chat

(Hey, sorry, I wrote way more than I had planned to.)

Sorta? 'Online' is just kinda where most information is. The problem isn't really the internet or being on it too much, although I guess screens are bad for your eyes. I think the thing you're picking up on gets referred to as 'human attention as a capitalist frontier' in that attention-based social media and advertising companies make money through views. So the strategy for all of them is to be as reflexive and 'addictive' as possible.

Kinda in the way that you open your phone and your thumb reflexively clicks on some app (hexbear maybe?, lol). Or that when you go on your computer you open a web browser (cause like what actually is a computer for) and you just go to some website as a page to look at because the alternative is about:blank or a homepage, etc. Modern (but also non-modern) capitalism puts a lot of pressure on time because of efficiency and everything, so it makes lots of people uneasy to sit idly for basically any prolonged period of time (like in line or on the train). Even more so if they're in view of other people (please do not perceive me xD <3) . There's a pretty common response to 'always on they damn phone' which is a picture of a bunch of people on a train reading newspapers, but it really misses the point. Being 'online' all the time is an attempt to blur capitalist-productivity mindsets with leisure and extend the accessibility of what marketers refer to as "content".

So the reflexive, online, social media content becomes accessible at almost every moment of our waking lives, which allows an outlet for the capitalist-productivity anxiety. Scrolling / Doomscrolling doesn't really do anything to address the underlying anxiety, partially because most content exists outside of oneself, but more importantly the underlying structure of social media, especially capitalist social media is arranged to monopolize human attention. For an extreme example, platforms encourage and push conspiracy content because the paranoia it creates makes it difficult to ignore and there is an infinite wellspring of further details for people to scroll through and click on or whatever. But it's not even really the 'content' itself that makes people interact with these platforms in this way. There are a lot of systems decisions that are way more important. The easiest example is asking "How often is there something new here?" For instagram, twitter, reddit, tik tok, etc, etc, etc, the desired corporate answer is: every few minutes. And they all follow similar-ish ways to make that happen. Lots of platforms just mark things as 'read' when they're rendered then save an index of 'read' content as a cookie (essentially).

A person who checked their phone 10m ago and scrolled instagram (because you're gonna check your phone and just look at the time? no that's silly there's content on there.) Well, yeah, they go and re-check instagram and it shows different content than the previous stuff because if there wasn't they wouldn't need to check, because the new-ness will make it seem as though their feeds are moving fast, because new stuff is on there, because the world is moving fast, because there's a lot to see, because every moment someone you follow is posting something, and because the anxiety of capitalist efficiency requires it. Also - this is kinda an aside, but I'm already writing this giant wall of text so I might as well - dating apps have extremely manipulative algorithms to keep people on the app as long as possible. Essentially they use like/dislike ratios to feed based on the variance of average dwell time.

If it's any consolation, the monetization and advertising angle of this may not actually work profitably or even at all. I'm not really sure what the future is for these platforms are when capitalists admit that this kind of monetization doesn't work, but they might just be head-in-the-sand forever because it's kinda a superstructure-superstructure interaction. A concession that these kinds of platforms are unprofitable or just e-waste can't really happen while it's still the economic foundation of like quite a few countries. So yeah, I guess it depends if capitalism wants to have a new artificial frontier, which was sorta trying to be crypto, but that seems kinda out, so idk. Maybe it'll be something more nightmarish like imagination lol.