23 December

Sometimes it just takes a moment to pause and reflect. I don’t transact personal life much on here, because I think it’s profoundly unhealthy that these platforms have captured our social lives. Increasingly all of our lives is being transacted in one way or another, through these platforms. Personal, political, economic. For example sharing pictures of Christmas goings on in my life. Seems the most innocent, happy and fun thing to be sharing here, right? That’s the bait and switch. These are not public service platforms. They’re businesses. The bait was to offer us all a place to socially connect. The switch is to then get us all locked in here, with all of our family and friends, becoming the venue we create our sense of community. And then to progressively monetise those connections. And not just by flooding us all with ads every time we mention anything at all, it’s much more sinister than that. The deepest mechanism here is to generate likes and traffic by creating conflict. To tribalise all of our friends and families into different teams, on every public issue. And then to have those teams battle here, which generates lots of clicks, and therefore revenue for the platforms. It’s how people create status, and therefore identity. This is what the term ‘enshittification’ means. To first capture our entire lives, and then to progressively ‘enshittify’ those social relationships in favour of one thing only. Revenue and influence, for platform owners. It’s Australia’s word of the year. Thought is not an Australian activity to any great degree, so I doubt many will make the connection, and will continue to use these platforms as an open window into the most intimate part of their lives. Posing and posturing, curating online personas in the relentless status games/team sports. These platforms are poker machines for status, and the revenue all goes one way only. (Not to us.) Society is not ‘more divided’ than ever. It’s just infected by social media platforms. That division is the status games, the revenue algorithms.