YouTube recommendations, and not subscriptions, are the primary drivers of traffic on the site.

Like chess, commercial social algorithmic media is a game played with rules. Those rules are called “The Algorithm” and the prize to winners is increased attention aka, “going viral”. But it’s getting harder and harder for individual creators to both create, and have time left over to play this game of attention. As artist recently wrote in a really fantastic piece for Vox, most of the job of being an artist these days isn’t creating, it’s marketing:

That labor [demanded by big tech] amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.

She goes on:

Self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose.

What this implies is that a creator’s success or failure at The Algorithm Game is determined, not by the time and effort spent creating interesting, meaningful content, but time and effort spent appeasing the algorithm. The artists who foolishly spend most of their effort on making good, meaningful, art will always lose the game to those who focus on marketing. It also implies that the content seen most widely —the viral stuff— is the content that had the least actual thought put into it. The algorithm (along with the corporate executives) don’t understand what art is or what “value” even means beyond a financial sense. It only understands what is likely to turn a profit.

III - Algorithms, not audiences.

The business model of algorithmic media demands endless fresh content from creators because well, that’s what keeps users addicted. The goal for companies is to keep users scrolling, and not connecting too deeply with any particular creator because gatekeeping access to the audience is what gives platforms power over creators who (need I remind you) make the stuff audiences actually want to see. By controlling access, companies can prevent creators from ever amassing enough power of their own to leave their platform.

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To prevent creators from becoming more interesting than the platform itself (and thus gaining the power to leave) the companies have engineered a rule set (The Algorithm) that provides rewards only to creators who can meet its ever-changing demands. This not only means always posting new, novel content, and doing it frequently, but not doing anything too weird or challenging that might cause users to think or feel too deeply. The goal is to keep users perpetually distracted and unsteady while also maximizing overall time spent there. Think: the digital version of a windowless confusingly-structured casino main floor. Always something shiny to distract, all of it in service to the singular goal of profit.

The most successful players of the social media game are those who recognize that “their” audiences are an illusion, and perform instead directly for the algorithm. You can see this in action with channels like MrBeast, the most obvious example I know of effuse, inorganic content produced not with the goal of meaningfully connecting with an audience, but of grabbing their attention in the exact light-touch way the algorithm prefers: High effort, low stakes.

Make no mistake, MrBeast is very, very good at The Algorithm Game. He is the algorithmic media equivalent of a human chess Grandmaster. Seriously, go to his channel, look at the first few videos and tell me you weren’t a little tempted to click on a thumbnail. When it comes to the algorithm game, MrBeast is like Gary Kasparov in 1995, the undisputed world champion. But every time GenAI improves, his position at the top looks more and more vulnerable.

These days, anyone with a smartphone can reliably outperform a chess grandmaster. Let’s assume for a moment that the promises of the big tech corporations are true (lol), and that AI-generated content will one day soon be indistinguishable to a layman from human-made content. Can Mr Beast compete in an arena where anyone with a decent laptop can type “Generate a short video featuring the latest trend, in a similar but legally distinct style to Mr Beast”?

Well, first of all, before the time comes when anyone could do that, the person who would absolutely do that is Mr Beast. It’s clear he views content purely as a means to an end, and if his team can more conveniently make that content, why wouldn’t they? Social media rewards efficiency. But audiences don’t care about what content is most efficiently made. They care if something is interesting, and as we saw with computer chess, novelty can only be interesting for so long once there are no humans involved. The question is, will audiences stick around these platforms —will they be interested in what’s going on there— as they realize that the content itself has less and less actual human involvement in its creation?

Conclusion - What’s Next

I suspect some percentage of users won’t care if humans had a hand in the content creation or not. After all, some people pay money to “play” slot machines, alone, in windowless casinos, for hours. Casinos target those people hard, and it’s likely the algorithmic media companies will find a similar “audience” willing to scroll computer-made “content” alone for hours too. Whether it’s enough to sustain the business model is anyone’s guess. But even if they stay up and running, the public perception of these “services” will likely change once social media is deprived of the last pretense that anything “social” is going on1.

There’s a tempting feeling of schadenfreude that comes with imaging the big tech monopolies getting devoured by a creation born from their own greed. There’s a poetic justice to the idea of an AI bot swarm overwhelming platforms by being really good at doing all the stupid, menial labor and adjustments they have been demanding from human artists for years. And I do think it’ll happen, just not all at once. And while we may be approaching a “Kasparov vs Deep Blue moment” for the attention game, most of the pain is, I fear, still ahead.

But the winds of perception are changing. I had feelings surrounding the healthfulness of social media for years before I read this landmark piece by wherein he described social media as “addictive” —the first time I can recall that word not being used as a substitute for “fun”— and it hit me in the gut. And back then, social media was a lot more social! It was easier to pretend something isn’t harmful when lots of real people were involved.

Since then, I have been pontificating (first to my friends, then later in this newsletter when they all changed phone numbers and forgot to tell me) on the mental, emotional, and civic harm social media can cause, while trying to illustrate the reason I believe the bad stuff is not just some natural, unavoidable outgrowth of what happens when you plug a bunch of computers together, but a specific product born of corporate incentives.

And yet it seems that only recently —specifically around the time when Elon bought Twitter— that a majority of the posting class is coming around to the idea that maybe this stuff is not great for us:

My point is that tech moves fast at creating addictive stuff, but the public, often even tech journalism, moves slow when it comes to recognizing it. If I’m right and generative AI is to one day cause algorithmic media to become, on-the-whole, uninteresting, it implies that in the short term, social media will get really, really “interesting” (in a bad way). More addictive, more manipulative, less grounded in reality. That’s what’s coming.

Epilogue - Not Your Daddy’s Effective Accelerationism

But someday after that, we’ll reach a point when the phrase “social media is all fake robo-crap” will be as common of knowledge as “cigarettes cause cancer” or “slot machines are a poor investment”. Adults can still smoke and slot, sure. But nobody in the developed world can say they weren’t warned of the risks. My other hope is that when that time comes, real human-made art made for connecting with human audiences can be more readily recognized by society as the valuable thing it is on its own, not only when it is put to work in service to some marketer turning a profit for some CEO.

Before that day comes, we’ll probably have another ten-ish years of people like me getting all bent out of shape, while the majority of users won’t put together that their persistent feelings of social detachment stem from these ostensibly “social” services that slowly, but increasingly will be perceived as little more than tiny slot machines, foregoing the casino chips for dopamine.

AI can’t kill the job of artist, because making art, like playing chess, is an activity people would do even if money didn’t exist. It won’t ruin socializing. But it will ruin the “game” of social media. And we’ll be better for it.

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I had a conversation this week that has kind of crystalized some feelings I’ve had for a while about tech and modern society. Specifically about what “convenience” means, and what it offers. Convenience doesn’t always lead to better outcomes, and sometimes it makes the overall experience worse.

The conversation involved a friend who is becoming increasingly frustrated with their experience of all the dating apps. When someone asked this friend why they’re bothering with the apps if they find them so frustrating, my friend shrugged and replied “It’s more convenient”.

Now, call me a geriatric millennial but this felt like a weird response. First of all, I can’t imagine a romantic partner feeling too enamored to know that they were the most convenient option. But also, courtship is like, a major part of the human experience? Viewing it like a job that might benefit from being made easier seems to be missing the point that nobody is forcing (or paying) you to do it. Y’all are choosing this. You’re choosing to include swiping left and right in your threescore-and-ten.

Please don’t read this as a complete dismissal of dating apps, like all tech, they are a tool. And there are many totally valid reasons to use them which I’ll get to in a bit. What I want to examine here is an attitude surrounding some of our tech that seems to be growing. An attitude about convenience and “saved” time. A sales pitch I don’t think we should always be eager to accept.

Making Leisure Time Worse

This tongue-in-cheek post I wrote in September was inspired by a similar conversation surrounding video rental stores. Specifically how they all went out of business despite everyone I know having mainly fond memories of them! Perusing the aisles at Blockbuster mightn't've been as fun as watching the movie itself, but it was still a widely and fondly regarded part of the overall home-viewing experience. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say they prefer navigating the interfaces of the various streaming apps over navigating the shelves at Blockbuster, and yet that’s what we, as a society, decided to go with. Why? Because it was more convenient.

AT&T’s famously prescient “You Will” ad campaign from the early 90s lives in my head rent-free1. The accuracy of their predictions thirty years later is impressive. These ads are kind of fun to watch, so here you go if you haven’t seen them before:

The ad campaign is meant to highlight the conveniences that AT&T’s tech will bring (has brought?) to society. But when you watch them I want you to think about what activity exactly in each example is being made more convenient. Some, like the voice-powered door lock are pretty unobjectionable, because well, unlocking a door is not an activity that, to my knowledge, is widely cherished. But what about the guy doing regular-ass remote learning? Or the hiker who is interrupted by a phone call (thankfully not someone asking about his car’s warranty)? Or the man at the beach vacation house who appears to be literally working? Like- at his job? AT&T in their fantasy future, didn’t make work more convenient —freeing up time for actually enjoying a beach house— they made getting to work (or more specifically, work getting to you) convenient. And now we’ve arrived at the exact point I’d like to highlight which is that a lot of our tech that has been invented in the time since “You Will” didn’t make work better, it just made leisure time worse.

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When we say an activity becomes “more convenient” we mean that it takes less effort. Usually this implies the task takes less time. Sometimes, instead of “taking less time” we like to say we’re “saving” time, but reader, please take a moment to realize that time from our perspective is not something that can be saved. We humans are allotted one minute per minute and we have no choice but to “spend” that minute the moment it is received. Like a budget surplus that disappears if not spent this fiscal quarter, our time cannot be saved, it can only be appropriated. There’s a great quote on this topic from J. Matthews in Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are that goes like this:

"We cannot get anything ‘out’ of life. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, where we could steal life's provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.”

Those twenty four hours per day get spent — lived— whether we acquire movies via a trip to Blockbuster or by navigating the Paramount+ app. The time passes whether we swipe left, right, or close the app and go to a party. So where does the “saved” time get appropriated? Probably not on something as enjoyable as perusing the aisles at a video rental store. What it probably gets spent on is work.

One of my earlier posts to this newsletter described Facebook-style social media as “automating friendship”. I wanted readers to think about what Facebook is actually making easier for us. Facebook’s “service” is that it handles some of the “work” that being a friend involves —like catching up, or swapping stories about your day— and reduces that experience to a highlights feed that can be consumed later at one’s own convenience. Facebook does not make it easier to see your friends, it makes it easier to not see them. Facebook does not make catching up better, it just makes friendship worse.

Sometimes I think that if aliens came to earth they’d be forgiven for assuming humans don’t even like spending time catching up with friends and family because we invented machines to handle it for us while we go focus our brief lives on working and recovering from work.

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Find Me in The Club

Here’s another anecdote: a few years ago, back when I was a young lad, I went to a nightclub with two former coworkers. One of them was laser-focused on getting laid that night. The other was annoyed by the former’s preoccupation, and kept regularly instructing him to “just relax and have a good time”. He pointed out (less analytically) that by viewing the evening as a goal-oriented task, and not something fun, it became work (not to mention annoying to listen to). Despite the fact that we were all doing the same thing, two of us enjoyed our time, and one of us didn’t. The only difference lie in our perspectives.

