Self Sabotage in the Post-Enshittification Era

We blew it. Goodnight, man.

If you want to know what I’m like, the story about me that I think is most illustrative is from back when I was mostly a poet. I used to write a short column in a Brighton free paper called The New Insight which was supposed to run next to the live literature listings and draw attention to the highlights with short previews.

Because I thought I was the new T.S. Eliot and my friend David was the new Ezra Pound, I believed it was my sacred duty to use this column to be as unpleasant as I possibly could be about harmless local promoters trying to put on friendly poetry readings.

This seemed very righteous and important at the time and, honestly, while I wouldn’t dream of doing this today, I harbor a secret suspicion that I was right then and am wrong now. I’m in favour of rigorously exacting standards in barely attended fringe entertainment - it’s immoral not to take things you are doing incredibly seriously while you are doing them, just as it’s equally immoral to take them at all seriously once they are finished: Hold on tightly, let go lightly as Clive Owen says in a film.

Anyway, because I was supposed to be making poetry and associated activities work as a proper career, I decided to get into a tough negotiation with the editor who had given me the column to write. After a lot of back and forth and determined career boy-ing on my part it was settled that, unlike the majority of columnists who were doing it for the exposure, I would receive £25 for my column each month: a handsome sum, enough to pay for a whole fundamentalist poetry night’s worth of A4 posters and fliers made on the duplo machine at the unemployed centre in Hanover.

I was extremely proud of having achieved this feat of boardroom triumph and continued writing my horrible little column for another three years - in which time I never once got round to sending in an invoice and consequently never actually got paid at all.

I was a gifted child, can you tell?

At first it was awkward and a bit rude and too much to focus on, then it was a little late and thus even harder to phrase, then it was very late, then it was more than one invoice - unexplainable. Eventually it was too much money to ask for in one go, £50, £75, 100 of the Queen’s English pounds - a total impossibility. In the end the newspaper ceased to exist and much as I loved writing for it, it was a bit of a relief. There would be no ghastly invoicing now.

That’s what I’m like. Hi.

There is a discoverability crisis in the production of independent media. Ask anyone who has embraced DIY as the only respectable approach to selling art, writing or music in the 2st century. The house that Web 2.0 built - the opportunity it offered for speaking directly to an ever growing audience - is collapsing.

Corey Doctorow’s Enshittification has become a well known concept now. The argument that platforms initially offer products and services at a loss to attract users, then shift costs to suppliers, and finally prioritize profits for shareholders at the expense of user experience once both users and suppliers are locked in is barely disputable. Enshittification leads to declining quality as platforms become monopolies, making it hard for users and suppliers to leave - despite available alternatives - while simultaneously refusing to serve the content that users actually want.

In simple terms: when a platform starts it is doing everything it can to gain users.

It prioritizes genuinely interesting content, shows users new art they hadn’t known they’d like and makes it easy for them to share and discuss it with their friends.

Once it has enough users, the platform has a product it can sell to people who make things so it starts to charge artists for better access to the audience the platform has captured - that’s OK though, because the advertising rates are a good deal. You don’t pay very much but you are guaranteed to get the work you want to show people in front of people who want to see it. A platform that sells users to creators is still functional.

The problem comes when the platform becomes the only way to reach those users - a de facto monopoly - and stops trying to serve advertisers and starts down a spiral of endless self-perpetuation. It no longer shows the content artists want to show to the people who want to see it - it starts showing them shit instead. It does this because the algorithm that decides which content is shown is better at guessing what people will click on - generating abstract revenue for the platform - but much, much worse at guessing what will make people enjoy their experience in the long term.

Obviously this is shit for the user who eventually wanders off and finds something else to scroll - but it is doubly shit for the creators who cut their ties to the teats of Mammon in order to bypass the demonic old twentieth century copy-making industries and connect directly with the people who liked their creations. Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube - the web 2.0 behemoths just don’t show your content to many people any more. They show it to people you interact with anyway but they don’t know the difference between spam and the huge novel announcement page that you’ve been working on for a year. They know that some dribble about the differences between American and British tea-drinking habits will provoke a great big comment thread and possibly a war whereas your album pre-order link will provoke some clicks away from the platform and then who cares.

Paying doesn’t work either - the numbers you can reach that way are literally decimated - a tenth of what they were. And even if users see your ads, they may as well be ads from Peter warning about wolves - people have switched off to protect themselves from the deluge.

We are now beyond even this sorry state of affairs. Web 2 is now in the era of POST-ENSHITTIFICATION.

This doesn’t have so singular a cause - the new issues are to do with fragmentation as audiences splinter and retreat to gated communities on Discord, uncanny twitter clones, extremist pressure cookers defined by their opposition to the ‘mainstream’, this place and, you know, real life. They are to do with TikTok and the death of the follower as a concept altogether. They are to do with echo-chamberisation and political polarisation and the increasing number of geopolitical and identitarian issues which are assumed to have only one valid side (though without much clarity on which of the evident two sides that might be)¹.

Increasingly though, a major plank in the post-enshittification creator dystopia is dysfunctional, advertiser-driven content moderation.

This is one of those problems that it’s really hard to blame anyone for - it seems almost and inevitable consequence of the situation we find ourselves in and it’s hard to image a solution that involves finding someone to blame and throwing them out of a window. This makes it difficult.

