Writing about the Internet, a Retrospective
The monkey's paw of social theory.
For approximately five years, from 2011 to 2016 I wrote a blog post once a week for Cyborgology, a group project aimed at theorizing a burgeoning digital society. It was a weird time to write on that topic. The field was filled with much more famous people making contradictory, dubious distinctions between the things we did on computers and phones being “not real” and inconsequential while everything else was “real” and substantive. Sherry Turkle was a favorite punching bag, usually because her corporate flavor of sociology was so unserious. I don’t feel like looking up the exact quote but I remember in one of her books (Probably The Flight from Conversation) she claimed that Starbucks’ requirement that its baristas engage in nerfed small talk with customers was somehow a more authentic human connection than, say, posting a picture of you and your friends on Instagram. It was such a deeply strange argument that it made it hard to make a careful counter-argument.
Much of our writing was pointing out how silly these online/offline social behavior arguments were. Not because there weren’t substantive differences but because the ones that filled bookstore shelves and magazine columns were focused wholly on the idea that most people were rubes. Smart, discerning types could escape this fate through a self-imposed media dietary regimen that would sharpen the mind and nourish the spirit. They didn’t recognize how subtle the control was. How these technologies were addictive not just because of their design but because they’d situated themselves between humans and what mattered in life. Give a bunch of lonely, over-worked people a device that offers a poor facsimile of hanging out and they’ll pick it over never hanging out. Then you can start manipulating them to figure out how to come back for the mediation, rather than the person at the other end.
And somehow those arguments would always get twisted into some strange accusation of silicon valley boosterism— that we were somehow romanticizing a life lived online. These old media types didn’t want to hear that control could come from giving people something they needed and wanted. In some ways the disagreement could be couched in who the victims of social media’s reality-warping affordances were: they said it was the young, shallow, and stupid. We said it would be everyone, eventually. It was endlessly frustrating to call something a honeypot only be told that you were in the pocket of big honey. Maybe it was all the Foucault that we referenced that made it hard to understand —looking back on it that was probably a problem— but I thought we were making a prescient, simple argument.
Today, I’m not sure if there’s much more to say about the Internet that goes beyond enshitification, a useful term that Cory Doctrow came up with to describe how platforms go from useful and fun to frustrating necessities:
Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
Facebook, flush with cash in 2007, starts collecting college-age kids at a rapid clip. Then they started locking in media companies and advertisers (those are the suppliers) to push even more content that could be mixed in with all your friends. This was, at the time, controversial and kind of annoying. Most people were brought through the cycle like a cat on a leash: stubborn reticence followed by bouts of spastic lashing out.
Nevertheless here we are. I don’t think I need to explain exactly how enshitification presents itself on Facebook today. If you still have access to the site you know what its like. What’s alarming is how fast the enshitification cycle is now. Facebook took the better part of a decade. Etsy a little less. TikTok only took a few years before it cranked up the ads and lost much of its charm.
If you’d asked me back in 2014 what I’d hoped my professional writing would accomplish I probably would have said I wanted to win this intellectual fight. And we did, sooner than I thought and in a monkey’s paw fashion. It wasn’t a coincidence that Cyborgology lost its edge in 2016. Most of us had left graduate school in one way or another and that certainly changed our time commitments, but that whole scene sort of fell off after Trump won the presidency. In a sense his ascendance was confirmation of everything we’d been saying: that online sociality was just as consequential and rich as the rest of the world, but there’s a radical ambivalence to this truth. To say as much isn’t a celebration of technology, it is a warning.
The fear and uncertainty that came with that moment closed the old debate and immediately opened another: reform or revolution? The industry had metabolized a lot of our critiques, particularly around issues of representation and accessibility, with all the subtly and good faith that their AI bots treat language and truth. The backlash to that from the right is even worse and more dangerous. The contradictions are now clear: these companies do best in a highly politicized, raucous social milieu but it is precisely the movements that emerge from that environment that seek to undo these companies. Whether its Elon Musk swallowing Twitter whole, liberal governments demanding oversight, or a thousand different activists pulling the terms of service every which way, this feels like one of those “the center cannot hold” moments.