The perspective that caused my former coworker’s night out to be less fun, is shared by the “dating” apps Tinder, Match, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime (all the same company!) Bumble and Badoo (a second company). These apps approach the task of finding romantic partnership as if it is work, and then they use tech to make that task more convenient.

And to their credit, they succeed! Dating apps are now the most likely way for couples in the US to meet. The apps work. People are gettin’ hitched, and dating is more convenient than ever.

…But it’s not fun, is it?

Single, but who has time to mingle?

Now before y’all think I’m hopping onboard the “everything new is bad” train, there are aspects of dating that these apps have improved. There’s probably less alcohol involved, for starters. And a lot of women say it feels safer being able to “test the waters” before agreeing to meet with a strange man. But the fact remains that for a lot of young people, dating has become kind of a chore. Sure, it’s a chore that gets more convenient with every version update and algorithmic tweak2, but a chore nonetheless. A big percentage of the single-and-open-to-something population is replacing 4-5 hours of socializing in public spaces with a “more convenient” hour or two swiping left and right alone at home. Are these apps really a necessary convenience if the outcome (finding a loving partner) is more or less the same as without?

At this point, probably yes actually. As we saw in the chart, dating apps are quickly becoming the place where dating happens. My fear surrounding this is that —like the disappearance of video rental stores— we could be forcing society into a position where the least enjoyable but most convenient option becomes pretty much the only option.

So what’s the benefit to all this convenience? Where are the minutes we’re “saving” by not dating, Blockbusting, or catching up with friends being spent? Why does it feel like we have less leisure time than ever, when so much of it is ostensibly being “saved”? Remember what we discussed earlier: time is life. We have no choice but to spend it. Time “saved” is time gone forever. So when we make something more convenient, that thing becomes a smaller part of our lives. Being able to video call your grandma anytime and anywhere is meaningful if you are unable to visit her in person. But making video calling with grandma “convenient” also means it’s easier to not visit grandma.

Of course, one thing in life that always seems to use the same amount of life no matter how fancy our machines get is work. When work gets made more convenient, the “saved” time does not get replaced with leisure, but more work. Like the beach house guy from the AT&T commercial, or this happy fellow from an Apple commercial who’s work is now so convenient (thanks to Apple Knows Best™ magic) that he can do it while playing with his kids.

Because of tech, our “leisure” time increasingly consists of many small “convenient” tasks, manning the levers, pushing buttons and adjusting the knobs of machines that produce the outcomes associated with happiness —shows watched, “friends” caught up with, photos curated, spouses, uh, existing— but as long as we remain focused on future outcomes, we de-prioritize the now, the life part of living.

It’s easy to imagine a tech startup in the not-to-distant-future that promises to make vacations more convenient by just downloading unique AI-generated memories straight into your brain while automatically updating your Instagram profile with the appropriately generated photos. Here is the sales pitch for the imaginary company: “Why take a month off of work to go on vacation when this process can be done in two hours on a weekend?”

Conclusion

The reason work doesn’t decrease when productivity increases is because companies understand they’re not paying for results, they’re paying for effort. Effort is the thing that humans find valuable, and making a task more convenient by definition decreases the effort that task takes. This is why clicking a button on Facebook does not make you friends with someone. It’s why we still have chess competitions despite computers far outperforming the greatest grand masters. And it’s how we know Generative AI is in a giant hype bubble right now! A “painting” that took no human effort to create is as valuable to society as the ink it’s printed with. Heck, that printer ink is probably more valuable left unused.

The sales pitch of an inconvenient convenience isn’t something all tech does, and it’s not something new. Almost all of us geriatric millennials (and up) have at one point or another, fallen for the sales pitch of some gadget we thought would be super useful but just ended up collecting dust. That quesadilla maker for example. It doesn’t make quesadillas better, it just makes cooking worse, because I have to move it every time I need my countertop. A countertop, like life, can only hold so much, after all.

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If you haven’t switched to Firefox yet, you’ll want to consider it this week. While Google is busy making some sketchy changes to Chrome on the road to (what else) forcing more ads upon it’s users, Mozilla is updating Firefox mobile in a big and exciting way.

Starting literally today (assuming I scheduled this post correctly) Firefox on Android will gain the ability to install over 400 new extensions. Remember this post where I painstakingly described how to install an extension on Firefox mobile? Well, it’s obsolete now! Annoying for me, but still cool actually!

Using a browser instead of apps to view content gives you more control over what you see and allows you to better protect yourself. A big part of the reason “apps” became a thing in the first place was to prevent users from having control over their experience, and doing horrible stuff like blocking ads. Even though most apps are in essence just glorified single-webpage viewers, it’s often illegal to modify how it presents content the way one could with a website.

If you’re worried about Firefox sucking or being bloated, I can assure you it does not and is not. I’ve been using it full-time for three years now and it’s just as fast, if not faster than Chrome. It also syncs bookmarks and tabs across all your devices seamlessly. If you’d like to switch from Chrome and keep all your stuff, Mozilla has a guide here.

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Without further ado, here are what I consider my “essential” browser extensions:

uBlock Origin

I could do a whole post on uBlock Origin, because it’s by far the most valuable extension here, but I’ll keep this brief. uBlock is known as an “ad blocker,” but it’s also much more. Simply installing it and not touching any settings will dramatically improve your web experience on it’s own; but there’s a lot more you can do.

Go into the extension’s preferences (Extensions > uBlock Origin > three dots menu > Options) click “filter lists” and you’ll see a list of lists. These are all maintained by volunteers that uBlock looks at to know what to block. Here are a few lists I recommend enabling:

• EasyList – Annoyances

• AdGuard – Mobile App Banners

• EasyList/uBO – Cookie Notices

• AdGuard – Social Media

A fun fact about the uBlock origin developers is that not only do they do the work for free, they refuse to accept any donations for their work. Talk about putting your money where your mouth is!

uBlock origin at Mozilla Add-ons

LibRedirect

I’ve talked about LibRedirect before here. If you’ve never heard about alternative front-ends before, I recommend you check out that article, but here’s the tl;dr:

Alternative frontends are alternate, simplified, ways of viewing a website. I like using them for Twitter and Tiktok, because it strips away all the nonsense and links you directly to the content. Think of them like a filter for intentionally bloated websites (who would prefer you use the app). They’re great for when a friend texts you a meme or something, and you want to quickly view it without all the garbage.

LibRedirect is an extension that automatically redirects you to an alternative frontend when you click a link. If you’re someone like me, who doesn’t have a Twitter, TikTok or Reddit account, but occasionally wants to view content on those pages, alternative frontends greatly streamline the experience and LibRedirect is basically essential.

LibRedirect at Mozilla Add-Ons

Leechblock NG

Leechblock is an extension for helping to thwart getting sucked into mindless or distracting screen time. It’s highly customizable, which may be off-putting to some, since it takes a minute to set up, but I think of it like a “Ulysses pact” where you put in effort up front to block yourself from making an unwanted decision later on.

Some things I’ve done with Leeckblock:

• Block Reddit.com (the homepage), but allow Reddit.com/whatever in case I want to access a particular thread from Google or something.

• Add a 30-minute timer to sites that suck me in. When there’s five minutes left, it turns the page grayscale, letting me know time is almost up.

• Delayed the loading of a page by five seconds. Just enough time to force me to think about if I really need to go there.

• Allow a distracting website only during my lunch break and after work hours.

Or any combination of things! I am a big proponent using tools like this for guiding behavior, but not throwing up a wall (that could cause me to just disable the extension altogether). And I appreciate the options Leechblock has for custom-tailoring to your specific needs.

LeechBlock at Mozilla Add-ons

DF “Distraction-Free” YouTube

If you’re already using LibRedirect, and/or viewing YouTube via a frontend, you may not need this one. DF YouToutube makes it easily to remove the distracting aspects of YouTube. If you’re someone who is easily derailed by all the extra shiny things when viewing a YouTube video, this extension keeps it out of sight (and mind). Technically, there’s nothing DF YouTube does that uBlock origin can’t do either, but this extension makes it a lot easier.

DF YouTube at Mozilla Add-Ons

Pocket/Instapaper/Push To Kindle

Mozilla actually owns Pocket, and it comes built-in to Firefox. Instapaper is a similar extension. Both make it easy to save articles online later for easy viewing later (perhaps on a dedicated reading tablet). I like using Pocket for “quick” stuff, and Instapaper for more longform stuff.

PushToKindle is a similar extension that formats articles for cleanly sending to a (duh) Kindle. The free desktop version is limited to 10 articles/month, but as far as I can tell, the mobile app is unlimited.

Side note: If you’re looking for a non-Amazon e-reader, Kobo devices now have pocket built in. I have a perfectly functional Kindle I bought years ago, but if I were in the market nowadays, I would absolutely go with the Kobo for this functionality alone.

Instapaper at Mozilla Add-ons

Push to Kindle at Mozilla Add-ons

Clear URLs

This is a simple one. You know when you go to copy a webpage to send to someone and when you paste it in the send field, it’s 1000 characters long? Most of that text is tracking information.

The ClearURLs extension trims away all that excess, leaving only the basics needed.

ClearURLs at Mozilla Add-ons

That’s it from me, please let me know if you have any I’ve missed! I’d love to hear any other essential suggestions you may have. There’s a war on for our attention out there, and the best defensive tool we have is working together!

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This was originally a tongue-in cheek post with “deals” on “purchases” for things like a “kit” for creating your own “artisanal human-made poetry”, and “recycling” an old smartphone into “a device for calling friends”. Generally, I’m a “less is more” sort of person who believes that if you need to purchase a gadget to make an activity more convenient, not doing that activity in the first place is probably simpler (alternatively, if it’s an activity you enjoy doing, not making it more convenient). But I realized there are a few tech products and services I employ that help me live a more meaningful life, and I’d like to share some with you now.

Please note that this post does NOT have any affiliate links, nor was I paid to promote anything. All support for Stay Grounded comes from readers! If you’d like to help out, subscribe! You can also get premium for free by referring people with the button below. I set the threshold for free premium super low. Friend of the show Ruth Gaskovski over at has already netted like two years’ worth via referrals!

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The Guide:

BitWarden Password Manager

Price: $0 ($10/year for additional features)

What it does: Keeps all your passwords in a secure and organized place.

Moving to a password manager is one of those things that once you do it, you can’t believe that it took you so long.

Not only is storing your passwords in a browser not secure, it makes it easy to become disorganized. There are a lot of password managers out there, but BitWarden is the simplest, IMO, and I like that the code is open source. It runs on all platforms, iPhone, Android, Windows, Linux, Chrome and Firefox.

Bitwarden charges $10/year for some extra features like 2FA (two-factor authentication) codes which is more than worth it in my opinion even though free 2FA apps (like Authy) exist. Advanced (or more paranoid) users can also have the extra features for free with self-hosted apps like VaultWarden.

An Alarm Clock

Price: ~$12

What it does: It tells time and has an alarm.

“Don’t charge your phone in the bedroom” is always the first piece of advice I give to someone who’s looking to be more mentally grounded. Kinda like the password manager, it’s one of those things you won’t believe you put off for so long!

Not only do you fall asleep easier (after a few days’ adjustment period) without your phone, but not subjecting your brain to the firehose of information that is the internet immediately upon waking means you can start the day on much more solid mental footing.

I actually thrifted an old retro “flip style” clock for $5. It looks cool, and as a small fun bonus it doesn’t completely shatter my mental well being into a thousand jagged pieces all over the floor every morning, slicing into the soles of my feet causing every step I take henceforth to be filled with anguish!