But - there was an issue. Web 2 platforms were so big and so ubiquitous that anyone colud join them and being shut out from them didn’t feel like being denied access to a pub - it felt like a genuine human rights violation. These services had moved on from feeling like software, passed through feeling like places and had started to feel like essential public services. Users were drawn into social platforms as a literal replacement for society and once the pendulum swung away from them, past advertisers and into the era of self-perpetuation (helped along by the pandemic) we found that much of the society we’d abandoned had withered in our absence. These platforms had monopolised our civil existence.

Whatever. I don’t buy nostalgia - people chose. There’s no real reason to say that the old society where you bumped into Janet in BHS and found out about her holidays and children was intrinsically better than this one where if you do bump into Janet you already know all about Janet’s daughter’s diagnostic pathway and have seen photos of every single meal that Janet ate in Xanthi last month and have very little left to say to her until she reveals that she’s just released a 4 CD box-set of ambient electronica that Facebbok decided not to show you because the post had a link in it. Whatever. BHS was also a construct - we build houses and live in them.

But, as a consequence of monopolising society, platform landlords were obliged to embody the roles that the rulers of societies are obliged to take on if they want their societies to function well enough that the society doesn’t end up hanging them from a lamp-post. So they had to develop rules of governance and processes for the mass moderation of content.

This feels like a simple problem - and it is treated like a simple problem by angry people - but, of course, it is really an impossible one. There are far too many people on Facebook for any company, no matter how flush, to check what they are saying with human eyes.

You could curate lists of people you trust based on time served and a hnadful of their output - but what about if they get hacked? or go mad? What if people accuse you of playing favourites? or political bias? it’s unworkable.

You could rely on community standards and only look at content when it is reported - this was the model for ages - but what about brigading? mass reporting by political interests? the sheer number of reports soon spirals to the point where it’s only slight more feasible than checking everything.

So you end up using some kind of automated system. The platforms like to claim that the automated systems they’ve come up with are tremendously sophisticated and intelligent - but as they obviously don’t work at all, there is reason to doubt this.

Remember when I told you what I am like? If you do, you’ll see that it makes sense that, during this discoverability crisis I decided to call my new album Avenue QAnon - a title which was absolutely guaranteed to make the situation worse. I know that. The will to self-defeat is a drive far too powerful to resist.

And obviously, since launching our pre-order campaign we have run right smack into Facebook’s tremendously sophisticated moderation algorithm which has deleted all of our posts with the link in and is treating other people who share it like miscreants. I submitted appeals, but I imagine this is like pressing the button at a zebra crossing next to a junction where the lights regularly change anwyay.

Needless to say, the album is not Pro-QAnon. It’s about QAnon - the exceptionally significant belief system that millions of people subscribe to and that forms a siignificant part of the impetus behind the success of one of the two candidates in a major world election happening very soon. I’m not messianically delusional enough this month to imagine that listening to it will convince anyone of anything - but it is part of a conversation that it is important for society to have. This much, at least, would be obvious to any human observer honestly looking at it for more than a minute or two: the satirical intent is not especially subtle.

This is interesting for two reasons.

1. It is another good example of What I Am Like.

2. It suggests that the tremendously sophisticated algorithm is just a list of words you can’t say and that when you say them your post gets deleted.

There are consequences to this.

The first and most teeth-grating is the emergence of a kind of cowardly YouTube polari where commentators earnestly describe pdf files unaliving themselves with pew-pews having been convicted of the r-word during the panini - all in order to avoid using words known to trigger automated demonetisation.

It’s an infantilising reductio ad absurdam and just absolutely not an appropriate way for important thoughts to be expressed in an advanced civilisation. There’s something hauntologically eastern bloc about it - operating at a basic level of deceptive corruption just to navigate the contradiction and senselessness of the economic paradigm. It comes from the same place as the ludicrous but widely accepted idea that asterisks can somehow sanitize a word - as if it was the letters themselves that were offending people.

I don’t want my album to be called Avenue Q***n. People might think was called Avenue Queen! Or Avenue Quorn - a misconceived spiritual sequel to Meat Is Murder. Why should I? I, like everyone, have something I want to say and I shouldn’t have to trick my way into having it available for hearing, no one should.

Obviously for people who DO want to spread QAnon theories - they can just call them something else and be fine. They can go to one of the competing echo chambers. The watchmen of the post-enshittification monoploy are simply not fit for purpose - it’s all collateral and no damage.

I don’t know what we do about it. My approach is to make it worse on purpose - but that won’t do. Probably the way it plays out is that these things are only discussed by people who have the backing of large publishing corporations and media conglomerates - a hachette audiobook on QAnon isn’t going to get shadowbanned or deleted. But that’s such a shame, and such a waste of Web 2’s promise. We were supposed to be freed from the need to filter ourselves through the digestive system of Mammon. It’s just a terrible, terrible pity that it ended up like this.

I’m always going back to the ending of Easy Rider. I usually use it to describe what happened when musicians were too confused, stupid and lazy to seize the initiative of the piracy era and ended up with the privateer ‘solution’ dumped on them by spotify - but it applies here too: we blew it. We blew it.

that link again is https://avenueqanon.indelicates.xyz - you should check out my new record, it’s THE CRAZY TRUTH that THEY don’t want you to HEAR.

1. Some of these issues almost certainly do have a right side, but the success of anathematisation as a tactic in the early culture wars has spread, imho, to realms where it does not belong.