Several articles caught my eye that were all about a paradigm shift on how we engage with digital platforms and social media. Crucially, they were all about giving names to trends I have been observing.

Enshittification: Naming the rise and demise of platforms

Cory Doctorow coined the term in late 2022, wrote articles and held a DefCon talk this year about the concept. It finally names how I’ve seen the rise and demise of platforms over the years, summarized by Doctorow on Pluralistic:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

It’s free, friendly, open, then it reaches a tipping point where it’s too much garbage content, nonsense ads and bots, and all you want is leave. There’s an example about the enshittification of Amazon, about Google Search, and I could name at least five other platforms where the same has happened in one way or another.

POSSE - Publish (On Your Own) Site, Syndicate Everywhere

The Verge writes about POSSE:

The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms.

This concept is closely tied to enshittification, Doctorow is also quoted by The Verge: If platforms rise and ultimately die, POSSE is the solution. You build your own garden and send postcards to whichever platform is en vogue. In a sense, it circles back to the old days of 5 MB Geocities space filled with “Under Construction” gifs. I decided to build my own POSSE at the suggestion of a friend (thanks!) by opening this blog. It provides a place to indulge in my writing urges and has been liberating in several ways.¹ Who knows, maybe we’ll all be using index sites in a couple of years, internetting like its 1999.

“Fame as we knew it has been obliterated”

This time, it’s a Polygon article whose title I’ve quoted:

As social media followings have ballooned, there are tons of streamers, YouTubers, and TikTokers with sizable followings that you haven’t heard of or that mainstream media isn’t covering. Fame has become fragmented. Gone are the days of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, where everyone knew their names. They commanded global attention and their fame was of a different caliber. […]

“There is no more mass media. That’s the same reason Barbara Walters was a famous journalist because there were only five news channels or whatever to watch so the people on those channels inherently had a larger audience,” says Taylor Lorenz, Washington Post columnist and author of internet culture book Extremely Online. “People have more access to famous people now than ever. Famous people used to be this elite separate group; they didn’t have to be beholden to their audiences almost at all.”

“Huh. Interesting. Oh. True!” was my initial reaction. Platforms gave rise to smaller, interest-focused communities and subcultures. If the public sphere splits up into smaller communities, the article’s author Shannon Liao describes what happens to fame. Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé - they have been stars for an eternity and fill stadiums. Who is the star of today? How many influencers do you know beyond their target audience? Fame is now concentrated on platforms, fragmented into subcultures and subgroups, and their stars still amass enough of a fan base to make ends meet. Maybe Pewdiepie was the last of its cross-platform, public-sphere kind, a phenomenon of the 2010s. And with the demise of Twitter a stupid single letter The Birdsite, it feels like one of the big digital public spheres has also been obliterated.

Side note: I hope this fragmentation into smaller communities will finally put an end to the “WHAT, you really don’t know X?!” questions. I have faced such questions in tech, one of the worst, most entitled gate-keeping reactions possible. It’s just another subculture, another sphere that might not have overlapped with yours. “WHAT, you really don’t know Pu Songling?! Wait, never heard of the Great Leap Forward?! O-M-G.” My cultural spheres and communities may not overlap with yours, but that’s not a reason to keep others out. My hopes are possibly in vain, but a woman can hope.²

Image source: “the transformation of the internet into smaller subgroups and communities, an entangled net”, Nightcafe / SDXL 1.0

Last modified on 2023-11-11