For some tips n’ tricks on how to transition to a phone-free sleeping area, check out my AIR Method post here:

PiHole: A network-wide ad blocker

Price: $0 - $15

What it does: Blocks ads and trackers for any device on your home wifi network, even within apps or in the menu of your Smart TV (lookin’ at you Samsung).

Setting up a PiHole is not for the completely tech-illiterate, but it is very easy, and very “set it and forget it” once up and running. To illustrate just how easy it is, I was looking forward to an afternoon project, and actually became frustrated that it only took about ten minutes from beginning to end!

You can install PiHole on a lot of devices. The cheapest way is by picking up a Raspberry Pi (the “Pi Zero W” model is $15 but any model will work) and installing the software onto it. There are also free PiHole apps available for all the main home server platforms too for all you selfhosters. For the less-literate among you, Adafruit sells a premade pihole (with a tiny screen!) for $39:

One day I’ll write up a full post about these things, but there are already a lot of guides out there (I used the official one). I do have a few bonus advanced tips, though:

Number one, is getting the PiHole browser extension (Chrome) and the “PiHole connect” android app to easily switch it on/off (blocking trackers often means some referral links break). Also, while the default block lists are fine, I find the blocklist project lists tend to have less false-positives. Please note that PiHole does not block YouTube ads, you’ll need a browser extension like uBlock origin for that.

A Dedicated Reading Tablet

Price: $60-100 new, but “old and slow” is just as good if you find a used one for cheaper.

What it does: Helps to keep your phone free of mindless scrolling.

After “no phone in bedroom”, getting a dedicated reading tablet has probably been the single biggest helper for me in maintaining a healthy digital lifestyle. It’s great for when you want to chill for a minute, but not quite at the get-invested-in-a-novel level.

Having a dedicated device for casual scrolling and article-reading, lessens some of the temptation to do it on your phone or laptop (devices you should aim to keep free of entertainment). I also highly recommend setting up an RSS reader for your tablet to ensure you’re only seeing the content that you specifically requested to see, not some algorithmically-generated “For You” tab which often serves up empty distractions.

Check out this post below if you’d like to see what device I personally got, how I set it up, and what apps I have installed:

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“If there's ten people and one Nazi at the table, you’ve got a table with eleven Nazis.”
— German aphorism

If you encounter a Nazi on social media (whose account isn’t banned within a few hours), it me…

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“You can act real rude, and totally removed, and I can act like an imbecile”
— Men Without Hats

“Social” media is largely more “media” than “social” these days. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok are all just variations of the same thing and by that I mean they are endless feeds of mostly bots and clout chasers reposting the same screenshots and videos on every platform. “Following” someone has little bearing on if you’ll actually see their content, you will see what the company wants you to see. Remember: “for you” isn’t.

One reason for this shift away from “social” is because “social” content is only really useful for attracting new users. “Your friends are doing it” is quite possibly the single most effective way to get a human to do something they don’t need to be doing. But we’re now in an era where the pool of people without an addictive scrolley app is dwindling, and so the effort to attract new users with “friends” becomes less profitable than squeezing the existing user base.

The other reason for the shift away from “social”, is that showing scrollers the same repackaged advertiser-approved memes over and over is much cheaper and easier (especially when not actually, y’know, creating any of the content) than having a platform where humans interact. “Media” is cheap, but “social” can get expensive. The more platforms allow for opportunities for people to pause scrolling and start socializing the more opportunities are created for toxicity. Toxicity increases engagement, but left unchecked it can cause users to quit, or worse, sue. Companies looking to maximize profit need to keep toxicity at an optimal level that squeezes the maximum amount of engagement out of users, but stops just shy of overwhelming them.

Enter “Trust and Safety” departments. “Trust and safety” departments are kinda like “Human Resources” departments. They exist to help the company avoid expensive lawsuits and expensive PR blunders. These departments, I assume, are comprised of good-hearted people who care deeply about their work and the well being of others. But they are fighting a battle that the companies do not actually want to end.

“Trust and safety” departments keep awful online places just not-awful enough so that most users don’t quit. But that’s as far as they go. If these departments were enabled to go further, and actually make social media into places where conversation was king, and anyone interrupting the free exchange of ideas was promptly booted, profits would go down, probably to the point where the whole system wouldn’t be sustainable. put it best in her now-famous rant, “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things” when she said platforms want us to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”.

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To put it bluntly, “Trust and Safety” is —borrowing a phrase from anthropologist David Graeber’s 2015 book “Bullshit Jobs”— a bullshit job. A “Bullshit job” refers to a type of job that exists to manage a problem that need not exist in the first place. Some examples Graeber gives are:

• Store greeters, who are paid to pretend to be happy because the other underpaid and overworked employees can’t muster it.

• Administrative assistants that are hired to make someone wealthy feel important.

• The person at the airport who hands out customer concessions when the airline loses their luggage.

In the context of “Trust and Safety”, consider that there’s absolutely nothing about “humans talking online” that necessitates putting up with most of the garbage we have to put up with these days. All the trolls, rage baiters, hate-speechers, propagandists and surreptitious advertisers who forcefully inject themselves into every conversation don’t actually need to be allowed to participate, and yet they feel impossible to avoid.

Here’s an analogy: Imagine you’re a part of a study group that just added a new member. For the sake of brevity let's call him “M. Zuckerberg”. No that's too obvious, let's say “Mark Z”. As soon as Mark Z joins the group, he becomes immediately disruptive to the point of preventing much actual studying. After asking him to stop multiple times with no effect, what should the group do so they can get on with their studying?

If you answered “hire an outsider to monitor his disruptions and ensure they are kept at or below some baseline level of disruptability”, now you’re thinking like a social media company!

The obvious and simplest solution here is to kick Mark Z the fuck out. A study group does not need to accept anyone and everyone. It does not need to grow indefinitely. In fact, the larger a study group gets, the worse it tends to be for actual studying. A group that is focused on facilitating studying would never have need for a Trust and Safety department. The fact that “social” media companies have them implies a goal that is not aligned with facilitating conversation or even (as Meta Systems Incorporated puts it in their laughably ironic mission statement): “Giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”1

Corporate social media and its distractions are awful for achieving any kind of collaborative goals. Even simple, casual goals like “getting to know each other”. But the answer isn’t a greater financial investment in “trust and safety”, it’s using spaces that don’t need it in the first place.

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Yes, Justin is talking about the Fediverse again

The reason I bring up Mastodon/Lemmy and the Fediverse so often is not because I think you need to be there, but because it serves as proof-of-concept that global online social networks can totally exist without all the garbage and nonsense that makes what we usually think of a “social media” so awful.

When I say I’m a “fan”, I don’t mean it in the way that I think most people mean when they discover some new shiny distraction. The Fediverse is not “fun” or “addicting” by default. It certainly can be, but that’s not the point of it existing. Mastodon/Lemmy (et al.) are tools that anyone can use to create a space for talking about whatever, however, and with whoever the hell they please.

When spaces are not seeking profits, they are not incentivized to endlessly grow, which means they are not incentivized for engagement beyond what the users naturally want to engage with. Non-growth platforms just aren’t incentivized to distract or upset their own users.

Mastodon has about two million users spread out over thousands of “instances” that are all connected, but each is ran by individuals or small teams. Being a small part of a bigger network means that the ratio of human people monitoring content to users posting the content is much narrower than on commercial platforms. Here are some numbers:

Meta Systems Incorporated has about 40,000 “trust and safety” employees. Assuming all of those employees are actively monitoring content all of the time (they’re not), that’s about one human set of eyeballs for every 60,000 Facebook users. These employees are not members of whatever subgroup they are monitoring, they are not personally invested in the vitality of the communities, they often don’t even speak the language. Their job is to identify and remove the worst kinds of toxic material. Nothing more.

On the other side of the equation, Lemmy.world is the largest single Lemmy instance with 130k registered users (the Lemmy network is kind of like decentralized Reddit). As of this writing, Lemmy.world has eight admins (people who can monitor everything), and a few dozen hosted communities each with their own human moderators. Just counting the admins alone (which is not a reasonable comparison because moderators do most of the curation work) means there is one admin for every 1500 active users. This more than an order of magnitude better than Meta, despite Lemmy.world not having a “trust and safety” budget at all. Furthermore, the .world admins and moderators put effort in, not because they are paid to, not because if they don’t their company could be sued, but because they want to. Because creating a space for conversation is meaningful to them, and because they themselves are members of the community and therefore personally invested in its health.

If you’re thinking “well, this isn’t a fair comparison because Lemmy.world is significantly smaller than Facebook” then you’re starting to get the point. Small communities can stay safe easier. They can stay trustworthy easier. It’s much easier to identify and minimize toxicity and harassment when the people in charge of identifying it understand the context behind what’s being said. It’s much easier to maintain a culture of whatever-the-hell-you-want when a single bad actor who is “technically not breaking any rules” can’t easily disrupt everyone.

Mastodon and Lemmy (or whatever new software that’s not been invented yet) might not ever influence global culture to the degree that Facebook and Twitter once did. But they prove that “people constructively and healthily socializing via the internet” is entirely possible without being forced to tolerate any more nonsense than one would normally expect when us “messy” humans get together. “Social media: The Business” on the other hand cannot exist without the garbage. Even if a company chose to ignore its bottom line and invest heavily in making the Trustest and Safetest platform possible, it would still be staffed by human moderators who need to be paid, vs those on the Fediverse who care about creating good spaces so much that they do it for free.

But let’s be honest, companies would never invest more than the bare minimum into Trust and Safety because they make a lot more money when their users are perpetually distracted and upset. A persistent state of anxiety is not some natural byproduct of what happens when humans interact, their products are specifically engineered to make you feel bad.

…But not too bad. It’s not the role of Trust and Safety departments to make users feel happy, productive or enriched, they just don’t want you to sue. And they don’t want you to quit. When an ostensibly “social” company has a Trust and Safety department, try and see it for what it is: a sign that failure is an option.

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“They just want my love and my energy.” —Doja Cat

In the late 1950’s psychologist Harry Harlow ran experiments on baby monkeys wherein he separated them from their mothers a few hours after they were born and replaced the real mom with two artificial stand-ins. One “mom” was made of wire and had an attached baby bottle. The other was made of soft cloth but provided no food.

The “point” of this awful experiment was to see which “mom” the babies monkeys preferred being with. I’m sure you’ve already (correctly) hypothesized that they spent more time with the cloth-covered “mother”. To me, and I’m sure to you as well, this result seems obvious. In what little defense I can offer Mr. Harlow, there was a growing movement at the time suggesting that giving infants physical affection caused them to grow into needy, weak-willed adults. Harlow, through his various experiments, “proved” that no amount of wires, cloth and food, can provide all that babies need to thrive into confident, emotionally secure individuals. So what is it about humans these days that despite having no shortage of real people around, we find ourselves spending the most time with our digital wire mother that is the Internet?

“Supplement, don’t supplant.”

Here’s a shorthand way to think about healthful technology use. Any technology, really, from an air conditioner or dishwasher, to TV or iPhones. Ask yourself:

“Is this tool supplementing my life? Or is it supplanting some aspect of it that is more meaningful to me?”

