Cory Doctorow

If you want to get shown to your own subscribers, much less recommended to a user who hasn't subscribed to you yet.

And if you put a link back to your own website, they won't show it to anyone because that might be a, quote, malicious link.

Advertisers see prices go way up.

They see ad targeting fidelity go through the floor.

Ad fraud explodes.

When Procter & Gamble in 2017 zeroed out its surveillance advertising budget with the platforms called programmatic advertising, they saw a 0% drop in sales because all $200 million was just disappearing down the fraud hole.

So the publishers and advertisers are getting a bad beat.

But so are we.

The amount of stuff in our feed that we've asked to see has dwindled to almost nothing.

And what's being filled in that void is stuff that people are being charged billions of dollars for that they're getting ripped off on too.

Now you get to this stage that they've been shooting for, this equilibrium where all the available value has been harvested.

But it's very brittle, this equilibrium, because you get one live stream mass shooting or Cambridge Analytica scandal, people bolt for the exits, shareholders pound the company's stock, and the founders and the executives, they panic.

Although being technical people, they have a technical term, they call it pivoting.

And so Mark Zuckerberg arises from his sarcophagus one morning and says, you know, hearken unto me, brothers and sisters, for I've had a vision.

I know that I told you that your future would consist of arguing with your most racist uncle using this primitive text interface that I created to non-consensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergraduates.

However, in this vision, I have realized that the true future is one in which I transform you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so that I can imprison you in a virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old dystopian, cyberpunk, satirical novel that I call the metaverse.

And that's the final stage of machinerication.

The platform is now a giant pile of shit.

So now you're getting into the theory part of it, right?

Not the descriptive part.