4 min read

The feed is working as intended

I've lived a lot of my life online, and still do. I'm writing this up as a bit of a therapy exercise but also because I think it's an issue not receiving much attention whilst getting worse. My generation was the first to be passively radicalised by recommendation algorithms. Take that millennials! xP

1 - Past

The NYT did a good piece on Caleb Cain, and the YouTube radicalisation pipeline that existed in the 2010s: The Making of a YouTube Radical

I've been on YouTube since 2011, but it was in 2014 that I began to fall down the rabbit hole, right around when Gamergate emerged. This was a semi-coordinated harassment campaign aimed mostly at women in the gaming industry that branded itself as a movement for Ethics in Video Game Journalism. It wasn't really. There's good writing on it that I won't rehash, but a lot of young men (including me) got swept up in it. The right-wing noticed this audience, and recommendation algorithms did the rest.

The content drifted, gradually, from gaming into politics, and then away from gaming entirely. In short, feminism was the real problem, actually no... It's political correctness! … Actually immigration is bad, and this means that Donald Trump should be president? For some people the radicalisation can continue past that into the alt-right and beyond. Fortunately I stopped at insufferable 16-year-old libertarian.

finally, someone is saying it (/s)

I didn't notice radicalisation happening at the time. I got bullied at school, and a lot of my social life already existed through a screen. On one tab I was consuming increasingly right-wing content, on another I was questioning my sexuality, future, and exploring queer and furry communities, whilst laughing at them and calling them cringe to my friends.

The politics gave me somewhere to belong. It was nice to feel certain about things, with explanations and villains to blame. In retrospect, a substantial amount of it was probably self-hatred. I needed to feel like I wasn't one of them, that I was normal and on the right side of the joke. Cruelty and punching down were part of the appeal, and it gave me somewhere to direct feelings I didn't accept or have words for yet.

For me, the cracks were starting to show by 2017. Climate change denial was probably the first thing that made me genuinely question the whole worldview. It became hard to ignore that the talking heads I trusted were straightforwardly wrong, and motivated to be. The biggest change for me was just being around people IRL more. I went to university and found friends I could be myself around, which ironically meant I was suddenly surrounded by the woke libs I was supposed to hate.

i luv my frens :)
- Me

I'm more settled now. I definitely lean left, but I'm sceptical of ideology and find a lot of online discourse exhausting and/or pointless. Since then it feels like everything has just accelerated.

2 - Present

Platforms/attention economy

Social media was initially built around showing you posts from your friends and people/pages/interests you followed. In the mid-2010s, platforms worked out that this was less engaging/profitable than letting an algorithm decide for you. The enshittification begins.

TikTok was the logical conclusion of this - An infinite scrolling video feed you have no control over, optimising to keeping you glued to the screen. The attention economy was hot and quickly other platforms realised this was the way - Facebook Reels shudder, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, probably your banking app eventually amirite! ;'D

Moderation

The next shift was in moderation. The resources were never there, and increasingly the incentive isn't either. Outrage drives engagement, and engagement is the only metric that matters when attention is what companies are competing for. That calculation has become a lot more naked lately - The alignment between Silicon Valley and the Trump admin shows companies reading the way the wind is blowing. Meta dropped its fact-checking programme and Twitter became a nazi infested sewer bought over by Elon "Rhino Ket" Musk.

Outside of the major platforms, an alternative network of sites like Kick have sprung up, funded by cryptocurrency and gambling sites that route around payment providers which forced bigger platforms to at least pretend they cared about content safety.

Alt-platforms

This is where the really horrid stuff lives. Around it has grown an entire clipping industrial complex - Thousands of teenagers cutting and repackaging the craziest moments from streamers like Clavicular and scattering them across YouTube, Twitter and TikTok for view-based commissions. Each clip is a little advertisement for the streamer and a little hit of outrage for the viewer. The moderation barrier turns out not to matter much when millions of clips arrive from thousands of accounts.

a $19.9M market cap for what exactly

The logical endpoint of this model is something like Chud The Builder: an IRL streamer who earns a living wandering around armed with a pistol, yelling racial slurs at strangers while a live chat places crypto bets on how each encounter will play out. It's a spectator sport built around manufactured conflict with real people who have no idea they're part of a broadcast. Recently one of these confrontations ended with him shooting someone who attacked him in the street.

TODO..........

  • Hypernormalisation
  • Post-irony/detatchment
  • Lonely powerless people
  • Neoliberalism/maggie thatcher tie in

Who's benefitting

  • Orange man AI military clips Iran
  • Social media zucc
  • Dark money
  • Why do they want this

What now?

  • How to help yourself
  • How to stop this
  • Idk
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