I like to take film photos. I find the effort rewarding. But I also appreciate the benefits a smartphone camera provides. With a smartphone I can spend less time fussing with settings and more time doing whatever it is I’m apparently enjoying enough to want a photo of. Not every picture needs to be some carefully considered artsy thing, sometimes you just want a quick snapshot, and the smartphone camera enables that while still allowing us to prioritize whatever else is happening that presumably we find more meaningful.

However, as I’m sure you’re aware, a smartphone camera can be a trap too; moments can really only be lived, they aren’t capture-able. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t ever tempted to try:

When we do stuff like record a concert, the camera is not supplementing, but supplanting our experience of the concert. The technology is physically positioned between us and the thing we (presumably) value. Our experience of the concert therefore becomes the experience of looking at our phones (or god forbid, an iPad).

A desire to capture moments is expected, as we are all cursed with the knowledge that our memories are imperfect, and that one day they will be lost, as Roy Batty famously lamented, “like tears in rain”. It can feel prudent to try and preserve the good times in high-def. But the whole idea is premised on a falsehood:

Experience is not made of moments, it is the moment. This thing, right now, is you experiencing life. The always-moving-but-always-present present cannot, by definition, be held onto. The fact of our inevitable deaths should cause the notion that we can “preserve experiences by living them a little less presently” to seem absurd.

That’s not to say that taking a few snapshots isn’t a worthwhile exercise now and then, only that we should strive to be vigilant in noticing when supplementation can turn into supplanting.

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A Friendship of Convenience

The big thing that our modern tech is often, in my opinion, dangerously “supplanting, not supplementing”, is our need for socialization. Just as with life as it is lived, our relationships are not built using time, they do not take effort, they are effort, they are time.

Relationships can be supplemented with technology, telephone calls, texts, chats, facetime, video games, etc. But —like the iPad at the concert— technology cannot “experience it for you”.

Big tech likes to imply that their services are just as real as the real world, only more convenient. They’ll insist that they can automate the “maintenance” of life for us, which sounds nice on the surface, but what often ends up happening is they automate away the life part, leaving us with nothing but maintenance. An example I gave in my satirical piece last week, is how food delivery apps automate away the “enjoying a restaurant” part of going to a restaurant, “freeing” us up… for what exactly? More time working? Where’s the app that frees us up to go to restaurants?

At least Doordash (hopefully) forks out some actual food. What activity is Facebook and Instagram “saving” us from? Catching up with old friends? How does handing that “task” over to the machines enrich our lives? What human was asking for this?1

Truth is though, many of us willingly play along with big tech’s charade, because to believe the alternative is a tacit admission that many of our relationships are not with people anymore, but with technology. “This is my friend” we’ll say about someone in our feed who we haven’t seen, called, or interacted with in years, “I know all about their life”.

One of the first essays I ever posted to Stay Grounded was called “What is it you’re friends with, exactly?” I wanted readers to consider that what social media platforms refer to as a “friend”, bears little resemblance to actual friendship. Indeed, what might once have been a real relationship often gets reduced to little more than another feed to scroll. When that happens (despite what Meta System Incorporated says) I contend that whatever it is, is not a relationship any longer —not with a person at least— but something supplanting your need for human contact with a facsimile of one. A wire mother.

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I do not want your takeaway from this to be that internet-centered relationships cannot be meaningful. In fact, I think the internet can be a great way to meet new friends and find community that might not be accessible in our physical lives2. But we should be careful not to fool ourselves into believing they can fully satisfy our need for socialization. Friendships can begin on internet platforms, but they cannot wholly exist there, not to the degree we need. The process is also one directional. Friendship cannot “go the other way”, by starting in the real world and becoming digital. We cannot hand off the nourishment of a new friendship to internet-based services and expect it to flourish the same way.

It’s also not wrong to consider someone whom you don’t see or call very often a “friend”. It’s painful when we don’t see our friends, but it’s a healthy pain that motivates us to put effort in, because friendship is this effort. What social media gives us is temporary relief of the pain of missing someone, and maybe some relief from the guilt of losing touch in the first place. At the risk of drawing too dramatic of a parallel, “pain relief without addressing the underlying problem” is how opiates work. And we know how that’s going. Talk about “supplanting not supplementing”.

“Fans ain't dumb, but extremists are.”

American rapper Doja Cat was recently pilloried by her own fans for pointing out what seems to me to be the obvious fact that she can’t love someone that she doesn’t even know:

Arguments about tone and graciousness aside, the fact that fans appeared genuinely shocked and hurt by this revelation is, in my opinion, a sad indicator of what happens when we let technology supplant too much of our social lives. Consider that nobody with a healthy support structure would be affected in the slightest by the news that someone they’ve never even met doesn’t love them. But also consider how few of us truly have robust circles of emotional support these days.

I’m not a big city psychologist, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the rise of aggressively militant fandoms and parasocial online relationships involving celebrities and influencers stems from this technological pseudo-isolation. It feels like a logical result of what happens when people are not actually meeting their daily requirements of meaningful social contact, and so begin seeking out whatever may resemble it via the internet. Burned out from unfulfilling “maintenance”, and deprived of meaningful connection, it’s easy to see why someone might settle for the nourishment provided by the ever available breast of the wire mother.

There’s a hard-to-swallow flip-side here, though. While the wire mothers in Harlow’s experiment provided very little to the monkeys, without their milk, the babies would have died in days, if not hours. Wire mothers do give something more than just milk, they gie a desperate hope, a chance to hold on one more day, for a future where things might be different. Our digital wire moms can’t give us everything, and they can’t give it forever, but sometimes they can keep us alive another day.

There’s no shame in turning to the internet for supplementing socialization when doing it “better” isn’t feasible. It’s easy to imagine situations where someone might not have access to a community that keeps them sane. A gay teenager stuck in rural Alabama. A woman born into a controlled religious society. A New York sports fan in Boston. Some days in life, the best we can hope for is making it until tomorrow in one piece.

Epilogue: The Best Sauce in the World

I have never personally gone back and watched a video I’d taken at a concert. Two seconds in it becomes shamefully obvious that I have not captured the experience. These days I still might record a few seconds, just enough for a personal record that I was there. A small present for my future self that might trigger the good memory. A supplement to life.

But when I want a recipe for spaghetti sauce, I call my Mom. It takes a lot longer than asking the wire mother that is the internet, but the time spent is more meaningful and let’s be honest- the sauce just tastes better.

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Tech these days is getting really good at automating away the activities that everyone hates. With all this time saved, we are freer to focus on what we enjoy most in life.

Netflix is when I first noticed this liberation in action. As everyone over thirty remembers, before broadband existed the worst part of renting a movie was physically browsing the aisles at your local video rental store. Nobody liked having to do this. To make it worse, there weren’t even any algorithms at play informing us as to what we might enjoy. Some stores had a “staff pick” section, but let’s be honest, who cares what some film nerd thinks when Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes can objectively (and instantly) tell us how worthy a piece of media is of our attention?

Before Amazon, the experience of shopping was tedious and unenjoyable. Shopping malls were commonplace, but if you were lucky, your town had a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart relieved us from the annoying drudgery of patronizing multiple shops in the old “town squares”. So much inefficiency making small talk with our neighbors and examining goods before our purchase. That’s all better thanks to Amazon. We know which product is best (the first one) and we can quickly get right to the payment (the best part of shopping!) in a fraction of the time. “Buy it now”? Yes please. I have important things to do.

In the early aughts, the invention of Facebook (and later Instagram) was a breath of fresh air. It helped us stay up-to-date with the lives of our loved ones easily and cheaply- no phone call needed! Facebook (now known as Meta Systems Incorporated) understood that “catching up with friends” is an activity we’d all prefer machines handled for us, freeing us to focus on what matters. I used to feel guilty when I hadn’t called my Aunt Linda in a while, but now I can conveniently scroll her feed for updates, and soon any uncomfortable feelings I may have had retreat quietly back from whence they came.

I also love a good story, and that’s why I love TikTok. A single TikTok video can tell a story in a fraction of the time it would take to watch a movie, or worse, read an entire novel. As everyone knows, the most distressing part of reading is accidentally losing yourself in the narrative. Sometimes whole hours can fly by! In the time you’ve read one novel, TikTok can tell me a thousand stories.

And thank goodness for Twitter and Reddit not only for serving up news headlines, —automatically sorted based on what’s most eye-catching— but prepackaging them with opinions on how to feel about all of it. All in one place! So much time saved that would have otherwise been wasted on internalizing the subject matter and formulating my own nuanced perspective.

Whenever I’m out to eat I can’t help but think about how inefficient the whole process is. Having to get dressed up, physically walk to a restaurant, taking a moment to admire the decor and ambiance, be literally waited on… that time adds up! Apps like Doordash provide just the part you need need —the food— in plastic containers and delivered right to your door at a comfortable room temperature. Best of all? It’s the exact same price.

Yessir, the future sure is bright. They’re even building “AI” powered machines now that can paint, write poetry, and compose music. Finally- artists will soon be liberated from the drudgery of capturing the effusive feeling of being; of snapping a corner off of the fleeting, ethereal sense of sublime, and distilling it into a drinkable tonic that enables our too-fragile hearts to briefly beat in sync with the pulse of our infinitely mysterious universe.

They’ll save so much time!

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What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a social media network created in the style of Twitter, but without ads or toxicity-inducing algorithms. The network is community owned and operated.

How do I use Mastodon?

1. Download the Mastodon app from the Apple app store or Play store.

2. Create an account (just like Twitter or any other social media)

3. Follow people, and get posting.

Why do tech journalists say it’s too confusing to catch on?

I have no fucking idea.

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This “guide” is a bit of a joke made out of frustration. If you actually want to know more, including why I feel it has potential to free us from the dystopian hellscape that is modern social media, here is the “real” guide to Mastodon. It still uses simple language (and has lots of pictures!):

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I’m a fan of Mastodon. I like that I control what it shows me. I like that it doesn’t demand my time, or manipulate my attention with subliminal trickery. But what I like most is that it provides a way for people to easily connect online without corporate middlemen siphoning pennies off of everyone’s sanity.

Mastodon (and the tech that powers it) holds a lot of promise for news orgs, governments, and artists to “get the word out” in a way that’s widely accessible, yet free of divisive, engagement-obsessed algorithms. I dream of a world where I can easily follow friends, creators, and government agencies all in one place, without Elon, Zuck, Spez (or any other four-letter names) having a say in when or how. But before Mastodon can transform the world, it needs a critical mass of users! A lot of my readers have asked for an explainer on how it all works. So here it is as best I can do.

A (way shorter) just-tell-me-how-to-do-it guide is here if that’s more your speed:

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• What is Mastodon?

• Why should I care?

• Do I need mastodon?

• How do I sign up?

• Who owns Mastodon?

• What’s “Federation”?

• How do I follow users who are on another instance?

• What’s Lemmy or Pixelfed?

• What if I’m worried about Privacy?

• How is the Fediverse for Content Creators?

What is Mastodon?

The simple answer:

Mastodon is a social media network created in the style of Twitter, but without ads or toxicity-inducing algorithms. It is community (not corporate) owned and operated.

A more detailed answer:

Mastodon is free (as in libre) software that runs on websites. It is created in a style similar to Twitter; it has profiles, posts, replies, and “boosts” (re-tweets).

There is only one Twitter, but there are many websites that run Mastodon. A website running Mastodon is called a Mastodon “instance”. They all look basically the same. Anyone with a lil’ know-how can make an instance pretty easily and allow their friends to join. Starting an instance is like having your own mini-Twitter. But the thing that makes Mastodon exciting is that all the (ten thousand+) instances out there are interoperable, so a user joining any one has access to follow, like, re-tweet, etc, with anyone on any Mastodon website.

