All your memes will come true

We found a problem for the cure.

Photo by Krisana Nakajo on Unsplash

For whichever iteration of social media we’re in right now, one I don’t care for all that much, at least this can be said: the memes are good.

But they’re a little too good.

Being wistful for a different era of social media — the golden age of Twitter, circa 2010 to maybe 2015 — makes me like an old man yelling at a cloud, since that was 500 years ago in Modern Internet time, but it really was good in a different way.

It was silly and serious. It was spontaneous. It was a bunch of weirdos saying things that came unfiltered out of their strange brains, and damn if it didn’t connect a lot of those weirdos together. And it was the finest sports bar in America.

At least the sports bar part is still sort of true. Being on Twitter, which I still can’t bring myself to call X, eventually became tediously necessary more than something to look forward to, and now it’s even worse. But nothing has really taken its place so we’re all still standing around in the club hoping a song we like will come on soon.

My main beef isn’t even that social media has become political, polarized and mean. That was inevitable.

The issue here is the seemingly more benign content being pumped out by the clout-chasing, algorithm-gaming set that, for a lack of a better word, fall under the collective category of “influencers.”

Content creators making good things from an unconventional route will always have my respect. There is still plenty of that across multiple platforms, and the process of genuine audience building — resulting sometimes in a career or even fame — that can come from it strikes me as delightfully meritocratic, part of an updated version of the American Dream.

The overwhelming amount of empty calorie junk that clutters our feeds, on the other hand, is a pox on our attention spans and time.

It’s the cheapest form of culture combined with the darkest part of data.

You need to scroll enough to know the difference, and admittedly I have done my inadvertent homework. On many occasions, I have opted into my feed on Twitter or Instagram to post or see something specific, only to find myself sucked into the scrolling vortex of pet videos, viral remixes and engagement tricks.

The next thing you know, many minutes (hours?) are gone. Maybe you’ll unearth a few shareable treasures within a mountain of garbage, but mostly you’ll just be proving that you are the product.

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote recently of this phenomenon under the headline, “The Junkification of American Life.” A key passage:

The result is we’re now in a culture in which we want worse things — the cheap hit over the long flourishing. You reach for immediate gratification, but it fails to satisfy. It just puts you on a hamster wheel of looking for the next mild stimulus and pretty soon you’re in the land of addiction and junk food, you just keep scrolling, you just keep snacking.

Brooks took a broad view and applied this phenomenon to many facets of modern culture, including social media.

If we can narrow back in on social media, we can identify the specific problem with its current state.

Platforms have been around long enough now that they have gone through various cycles. The early part of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc., was mostly genuine. Intelligent and creative users were attracted to each other. They made and shared content that inspired others to think and create differently. And the platforms themselves were more interested in growing audience than cashing in on that audience.

Things began to change a handful of years ago as the business side of platforms became more scrutinized and data collection became more refined. Feeds became less of a curation of what users had chosen and more of a collection of bits and pieces the platforms were elevating because they were 1) popular or 2) similar to other things with which we had already engaged.

The likes and comments on posts told both creators and platforms what was working, so they just made and promoted more of it. Or, in the worst cases, content pirates took existing content and stole it outright as their own.

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched a “viral” video, only to 1) have a vague sense that I have seen it before, but long enough in the past that I don’t specifically remember and/or 2) scrolled to the comments and seen a battle over intellectual theft or credit.

Creators figured out they could game the system by essentially reverse-engineering their content. We suddenly knew the cure. We just needed to invent a problem so we could use it.

“Influencer” became a job title once they realized all their memes could come true.

Like Brooks, I find this a broader problem in a lot of facets of society: Political messages are sculpted with victorious outcomes instead of virtuous processes in mind. Sports are analyzed and number crunched to death until seemingly every NFL play is a 6-yard pass, every NBA possession ends in a three-pointer or shot at the rim and every at-bat in baseball ends with a walk, strikeout or home run.

It’s not creative imitation; it’s artistic strangulation. Evolution stagnates.

Narrowing the focus back to the platforms that rule so much of our time, I find myself coming back to this Wired piece about TikTok and an even coarser word for what Brooks is describing.

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. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

If this is a problem now, in what one imagines are the early stages of artificial intelligence, it’s hard to be optimistic about where our creative minds and the platforms that host them are heading.

It’s worth trying to engage with or create content that is driven by end goals over process, but I also realize that my preference for avoiding endless recommendations might be a personality bug more than a cultural feature.

Knowing there’s no turning back is one thing. Understanding how hard it is to turn away is another.