A Utopia Surrounded by Rubbish

Japanese-Americans dumping garbage. Oregon, 1942 | Russell Lee, Library of Congress | Public domain

The expression “everything was better in the past” often exudes a certain air of conservativism, but when applied to today’s Internet, it makes perfect sense. Anyone who was online during the early days of the World Wide Web knows that during recent years, the experience has become very different… and generally far worse. This is counter-intuitive when you consider the advances in technology (which allow us to do so much more online than we did back then), but it makes sense when you take a closer look.

In the last few years, the Internet has filled up with sponsored content, usually produced automatically based on key terms or generated around popular trends. If we do a Google search, for example, the first results that appear are normally reserved for ads, which almost never respond to our query, while further down we find websites with titles that seem to match what we’re interested in, but after clicking and scrolling through paragraphs and paragraphs of redundant content, written to satisfy algorithmic designs, they never deliver on their promise.

To make matters worse, sponsored pages are sometimes fronts for scams in the form of clones of official bank, ticket or credit card sites designed to steal our personal data.

On the social media platforms, the great cathedrals of Web 2.0, things are no better. Since it was bought by Elon Musk, Twitter has not only changed name, but it has become a sort of digital Wild West where anyone can spread disinformation or hate speech without the platform taking any action. In fact, quite the opposite happens – in order to achieve greater visibility and relevance, many people post outrageous ideas with the aim of emboldening like-minded users and triggering detractors. If we add to that Musk’s new premium user policy (where you get a blue tick and a bigger audience for posts if you pay a monthly subscription), achieving engagement, for good reasons or for bad, becomes tempting from a monetary point of view, as it offers financial returns.

In a nutshell – spouting nonsense has become big business on today’s web.

Instagram and Facebook have been going in a similar direction for some time now. Increasingly focused on introducing ads or trending topics in feeds, even if the user doesn’t follow related accounts, Meta networks have become a shadow of what they initially were. On top of all this, the boom in generative AI can drive forward these aims, like in the case of software-generated images made for the purpose of engagement farming, i.e. obtaining high levels of interaction from fake photographs.

In the case of both X and the two Meta platforms, the algorithm sets the directives, sometimes justified in the name of an elastic and questionable freedom of expression.

What’s going on with the Internet? Among other things, the major companies in the online world need to redesign their business models. The crossroads seems to lie somewhere between money and manipulation – either we pay for quality content (platform subscriptions, news site paywalls) or we keep content free in exchange for our attention, which is increasingly altered by sensationalist and perishable material. We should have sensed this years ago, when we set up our Facebook accounts and the homepage said “It’s free (and always will be).” The business was our time.

The writer and activist Cory Doctorow created a term to describe this stage of the Internet – “enshittification,” which explains the process of decay so clearly that it was even chosen as the 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The concept, coined in November 2022, alludes to a cycle that social networks go through, consisting of a first stage in which they’re attractive to users, who build a community there and create content; then a second stage of attracting advertisers, even at the cost of degrading the user experience; and a third stage, which is detrimental to both clients and users, while the platform keeps what is valuable – our data.

In the manner of a coda, death finally comes, prompted by shareholders who demand returns on their investments and who, seeing the lack of auspicious results, jump the boat. It’s similar to how a ghost town is made – the inhabitants leave when the things that made it attractive and habitable have ceased to exist.

Although the neologism “enshittification” refers to the world of digital platforms (from social media to streaming and e-commerce services), it can also be applied to other industries, such as journalism, which is currently trying to survive on the web after a clickbait-addicted maximalist stage that focused on a superabundance of low-quality content with the intention of capturing users of Meta and Alphabet services. All of these were survival strategies, but they damaged the prestige of even the most serious media outlets.

The 2023 novel Contenido by Carlo Padial reflects this moment of enshittification through a contributor to Zenfire, a media outlet aimed at millennials and focused on video content, which operates more along the lines of a start-up than according to the logic of a traditional newsroom, and which is run by Israel de la Plata, a CEO with outlandish behaviour. After its videos obtain millions of views, the site loses almost all its capital (both symbolic and economic) due to a change in Facebook’s algorithm, until then its greatest ally, which has decided to show less media content in users’ feeds and more content from other users. “The important thing was to live in a permanent state of novelty. Israel was the human embodiment of the Internet, and he was hungry for novelty,” the narrator says at one point about Zenfire’s head, in what makes a good summary of the current state of affairs on the Internet – everything has to be new and rapidly consumable.

One of the consequences of this phase of the Internet is that those who grew up using it in a different way, one oriented more towards discovering information of interest than mere light entertainment, no longer find many reasons to defend it, worried as they are by its current phase of ephemerous content.

“Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago,” wrote journalist Kyle Chayka last October in The New Yorker, in a column whose title seems to describe the mood of the times: Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore. “In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems.”

Earlier this year, Doctorow published a new article in the Financial Times, in which he describes how the problem is getting worse, to the point that we are now entering an “Enshittocene” due to the fact that independent enterprises are finding it increasingly difficult to stand out or compete against the giants. “Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with ‘predatory pricing’ that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold,” says the activist.

At this point, it’s worth asking whether there’s a way out of this labyrinth. One way could be to escape from the top – to delete our social media profiles and reject the tyranny of smartphones. However, digital disconnection is a privilege that very few people can afford, as many of us depend on the big platforms to survive, whether to sell products or services through social media or to give our business visibility on geolocation apps.

As the philosopher and video essayist Alba Lafarga pointed out in this very blog, “The capitalisation of disconnection and minimalism make us see that the right to disconnect is not recognised for everyone, and it becomes clear that it is, in fact, a privilege for many. What’s more, disconnection is sold to us as an essential break to recharge our batteries before getting back into the system; simple tools in the service of productivity that will never provide a solution to the basic problem of the attention economy.”

Other authors speak of the Fediverse, based on free software, in reference to an open federation of servers that allows content to be published on the web, both on websites and social media platforms, regardless of which particular implementation of the software each server is running. Bluesky and Mastodon are examples of social networking services that can connect to the Fediverse, but they are not currently as popular as X, for example, which clearly shows that the social capital of the most popular platforms lies in their respective communities.

A decentralised Internet, like the one promoted by Web3, could be another possible solution to the problem. For many people, words like blockchain (the technology on which this new World Wide Web is based), tokens or cryptocurrencies set off the alarm bells, because of the way they’ve been used as vehicles for scams in the guise of innovation. In his book Read Write Own (2024), programmer and investor Chris Dixon defends Web3 as the best way to re-establish an open and democratic Internet, and makes a distinction between “computer culture” (which defends these principles) and “casino culture” (where easy money and magic solutions are sold by opportunists and false financial gurus). Web3, however, is still nothing more than just a promise, at least on the large scale.

Faced with the current scenario dominated by the big platforms, the wisest thing to do is to stay alert, be aware of the situation and think of creative ways to inhabit a sphere that has been filled with highly profitable rubbish. It would be a first step in this unequal battle.