Why You Should Care:

The simple reason:

Unlike Twitter (or Meta, or any social media company), Mastodon is not incentivized for addictive “engagement”. It is incentivized for conversation. Users have full control over the content they see, and how they see it. There are no mysterious algorithms pushing people towards well, anything they don’t want to be pushed towards.

A more detailed reason:

When a for-profit corporation is facilitating a conversation, the conversation itself —its quality, depth, reliability, even its factuality— will never be their priority. Profits are the priority. Profits are generated mostly in two ways: selling ads, and selling user data. This means (despite what is commonly said) their priority is not “connecting people” but holding their users’ attention as long as they conceivably can1.

These incentives simply do not exist on Mastodon. “Mastodon” is a tool, not a product. Nobody owns the software, and the people operating Mastodon platforms aren’t making big bucks (most sites are paid for by the owners out of pocket, or supported via small donations by users). The people starting an instance usually do it because they want to facilitate some kind of conversation.

Mastodon admins are incentivized to keep the platforms online, reliable, and free from intrusions such as spam and trolls. “Engagement” is only a priority when it’s meaningful. And what “meaningful” is up to the instance Admin and its users.

Do I Need Mastodon?

The simple answer:

Nope! And if you only want to follow people, you don’t even need an account. It’s an open platform so any profile can be easily followed using an RSS reader.

But if you do switch over and post, it’s more likely your social media-addicted friends will too. And the more people who switch, the more institutions you’ll see coming over too. And once the people and institutions are on board, society won’t have any need for corporate conversation-brokers like Twitter or Meta.

A more detailed answer:

If we want digital society to move away from big corporate platforms, and onto nonprofit community-owned ones, those of us who have the means and understanding to help should strongly consider getting the ball rolling on the change we wish to see. Heck- that logic is why I started this newsletter. Free, decentralized, community-owned things don’t usually have an advertising budget. Trust me there’s little money in getting the word out about things that don’t make money (plssubscribeiloveyou🙏)!

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But as I’m always saying: technology should supplement our lives, not supplant it. In the event of cabin depressurization, we need to put on our own O2 masks before helping those around us. Just because Mastodon isn’t purposefully engineered to be addictive and distracting, doesn’t mean it can’t happen if you’re not careful how you configure it. If you’re someone who struggles with regulating yourself, don’t feel pressured to sign up. Keep on touching that grass.

How do I sign up for Mastodon?

The simple answer:

1. Download the Mastodon app (Apple store or Play store).

2. Create an account. Just like Twitter (or any other social media).

3. Follow people, and get posting.

A more detailed answer:

To make sign-ups simple, the official app defaults to Mastodon.social, the largest server (also run by the Mastodon developers). But you are also welcome to find an instance that resonates with you and create your account there. Are you mostly interested in being around other artists? Maybe sign up on mastodon.art. Are you a New Yorker? Check out masto.nyc. A journalist? Journa.host is created with you in mind.

This is a neat tool created to help people choose an instance. But I really can’t stress this enough: don’t overthink choosing an instance. They all provide access to the same network and all function largely the same. And if you choose one and decide to switch later it’s entirely possible to move without losing your followers or the people you’re following.

That’s it?

The simple answer:

That’s it.

A more detailed answer:

That’s really all you need to know to get going. Don’t forget to smash that like button y’all and blast this to your friends on for-profit social media. ✌️😎

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Other Questions you may have:

Who owns Mastodon?

The simple answer:

Nobody.

A more detailed answer:

Nobody owns the Mastodon network. Nobody owns the Mastodon software. The software is maintained by a nonprofit based in Germany headed by Eugen Rochko. That nonprofit is funded largely by donations. Eugen is not a billionaire. But even if he was, he couldn’t own Mastodon.

People do own the actual websites (“instances”) running Mastodon. Some are big, and some are small, many are only one person. That German nonprofit I mentioned also owns and operates Mastodon.social, the largest instance, and the default option in the app.

What about “Federation”? And what is “The Fediverse”?

The simple answer:

“Federation” is how Mastodon can function without anyone owning the whole network. “The Fediverse” is the informal name given to all connected sites.

It’s not really important to know this in order to use Mastodon. Nerds think it’s cool, but if you’re on the official app it doesn’t really matter.

A more detailed answer:

“Federation” means that users can interact with (reply, favorite, re-tweet, etc) any other Mastodon user no matter the instance. It’s like if Threads users could reply to Twitter users and vice versa. “The Fediverse” refers to this big interconnected web of instances that are able to interact.

Even if say- an emotionally insecure billionaire were to hypothetically buy up every single instance, the Mastodon software can’t be bought, so it would be trivial for new people to create and connect thousands of new instances outside of the billionaire’s control.

The concept of federation is a little confusing, and it’s where many people get hung up on Mastodon. But I think it’s only confusing because we’ve only ever had large, centralized platforms that don’t interact. It’s like trying to explain the concept of a “neighborhood” to someone who grew up only going to Wal-Mart.

“You mean the ‘bakery’ store only sells bread? And it’s a different owner than the Pet store? But I can use my same bank card at both??🤔🤔🤔”

Think about it like email. Nobody owns “email”. Gmail users can message Hotmail users easily, but you can’t use your Twitter account to post to Threads.

Federation works because of a protocol called “ActivityPub”. There are other apps (like Lemmy or PixelFed) that use ActivityPub too. “The Fediverse” usually refers to all sites using ActivityPub. Not just Mastodon.

So what’s Defederation?

The simple answer:

“Defederation” is when one instance blocks another instance entirely.

A more detailed answer:

Defederation is a tool for instance owners to prevent bad actors from interrupting and derailing conversation on their instance. For example: imagine an instance that for whatever reason, doesn’t remove spam accounts. By “defederating”, other instance owners can protect their users from spam accounts hosted elsewhere.

Some instances rarely defederate from others, if ever. Some do it more often. For example LGBT and other marginalized communities tend to use it to prevent outside harassment on their instances. Everyone using Mastodon users have freedom of speech, but nobody has freedom to be listened to.

How do I follow users who are on another instance?

The simple answer:

If you’re using the app, just click “follow” on their profile.

A more detailed answer:

When using a browser, most of the time you can just search from your Mastodon site and find them. But it’s harder to link directly, because each instance is functionally its own website. If you’re like me and mostly check Mastodon in a web browser, this Firefox extension (Chrome version) makes it as easy to follow as it is on mobile.

What’s this about Lemmy and Pixelfed?

The simple answer:

Just as Mastodon is made in the style of Twitter, Lemmy is made in the style of Reddit, and Pixelfed is made in the style of Instagram. They are all open-source, meaning like Mastodon, nobody owns them either.

A more detailed answer:

The underlying protocol for Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed (and others) is called ActivityPub. Nobody owns ActivityPub. Anyone can set up a Lemmy instance and interact with other Lemmy instances, like if each Reddit subreddit was independent from each other.

Technically speaking, two sites don’t even need to be using the same software to be interoperable. You can post to Lemmy from Mastodon (and vice-versa) since they both use ActivityPub. That said- doing that can get confusing fast and isn’t really recommended. But it’s possible because the “language” is the same. Mastodon is the most “mature” and the most used Fediverse app by far, but the others are growing.

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What if I’m worried about Privacy?

The simple answer:

Well, get the heck offa Twitter, Reddit and all Meta products, for starters. Assume everything you post anywhere is public. Mastodon is still on the internet, after all.

A more detailed answer:

As far as tracking users’ every move, Mastodon does not do it by design. Without ads to sell, there is little need track behavior.

You should not sign up to a site you don’t reasonably trust the owner. But also the chances of any random Instance owner having fewer moral scruples than Elon, Zuck, Dorsey or Spez is well, improbable.

That said, if don’t trust anyone- it’s not complicated to run your own instance for as cheap as $5/month.

How is the Fediverse for Content Creators?

The simple answer:

Mastodon, Lemmy, and Pixelfed do not have rigged algorithms deciding who gets noticed and who doesn’t. And as it stands now, the network isn’t as big as the commercial platforms. This limits reach, but can also help emerging artists be noticed by standing out.

A more detailed answer:

It’s not easy out there for creators. Commercial platforms have larger reach, but only if creators are willing to cater to the desires of the algorithm. This causes creators to compromise their visions in order to be noticed at all. There’s nothing wrong with promoting oneself on commercial social media, but it needs to be done carefully. For more on this topic, see the following post:

Corey Doctorow’s now-famous piece on Enshittification includes this line about carnival games as a metaphor for how Social Media companies treat creators:

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one.

Corporate Social Media offers creatives the hopeful illusion of a chance at virality, but it only gives virality to those willing to produce the sorts of shallow content that keeps other users hooked on the platform. It feels random, but it’s carefully engineered to keep creators constantly guessing.

Fediverse apps like Mastodon are still a middleman between creators and their audiences, but they do what middlemen should do: facilitate connections, not disrupt them.

Thanks for reading, hope this helps you! My account is here if you’d like to connect!

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If you have any other questions, feel free to leave a comment or reply to the email and I’ll do my best to answer it!

I’m not a “techno-optimist”, at least, not the in the usual definition. But I do feel that —with vigilance— tech can help us live more fulfilling lives. It’s my perspective that nearly all of the usual “big” problems associated with “tech” are really problems with financial incentives (e.g. Facebook incentivized to encourage a genocide in Myanmar, or push teens into developing eating disorders, etc.) and not a problem with the tools themselves.

With a little awareness, education, and personal responsibility, it’s possible for individuals to reap most of the rewards of modern technology while minimizing its ability to negatively intrude in our lives. But there are other issues (y’know like the aforementioned genocide) that can’t be fixed on the “user” end of things. Some problems can only be solved when a bunch of people make small changes. Big, societal issues like polarization, misinformation, and the “simplification” of our collective understanding; when our brains get overwhelmed to the point we all prefer skimming art and information —to quickly get the gist— instead of putting in the effort to be educated on anything in depth.

It feels like there’s a danger here, the danger that if individuals are never permitted time to deeply consider, y’know, all of this, we might collectively lose the ability to.

Kids These Days

When you see the Zoomers injecting TikTok depression directly into their eyeballs It’s easy to shake your head and think “kids these days don’t want to put the effort in” but I think this misses the mark a bit in two ways:

• Nobody ever wants to “put effort in”. Effort is hard! We put effort in because we’ve learned that the goal is rewarding, not because effort is fun.

• “Kids” of the past were not significantly more eager to “get deep” in their intellectual or artistic endeavors. They just had more time being bored. More time being bored means more time to be creative.

I also feel confident suggesting that past generations did not have a greater number of artistic and scientific works available to them, and that the works that did exist were not on the whole “deeper”, than what we have today. I believe this to be true in part because well, people never change, but also due to most “regular” folks not having the means (or access to the necessary knowledge) to produce and disseminate physical works, not to mention the widespread literacy rates needed to consume them.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good that today most people have the tools, capability and mental foundations, to create and consume challenging “deep” concept stuff. So why when we look at society, does it feel like this ability is so painfully under-utilized?

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Brave Old World

I recently came across a quote from Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and someone who’s whole deal is warning where our proclivity to select shallow low-effort experiences can lead. Specifically, he feared a world so full of distractions, that eventually nobody would even remember what boredom feels like. A society where shallow experiences become the only experiences; and people are easily manipulated by them.

Here’s the quote:

“In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

This was from 1958! My dude is describing engagement bait in 1958! He goes on:

“In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous.”

In my own most read essay, I put this way less eloquently when I said: “There’s only so much new information a caveman can learn about his or her cave.” But the idea is the same. Our brains evolved to be distracted. But they really thrive when we’re not. I’ve cut a bit of the following for brevity (full quote here if interested), but he goes on:

“…in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. […] Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

Huxley’s fears don’t just echo the fears of today, but are quite literally the same. I take some comfort in knowing that Brave New World is ninety-one years old. It tells me that the problem Huxley identified, while not being wrong, maybe wasn’t as hopeless as he believed. That ninety years have passed since Brave New World was published tells me that maybe The Problem™ as I see it —as we all see it— might not be hopeless either. Like in the 1930s, authoritarianism, and anti-intellectualism are certainly on the rise, and it’s again being boosted along by endless, non-truth distractions. There’s a genuine concern that a critical mass of the people who are both:

1. In a position to, and

2. smart enough

to save us all, are too Twitter-addicted to actually focus on coming up with creative solutions. But that was a concern in Huxley’s time too (well, not Twitter exactly), and the Free World™ has, if not thrived, at least held on since then.

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Huxley didn’t live to see the passing of the voting rights act, the Moon landing, or the fall of the Berlin wall. He’s not around today to witness the stigma fading around his beloved psychedelics. He didn’t see the first interracial kiss on TV or the series finale of M*A*S*H. He didn’t see Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I’m pretty sure is the weirdest and most challenging movie to ever reach the mainstream. If you, like Huxley, were afraid of mankind becoming on the whole unadventurous, timid, and uninspired, all those events should be reassuring news.

Huxley didn’t live to see the rise of the Internet. But I think he could have predicted its arc. “Universal literacy and a free press” didn’t account for “man's almost infinite appetite for distractions”, but then again you don’t even need to be literate to use TikTok, and there is no freer press than the World Wide Web. Is it possible we are in the endgame in the battle against distractions? Will the men who control the machines that control our attention soon achieve ultimate dominion over our very thoughts in a way demagogues throughout history have only dreamed?

No Gods, No Masters

The internet’s founding principles are baked into its construction. And those principles are all rather anti-authority if you think about it:

Nobody owns the Internet. Nobody can own it. No government or corporation controls it. Anyone can, with a little effort (yes, more in some countries), plug a computer into it and broadcast a message to anyone willing to listen.

But that’s not the problem. The problem we didn’t foresee is that those willing to listen face increasing hurdles. I’m not even talking about the ocean of ads we have to sort through to find what we want. Consider that some of the largest services on the internet are not even offering the very service that claim to:

• Google’s increasingly useless top search results are all ads, and their de-facto monopoly means they have no incentive to combat SEO on the “real” results, because those don’t make money.

• Amazon product reviews are equally meaningless, since their de-facto monopoly means they are not incentivized to be fair. Every day it’s harder to find useful information in reviews.

• Similarly, reviews on Goodreads are equally difficult (a great piece by ) to glean any useful information from. The incentive to be good, or honest, just isn’t there.

• TikTok, Instagram and X (née Twitter) don’t even show you the content from the people you specifically asked to see content from, because their incentive isn’t to show you what you asked for, it’s holding your attention.

I often think about the time when the Internet was new and the seemingly endless opportunities for collaboration it offered. How exciting it must have been to find people across the globe who share your niche interests. Those people are still out there, of course, but the effort it takes to find them goes up every day. And the distractions, those easy, fun, ever-ready distractions, are just everywhere along the path between you and what you’re looking for.

It’s hard for a listener these days. Even for those of us who want to put the effort in. Who understand how rewarding real listening can be, because we remember what it felt like. We’re not distraction-proof supermen (and I don’t think anyone given the choice would ever really want to be).

Is it possible to design systems with better incentives? Somewhere enough smart people can get together to make it worthwhile? Places we can just talk without a corporate middleman siphoning off our attention or sanity?

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How beauteous mankind is!

Nobody needs social media, nobody needs the internet. Technology should supplement real life, not supplant it. But it feels like a waste to have this massive, decentralized, interconnected, border-crossing communication tool that nobody owns —that nobody can own— and willingly surrender it to the forces of unregulated capitalism. That’s why I find the experiments going on with “the Fediverse” very interesting. It’s like an Internet built with, well, the Internet. A return to the decentralized first principles. Nobody owns it, and nobody can own it. It’s all delightfully anarchistic, but instead of the anarchist slogan “be ungovernable” it’s “be unprofitable”.

“The Fediverse” refers to apps using ActivityPub (Mastodon is probably the one you’ve heard of). Even though decentralization is a founding principle of the Internet, it’s a hard thing to wrap our heads around, because we’ve spent the last twenty years in a world where big, corporate, ad-filled, centralized platforms are where people talk online. Carl Heath recently described our current state of affairs this way (lightly edited for brevity):

Imagine all the squares, streets, parks, and venues you visit or live by in are owned by just one or a few companies. They not only own all these places but also determine what they are to be used for, and who can use them. They decide who can be there and who cannot. Mostly, it's free rent, for these companies finance everything through advertising.

Since it doesn't cost anything and this has been going on for so long, no one really thinks about it anymore. It has become the norm. It just is. I'm not sure that anyone would particularly appreciate this alternative world. Yet somehow we have chosen to organize our digital lives according to this model.

ActivityPub is kinda like email. Nobody “owns” email, and it doesn’t matter if you have Gmail, Outlook, or host your own one-woman email server at home. Everyone can email each other using email. Nobody owns “email”.

Nobody owns ActivityPub (remember- think “email”) either, and nobody owns Mastodon (the most popular service using ActivityPub). Anyone can quickly set up a website with Mastodon and that website can instantly talk with all the others. Unlike Twitter (er- I mean, 𝕏), If one Mastodon site were to go dark from government censorship, or be hostily acquired by a billionaire with insecurity issues, the rest of the network would be unaffected.

People who choose to make Mastodon-powered platforms do own them, obviously, and can control what other “Fediverse” sites it connects with and doesn’t. There are specialized instances (mastodon.art for example) that focus on what sort of people they would like to attract, and if users don’t like how a Mastodon site is run they can go somewhere else and their followers will still find them.

Social, not Media

Mastodon (the software) was designed by its creators to prioritize conversation over self-promotion. I think this is why I’ve noticed that journalists, celebrities and politicians (those who want to leave Twitter, at least) largely seem to prefer “BlueSky” the for-profit, centralized, Jack Dorsey-endorsed Twitter-clone, over the open, decentralized, and largely nonprofit Mastodon network. Cynically, I think this is probably due to those sorts of people being hooked on that artificial feeling of importance that Twitter provided, at least until its “cultural middle class” started quitting when Elon took over (I maintain that Elon actually changed very little about Twitter and everyone should have quit ages ago). BlueSky is currently invite-only, so it comes prepackaged with that feeling of being in a cool kids club. That all said, I know it’s not exactly easy out there for journalists these days, and as badly as some may want to talk, what they foremost need are clicks, not conversations. We should go easy on them.

It gives me hope that scientists, at least, appear to prefer open platforms. The last thing we need is for the places our scientists are chatting to be awash in shallow distractions. But good science is worthless to a society that won’t (or can’t) listen. Without good journalism to translate science for the politicians, lawmakers can’t understand what laws may need passing (or repealing). Without artists able to get deep, and make thoughtful, deep art, and without platforms who prioritize art’s dissemination, a different kind of truth is also kept from reaching broader society.’

I don’t think a forever-solution to mankind’s distractability is possible to exist. And as I’ve said before, I don’t think distractability is itself a problem in need of solutions. I also don’t think the answer to having people get along is simply to “quit Twitter and Reddit, and move to Mastodon and Lemmy”. But I do think it’s a start1. I don’t expect people to get along. It’s foolish to assume a brave new world like that is even possible. But at least on open platforms people have a chance to try.

They’ll probably still get distracted (after all, we’re only human) but it won’t be on purpose.

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“The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press […] failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.” — Aldous Huxley

In 2020, Meta Platforms Incorporated (née, Facebook) spent many millions of dollars funding a study, who’s conclusion appears to demonstrate that (wait for it) users will spend less time scrolling chronologically-sorted feeds as compared to their algorithmically generated equals. Turns out, when you give users a chronological feed, they get “bored” with it faster and are more likely to switch away.

Shocking, I know. Meta considers this “bad”. Speaking with WIRED magazine, Professor Michael Wagner (who helped oversee the study), cheerfully described the phenomenon this way:

“If Facebook takes away your Snickers, you can still go to TikTok and eat Doritos. If you want to eat junk food, you're going to find more junk food, not some broccoli.”

Does professor Wagner subscribe to Stay Grounded? I’ve frequently described certain kinds of apps as “junk food” and healthy digital habits as “broccoli”. But really, I almost hope he doesn’t, because it means I’m not making the points I want to make.

Mr. Wagner’s got it all backwards- nobody wants to “eat junk food”. Nobody is sitting around going “hm it is my desire to harm my body with empty calories”. What people want is pizza, doughnuts, soda, etc. and (assuming they’ve even been educated on healthy eating habits) they are willing to make the short-term trade against their long-term health because the lizard part of our brains that evolved to crave fat, salt, and sugar is very very hard to override. If someone invented a healthy pizza with half the calories, a bunch more fiber and vitamins, and it tasted (and cost) exactly the same as our current “junk food” pizza I think people would just go nuts for it. It’s not “junk food” people want.

• What we want is to satisfy the feeling of hunger.

• What we need is nutritious, filling food.

• What we crave is calorie-dense foods.

• What “junk food” provides is the thing we crave, with none of the nutrition or satiety we need to be healthy.

Junk food “skips the line” so to speak, by appealing to our craving (calories) directly, and bypassing the reason that the craving evolved (sustenance). It’s kinda like when Homer Simpson “solves” his car’s engine problem by taping over the warning light:

Check engine lights trigger a low-level anxiety. The idea is that drivers will seek to alleviate the feeling by y’know, fixing the engine. By hiding the warning, Homer “solves” his anxiety directly, bypassing the problem that caused it and going straight to the bad feeling. It’s like how McDonald’s solves food cravings without addressing the need for nutrition.

Homer may believe that what he desires is tape, but his real desire is for the uncomfortable feeling to go away. Now that the joke is thoroughly ruined, you may see where I’m going with this…

1. “Limbic Capitalism” and the New Digital Robber Barons

I recently came across the phrase “limbic capitalism”, from the book “The Age of Addiction” by David T. Courtwright. It’s a good, if anxiety-inducing read. The short definition of “limbic capitalism” is that it refers to industries who’s business models are based around satisfying cravings, not underlying needs. Not actually providing customers with anything beyond what the kids these days call “dopamine squirts”.

Before the digital era there were essentially two major industries that could be described as limbicly-capitalist: gambling and tobacco1. However, today we have dozens. Addictive pharmaceuticals, and hyper-engineered junk food are two that have kinda always been around but recently taken a turn for the worse, and many businesses that are entirely digital, like much of the gaming industry and yes, algorithmically-sorted “social” media.

“For you”, “home”, “popular”, etc. These are often friendly-sounding ways of saying “not what you signed up for”. Everyone knows that “following” someone on “social” media these days is no indication you’ll actually see their content come up during scrolling, but you will see a bunch of stuff you didn’t ask to see that is statistically more likely to hold your attention longer than the stuff you specifically wanted.

Companies insert content into “your” feeds not because it’s meaningful, informative, or enriching, but because it’s hard to resist. Remember: the only thing they care about is you spending more time on their app.

Algorithmic feeds aren’t for you, they’re for them.

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2. Meta Knows Best

I find it almost offensive that a lot of the coverage about Meta’s study on chronological sorting have headlines like WIRED’s here:

This is how it reads to me (maybe I’m being a little unfair):

Y’know a study I’d really like to see? One measuring the percentage of tech journalists suffering social media addictions as compared to the general populace. These articles feel like they’re written by junkies sometimes.

3. Letting Big Tech Stock Our Mental Refrigerators

Here’s a Stay Grounded™ approved weight loss tip: don’t buy a ton of junk food and keep it within arms length of you at all times. IT DOES NOT HELP. We should all try to think of our digital feeds the same way we think of our fridge and pantry at home. Don’t stock them with what we crave, stock them with what’s good for us.

When we scroll feeds, we are consuming content. There’s nothing wrong with content, not inherently. Content, like food, exists on a scale between nutritious and satiating to snacks and junk. Reading a well-written article, or even watching a thoughtful online video will leave us feeling enriched and satisfied. Reading the news (real news) should make us feel informed, not overwhelmed.

Algorithmically generated feeds create a feedback loop: since they don’t provide much mental “nutrition”, they leave us anxious and un-grounded. That makes it harder to focus on identifying what we need, which means we crave a fast and simple solution to the anxiety, which the feed conveniently provides. Kinda like how smoking cigarettes solves the problem of nicotine cravings.

Information defines our reality. Scrolling algorithmically-sorted feeds (especially those with ads and inserted content) is ultimately surrendering control over our own sense of reality to for-profit big tech companies. When we have control over our information feeds, we can more effectively ignore our lizard-brain proclivities and even enjoy an occasional “junk food” meme scroll without getting burned out.

Refer a friend

3. The Benefits of Boredom.

Boredom, like hunger, is uncomfortable. When we’re bored, our brains crave stimuli. Brains evolved in a place where information, like calories, was rare; so we crave all kinds, good or bad, true or false. Let’s compare this to the food metaphor above. When we find ourselves alone with no stimuli:

• What we want is to ease feelings of boredom.

• What we need is trustworthy news, and meaningful social connection.

• What we crave is stimuli (of any kind).

• What algorithmic feeds provide is the thing we crave, with none of the “nutrition” we need.

In order to feel grounded mentally, we need both reliable information about our environment, and safe social connections. We need them just as much as we need food. If we’re going to start somewhere, taking control of our digital feeds and stocking them with the best sources of both will go a long way. But there are benefits to (occasionally) going without, too.

When we don’t have food, our bodies burn fat for energy, but only after exhausting all other options (like making you super hangry). Anyone who’s tried fasting for a period of time can attest that after a short while, the urgent feeling of hunger kinda moves to the background. It doesn’t go away exactly, but getting food now feels less pressing over time, not more. We probably evolved this way because it’s hard to think straight when you’re hungry, and if there’s no food immediately accessible, the people who could think clearest were better able to figure out the whole “no food” problem.

Our brains have their own built-in boredom-fixer, too. “Creativity” is the means by which our brains ease boredom when no easier stimuli exists. Creativity is good for us. It helps us solve problems and plan for the future. But creativity can’t be triggered directly. If it could, painters wouldn’t need studios and writers wouldn’t need long walks. The road to creativity passes through boredom.

Epilogue: You Know What really Sucks?

I think when people exasperate: “the internet sucks,” they aren’t really referring to Wikipedia or Weather.com. What it almost always boils down to is: “someone was awful on a platform that incentivizes awfulness”. When you see someone being an asshole on the internet, ask yourself: how did you encounter them in the first place? Were you seeking it out? Or did it just show up?

My theory is that despite all the stories about how “anonymous accounts” and “not being face to face” inspire people to be meaner to one another online, I suspect the truth is that the internet has only incrementally more assholes than the real world. We just don’t encounter as many in the real world because the real world isn’t trying to artificially increase superficial engagement by constantly experimenting with new ways to upset us.

Thankfully, like the cupboards in our kitchen, there exist content feeds that we do have full control over. RSS readers are great (and free) and newer decentralized social networks like Mastodon and Lemmy give users full control over what they see (and don’t). You could fill up these feeds with “junk food”, but that would be your choice, not something imposed upon you. Most people wouldn’t choose to fill their cupboard with junk, but unfortunately with most “social” apps, taking personal responsibility isn’t even an option.

If you went to the grocery store to buy healthy food, and the store only sold broccoli packaged with potato chips, you would be forgiven for being a little upset. It’s hard enough to eat healthy as it is! So do your brain and body a favor, don’t accept a “bargain” like this in your information diet either.

If you’re considering investing your time an app with an algorithmically-sorted feed, do so cautiously. Remember: it’s not really “for you”.

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“You don't find a sense of community in malls.” ― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent

There are two kinds of users on for-profit social media: people with something to sell (or promote, etc.) and suckers, frankly, who don’t realize they’re trying to authentically express themselves in someone else’s shopping mall. See- Malls can’t have too many features that don’t earn money, because then customers wouldn’t be customers, they would just be people. And malls, like social media, don’t want people. They want consumers.

Like social media, real malls have to strike the balance of maximizing the money it’s taking in from tenants (stores), but without doing it too aggressively or in a way makes customers uncomfortable. The difference between actual shopping malls and social media of course is that you can get real stuff at the mall, whereas social media at best provides shallow entertainment (often cosplaying as news). You could say social media offers all the superficial “fun” associated with 1980’s and 90’s suburban mall culture, without actually giving you anything of substance, or at least, not giving you anything more substantial than you could get without it.

1. The King is Dead (monarchy is cringe anyway)

As Twitter lay dying (and dying, and dying), many pretenders are circling; each of them vying to claim the crown of what used to be called “microblogging”. It seems like nearly every month now, staff writers at The Verge become obsessed with a different character-limited text box: Mastodon, BlueSky, Substack Notes, and now- Meta’s “Threads”.

It’s a bit weird to me that so many for-profit companies are hoping to be “the next” Twitter despite Twitter first of all still existing, but more importantly the fact that it’s never turned a profit in nearly two decades of trying to do precisely that. The fact that Twitter has changed so much since Elon Musk took it private is not, I suspect, evidence of Elon being malicious or singularly foolhardy, as is so often portrayed, but evidence that the business model he inherited just didn’t work without a constant influx of new investment. Whatever your opinions of the man’s politics (or level of emotional security), Musk has proven himself reasonably capable of one thing, and that’s amassing stupid amounts of money. I suspect that Elon is doing to Twitter openly what other social media companies do secretly, which is target the maximum amount of toxicity its users are willing to tolerate. More toxicity = more engagement = more time on the platform = more ads served.

But users will only tolerate toxicity up to a point at which they’ll pack up and leave. It’s easy to imagine that there’s some magic “tipping point” amount of toxicity that will cause a platform to implode, but that’s not the case. The quitting point for every user is different, and the only thing that can cause a platform to truly go away is no money. And, as evidenced by 4chan’s continued existence, there’s always some class of user who will tolerate a lot of toxicity.

I suspect that Twitter is following the 80/20 rule: prioritizing the 20% of users who generate the most money for them, and hoping that they can keep enough of the other 80% to stay relevant (or at least net-profitable). Twitter may be losing its cultural stature, but it still has millions of users who for some reason or another, haven’t hit their breaking points; and as long as users are there, advertisers and promoters will be too.

2. If Twitter is crack, Threads is vaping.

If Twitter’s plan is prioritizing its more “spendy” users by leaning hard into emotionally-charged engagement (ie; toxicity), I think what Meta is going for with Threads is trying to be so routine and unexciting that you don’t even realize you’re opening the app. Twitter wants users to obsess over it when they’re not on it. Meta doesn’t want you to think about its apps at all, it wants to integrate itself into your life to the point where you don’t even notice you’re using it.

In other words: Twitter wants to be crack cocaine, Meta wants Threads to be vaping.

Vaping is harmless enough that it won’t suddenly kill you, innocuous and ubiquitous enough that few would openly judge you for using, and addictive enough where you don’t even realize you’re doing it. Something to fill the time that would otherwise be spent oh, I don’t know, thinking I guess.

Threads brands itself as a “sane” alternative to Twitter, but knowing Meta, “sane” likely means “lobotomized”. Like- sure Threads probably won’t hurt people to the degree Twitter is. But is a semi-lucid social media platform drooling out the corner of its mouth really what anybody is asking for?

I’m frequently saying that users should look to what a space is built for before investing their time in it. Was Threads built for conversation or was it built for commerce? I think you know the answer.

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3. Mastodon is so 2002

The thing about shopping malls is that they can only exist when the downtown shopping district of whatever city it’s a suburb of, dies. Shopping malls served as the de-facto town squares —the cultural hubs— of the USA in the 80’s and 90’s because the actual town squares laid abandoned. The reason shopping malls enjoyed massive cultural relevancy in the 80s and 90s, was not because it was an improvement over downtowns, but because it was an improvement over no downtowns.

Developers razed city centers and then built for-profit walkable indoor faux-neighborhoods in the ‘burbs after the moneyed class moved. And that’s exactly what social media companies did to the Internet, which began as free and open, before users were shepherded onto a handful of commercial platforms with the siren song of “connectivity”.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, a certain class of young people pejoratively referred to as “hipsters” began moving to US cities in search of the gritty authenticity they felt was lacking in the safe and sterile malls of the ‘burbs. Most people today associate hipster culture with fancy beer, trendy clothing, and pretentious attitudes. “Hipster” today usually refers to high-income “gentrifiers” of urban areas. But that’s not how it started. At least, not how I remember it…

When I was a young millennial, my friends and I saw the “Hipster” migration as an anti-consumerist movement. We saw young people rejecting commercial social spaces and reclaiming abandoned city squares. “Hipsters” bought their clothes at thrift stores, not malls. They built their own easily repairable “fixie” bikes instead of driving gas-powered cars. They weren’t buying craft beer, they were brewing their own. And they weren’t “gentrifying” in the way it’s usually understood now —by economically displacing people who already live in a city— they were moving to largely abandoned industrial areas, and renovating raw “loft” apartments that used to be commercial factories.

I’m sure I’m romanticizing a little, but as a bored suburban kid, it was exciting to see the big kids trying out a radically different way of living all while making it look cool. But corporate America correctly identified the danger a group of people living happily without them posed. Ever realize how nobody uses the term “yuppie” anymore? It basically referred to the same thing that “hipster” refers to now. So why the new word? The conspiracy-brained part of me can’t help but feel that maybe “yuppie” was intentionally rebranded in an effort to make “not-malls” seem “not-cool” the same way car companies spent a lot to make minivans and station wagons uncool.1

The growth of Mastodon and the “Fediverse” kinda remind me of that punk rock, anti-consumerist, DIY spirit from the turn of the millennium. But instead of beer, people are brewing up organic communities. Due to its decentralized nature, Mastodon-powered platforms can’t be “enshittified”. Corporations can't fight with money something that doesn't want to be monetized. Their only hope is to convince you it’s not cool.

4. Meta’s real competition

Facebook’s pivot to the “metaverse” reminds me of the “new style” of shopping mall we started seeing pop up 3-4 years ago. Regular malls were dying, the story goes, so they tried making themselves more exciting with “immersive experiences” in an effort to lure customers back. It didn’t work for the malls and it’s not working for Meta either.

Threads however, feels like a step back. It’s a new mall built in the old mall style. And I can’t imagine it’ll work. Like I’m sure people are going to go check out the grand opening, buy a cookie, and maybe throw a penny into the fountain. But I don’t think people will generally seek out Threads unless of course, there’s nothing more interesting to be done. Heck- maybe “shopping mall” is the wrong analogy, actually, because I don’t think being a destination is what Meta is even going for. I think they want their apps to be like Walmart. Nobody seeks out a Walmart, they stop at one because it’s there, it’s easy, and it’s good enough. Kinda like Instagram while waiting for the bus.

Meta’s products are sterile, corporate, and uninspiring2. But they don’t need to be a destination, they just need to be available for when users start to feel that itch of boredom and seek out a quick hit of low-stakes algorithmically-sorted content. I don’t even think it’s right to say that Threads is “competing” with Twitter exactly, Twitter’s slow death is just an opportunity for Meta to capture users who might otherwise risk the cosmic horror of sitting alone with their thoughts. Meta’s true competition isn’t Twitter, it’s downtime.

It’s daydreams.

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Epilogue

I’d be shocked, frankly, if Threads can strike the balance nobody else has managed to strike —including Twitter itself— of making short text posts profitable. And don’t think for a second if Threads by some miracle happens to achieve cultural relevancy, that it won’t quickly become “enshittified”. There’s a reason signing up for Threads holds your Instagram account hostage —preventing you from deleting Threads without taking Instagram along— and it’s not because Meta believes it’s a good product people will want long term. Don’t sign up for platforms that won’t let you leave, kids. As Cory Doctorow recently reminded us:

“Meta was able to [grow Threads quickly] because it owns both Threads and Instagram. But Meta does not own the list of people you trust and enjoy enough to follow.

That’s yours.”

There is one potential good thing Threads might do, and that is actually kill Twitter for good because if Twitter can’t turn a profit soon it’ll actually collapse. If the choice for society is between Twitter’s malignant toxicity, and the sterile uninspiring Walmart-style of a platform that apparently is Threads, Threads is probably a step in the right direction. But neither of these sorts of places can function as a digital town square. For that matter neither can BlueSky, Post, Hive Social, or any of the other weird, corporate-owned malls cosplaying as public spaces.

If we truly want the internet to be “sane”, we need to educate ourselves. We need to build and support home-brewed spaces that are for constructive conversation. Nobody outside of the investor class actually needs a “next Twitter” to be popular the same way nobody needed vaping to replace smoking, but someone somewhere, really wanted tons of money so sorry if you got addicted I guess. Do your sanity a favor, don’t subject yourself to more of Zuckerberg’s algorithms. This time won’t be different.

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“Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.”
― Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic

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Commercial social media is like a shopping mall. It’s entirely possible to have a constructive conversation in one, it’s entirely possible to have a fruitful political debate at the food court, but it’s not why the mall is built. It’s not what it’s for. What it’s for is commerce. Anything more is a happy byproduct.

These past two weeks saw some drama on Reddit that, while functionally different than the drama Twitter has been seeing over the past year, spiritually feels quite similar and I think is illustrative of the era we’re living in. A lot of people are questioning what Reddit is for. A lot of people are looking up from their bourbon chicken lo mein and asking each other if this has always been a food court because at one point y’know it really felt like a rec center.

What’s happening on Reddit is ostensibly about API access, which is basically the way third party apps and helper-bots interact with the site. It’s true that changing API access will seriously disrupt functionality, and I get why a heavy Redditor would be upset over it, but idk, somehow the reaction feels different than just annoyance at API changes. I’ve personally noticed more than a few people expressing that they view this as an opportunity to “get clean”, as if their drug dealer got arrested or something. And honestly, good for them! Recognizing that you can never scroll to the end is a hard step.

There have been some pretty funny twists and turns in this story. For example, Reddit started replacing moderators who were keeping their communities private, so many opened back up but only allowed posts about John Oliver, medieval art, or in some cases relaxing their rules about porn (the logic being that Reddit can’t sell ads in NSFW subreddits)1. Moderators are upset, but they’re also having fun. I don’t think Reddit inc is having much fun. From the outside this whole scenario seems to be a massive misunderstanding on the part of Reddit on what exactly makes their platform something people want to contribute to in the first place.

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1: Maybe Don’t Fight the Volunteers Who Run Your Wooden Shoe Machines

“Enshittification” has been a buzzword lately as the big social media platforms try to maximize revenue. It’s one of those things that once you know to look for it, you’ll see it in action everywhere. The original essay by Cory Doctorow is short and absolutely worth a read, but here’s my best summary in three bullet points:

• Platforms attract a large user base by being good to them.

• Once they’re dependent, the platforms squeeze users in order to make it more appealing for businesses.

• When those businesses become dependent, the platforms squeeze them to maximize profits for management and shareholders.

All the big tech platforms have followed this pattern: Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, eBay, Google. They used to be good, then they got less good, now they’re awful for everyone but also the only game in town. What we saw at Reddit this week is the company attempting to fully transition to the second bullet point (favoring businesses over users), and seeing its volunteer moderators (something that doesn’t exist on the other platforms) obstructing, and sometimes actively sabotaging Reddit’s efforts.

The thing with Reddit is that its whole system only “works” because a small percentage of its userbase is willing to provide content moderation services for free that other SocMed companies have to pay for. Facebook for example, is reportedly spending half a billion dollars annually on content moderation; a major savings for Reddit (who somehow isn’t profitable despite turning 18 literally today). In return for their efforts, Reddit has (historically) given moderators freedom to build and shape online communities to meet any vision their heart desires. In the first few years of subreddits existing, Reddit was so moderator-friendly that communities supporting “jailbait”, antisemitism and calls to violence were all given a welcoming home2.

Over time that freedom has been chipped away. And no, I don’t mean that in a “banning intolerance is the same as government censorship” sort of way. Reddit has quite literally taken away the tools moderators have used to shape their unique communities. The first big change I know of was in 2018 when Reddit redesigned their platform to make subreddits more visually homogeneous. The new API changes this month will revoke the ability for mods to utilize many tools (like bots and apps) that assist them with their free labor.

Reddit was good to moderators because moderators built and maintained the myriad communities that attracted users in the first place. Now the company is trying to squeeze its users for a buck, and didn’t seem to realize that some of its users have an ability to throw a wrench into those plans. Reddit moderators aren’t employees. They can’t be compelled to cooperate. They work because they want to. If mods aren’t feeling rewarded for their effort, they simply won’t make one. Or worse (for Reddit, hilarious to us), they’ll make a joke of the very system that makes Reddit a destination at all.

In its attempts to force mods’ complicity in the platform’s enshittification, Reddit is using fewer carrots. But the only stick at their disposal is threatening to fire mods from the jobs they aren’t even getting paid for. And (surprise surprise) it’s not going great.

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2: Rise of The Moderatariat

I sometimes compare Wikipedia to Reddit because both systems only “work” when people who care strongly about the subject matter are willing to volunteer their time. Imagine how quickly Wikipedia would fall apart if Wikimedia Inc, started squeezing contributors for cash. Without a critical mass of people who care, Wikipedia would quickly become overwhelmed with spam and misinformation to the point of uselessness. And surely, in recent years we have seen Reddit’s overall usefulness decline thanks in part to the company’s laissez-faire approach to disinformation, political extremism, and corporate spam. Though (thanks to mods who prioritize authenticity) it’s not yet to a degree extreme enough to keep users away from the site en masse. In fact, Reddit’s decades-old archive of reasonably spam-free discussion threads is currently propping up Google’s increasingly enshittified search business.

Unlike Twitter, Reddit has no aristocracy class of “anchor” users that hold regular users to the platform. On Twitter, famous people stay for the attention and regular users stay for the famous people. That dance has kept Twitter relevant (though apparently also somehow not profitable?) despite the exodus of massive chunks of Twitter’s “cultural middle class” to the Mastodon network since Elon’s takeover last year.

There are celebrities on Reddit. But (outside of r/IAmA) they don’t get much attention, and they’re not why users go there. People go to Reddit for the content. Content made by users, and curated by mods. Some of you might be tempted to call mods the “aristocracy” in this comparison. The CEO himself recently called moderators “the landed gentry”. But I think this demonstrates a massive misunderstanding of who exactly is profiting3 from the moderators’ efforts, and of the motivations that inspire someone to volunteer their time to a for-profit4 company in the first place.

And yes, there are bad moderators. But most of them are dutiful (if idiosyncratic) curator-types who take pride in their efforts. And Reddit has always allowed anyone to create a new subreddit anyway, an escape-hatch for communities who’s moderators’ have become too out of sync with the users. Don’t like how a community is run? Start a new one with blackjack and hookers.

So what’s the escape hatch when Reddit itself finally gets too out of sync?

3: The Future of Mall-Based Conversation Technology

I predict that similarly to Twitter, Reddit’s movers and shakers —its “cultural middle class”— will eventually relocate to the independent “Fediverse” of decentralized social media. Connected websites running on Lemmy and Kbin (think- Mastodon but Reddit-style) have already seen an explosion in popularity despite not being nearly as polished.

Transitioning online discussions away from for-profit shopping malls into spaces designed for constructive conversation is a good thing not just for humanity’s ability to cooperatively solve problems, but for the oft-disregarded mental health of the individuals who’s content contributions power the platforms.

“Small communities that are interoperable” is basically what Reddit is now, and Mastodon’s growth serves as proof people don’t need a centralized CEO or a board of directors shaving pennies off of their users’ sanity to keep a social media network operational. A few people who care about making space for authentic communication is all it takes.

As far as Reddit’s fate is concerned I predict that what will happen to it is the same thing that is happening to Twitter and has already happened to Facebook and frankly, actual shopping malls. The business side of things will churn along divorced from the content which will become ever more generic and culturally irrelevant. The users who stay on Reddit will be of the unadventurous variety, not inclined to make waves or analyze their habits. I shudder to think what kind of spiritually bereft person would choose to moderate on this new Reddit, but I’m sure there’re people out there willing to take out the trash at Steve Huffman’s dying mall because he can’t afford janitors and they were taught that helping is good.

But communities can’t thrive on trash removal alone.

I think- I hope, where this will all end is a saner future wherein the people in charge of facilitating conversations are motivated by something greater than wealth.5 Places we can connect free of commercialism. We’ve just got to get up and go there. Now, who remembers where we parked the car?

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Welcome to Stay Grounded’s quarterly bonus newsletter for premium subscribers. This is a place where I collect all sorts of things that don’t fit in a full essay but are still worth sharing. First of all, apologies to my premium subscribers for the lateness of this one. Life gets in the way sometimes! Click the button below if you’re interested in a premium subscription to help keep me motivated:

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Protip to the free subscribers: I have “7-day premium trials” enabled if you just want to get around the paywall and get to the juicy bits. I won’t be mad. Maybe you’ll even become a convert!

Just curious:

In this Issue:

• A hilarious “whole grain junk food” app

• The preferred way to check Instagram

• An Android app that helps filter unwanted notifications

• The first use of ChatGPT I actually can get behind

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