Happy Labour Day! Let’s go through some quick hits, because I have lots of little thoughts about several little things but no big thoughts about any big things, and sometimes that’s the way it is.
Social Media Won’t Stay Dead
One of these articles about the so-called death of social media seems to get written every other week or so, this time at Insider, acknowledging that something is changing about our relationship to social media but never quite capturing what’s going on. For instance, they point to the “rise of group chats” as a primary reason why social media is dead, but what does that even mean? Group chats aren’t rising, they have been very popular for a very long time! As they explain: “Regularly posting content is now largely confined to content creators and influencers, while non-creators are moving toward sharing bits of their lives behind private accounts.” There is truth to this, especially on a platform like Instagram, where regular people mostly only post monthly photo dumps, if at all. The framing is odd, though, since it seems to suggest that we haven’t been doing most sharing in group chats and private direct messages for a long time.
I would say it’s a lot simpler: most people are just posting less on their main public accounts, while other, more private activity has stayed about the same. It may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it’s useful for clarifying the same-old argument that these articles always make, which is that social media is no longer social, it’s just media. The problem is that this article makes the same mistake, largely putting the blame on influencers and brands for going overboard on curation, which has supposedly led to this moment of non-social media. I truly don’t understand why writers still do this, this far into the feigned “techlash.” There are a couple times when the article points out Instagram’s changes to the platform as contributing to this shift, but the clear takeaway is that something larger has happened, and people are behaving differently, and maybe it has something to do with privacy?
The article takes Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri at his word when he explains what is going on with his app: “‘If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed,’ Mosseri said during the ‘20VC’ interview. Given this changing behavior, Mosseri said the platform has shifted its resources to messaging tools.” The story here is that whatever is going on is just a response to how people are using the app, instead of reflecting on what the app itself has done to make the experience of using it so bad.
There is nothing here about how Instagram chose to cater to brands and creator monetization tools as a way for them to scrape fees from everyone involved, thereby making the app into a purely corporatized space of exchange. It’s really not a chicken and the egg situation, there is an obvious line to be drawn from the way Instagram changed itself in order to increase revenue and the way user behaviour changed afterward, and now they are trying to capitalize on the new, ostensibly more private world they’ve made by introducing paid subscriptions that offer “exclusive group chats.” Something something capital eats itself.
So, if you ask me what’s going on with social media, I don’t know. It is in transition, and maybe it’s going to be “less social” in some way, but whatever is happening is happening precisely because these companies have fucked with us for too long, making their products worse, harder to navigate, and less fun, so most of us just want something else. This is a media critique as much as it is a tech one, because it’s just bizarre to tell this story without honing in on the failures of these tech companies to maintain the stuff we liked about them to begin with.
I also love this: “Other apps like Dispo, Poparazzi, and Locket have all used various gimmicks to try and recapture social media's halcyon days — each had a moment in the sun at the top of the US Apple app-store charts — but none have truly broken through.” You’re just making up apps! JibJab! Konkrete! Pickle!
Characters of the Algorithm
In recent weeks, I have come to know Helga. If you’re on TikTok, you may know her, as well. She’s usually at the lake, with her friend, who remains mostly silent and barely seen. She has a thick accent (Scandinavian? German?), though she appears to be somewhere in the United States, but it’s unclear. Many of her videos are very similar, as she is always in a great mood, hanging out with her friends on a boat or somewhere else picturesque, updating all of us about that day’s particular highlight, or maybe her friend is being a bit of a pest. Everyone wants to know, or be, Helga.
As more and more of her videos have come across my For You page, it has made me think about how, exactly, the TikTok algorithm has determined that this is a character I would be interested in paying attention to regularly, particularly considering that it is rare on the platform for a user to be featured so much, rather than to show up once and then disappear into content oblivion. Of course, as with any social platform, certain users become popular, and it’s not always obvious why. Still, the popularity of Helga, for my feed specifically but also in general (some of her videos have millions of views), strikes me as a sort of algorithmic stardom unique to TikTok, whereby seemingly regular users can blow up overnight, as we know — but, I wonder, what data is plucked to make it happen, especially for a rather singular example like Helga, who isn’t posting typical content?
In Helga’s case, other users seem to have likewise identified something a bit weird about her videos — the generic locations (can we get the Geoguessr guy on this?), her accent (is she putting it on?), the way she never lets her friends say anything or lets us get a good look at them, or just the weird things she says sometimes (“I don’t even know where I am anymore!”) — is Helga a deepfake? For some users, it feels a bit like a throwback to the Lonelygirl15 days of YouTube, a conspiracy-minded puzzle that, in this case, may or may not have been designed to go viral. On the other hand, Helga might just be the fun, charismatic personality that she presents as, sharing her little videos and enjoying the attention, oblivious or indifferent to what weirdos online are talking about.
Either way, though, the TikTok algorithm has helped to manifest Helga as a character that we pay attention to, according to a logic I’ve described elsewhere as “the cultivation of genres that apprehend organic (or artificial, it hardly matters) trends and turns them into stories with particular, but diffuse, audiences to target.” At the end of the day, it hardly matters whether Helga is an organic or an artificial success on TikTok, though it’s worth questioning how influential a single algorithm can be in determining the characters many of us come to know, practically forcing us to work backwards to understand what it is that makes it happen. We can guess, as I have here, that there’s just something about Helga that strikes people, and the rather banal oddness of her content helps turn it into a bit of a harmless game which thereby churns out more content, especially at a time when we’re a bit obsessed with saying everything is AI now. It does make me wonder if, soon enough, we’ll be having much more consequential debates about whether the new character of the week is real or not.
The Loneliness Epidemic
We hear a lot these days about the loneliness epidemic, whether it’s about young men or older women, and we’re left wondering if new sex robots will solve the problem. A new short film by Toronto filmmaker Sophy Romvari, “It’s What Each Person Needs,” which premiered last month on The New Yorker’s website, takes on the issue from a more specific, intimate perspective, following Becca Willow Moss, an artist who also works as a sex worker and as a companion carer, singing for lonely elderly folks. Either way, she meets her clients through a screen, characterizing what she does in general as catering to “lonely people deserving companionship.”
Moss’ labour is, in some way, addressing this so-called loneliness epidemic, the sense that we are all more isolated than ever, having less sex, poorer health, more precarious jobs and lives, quieter social lives, and higher risk of suicide, all of which has been said to have intensified during the pandemic and been calcified through social media. One aspect of Romvari’s film, then, is to reveal the amount of work that goes into addressing these needs, and how Moss herself doesn’t seem to have the same kind of support in her own life. Who cares for the carer?
Later, as the pair discuss what the film is about within the film, Moss eventually provides a poignant answer that I won’t say here, but not before a long pause that she explains away as a consequence of the fact that she is “a very curated human being.” As we all are online, sure, but it further underlines the nature of labour in an age of fragmentary technologies and uneasy sociality, an ouroboros of performance between the public and the private, the self and the other, the real and the artificial. Suddenly, one woman’s profound work of connectivity takes on (uncomfortably, even or especially for the filmmaker) a wider meaning, addressing a problem so abstract that it risks slipping between our fingers.
Ephemera
Paris Marx used Ursula K. Le Guin’s oft-cited, rousing 2014 speech about the struggle between art and commodity to explain what’s going on with generative AI. The post is great, but it’s worth re-quoting Le Guin herself: “The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
More good writing on Oppenheimer: “Oppenheimer is a man reconciled to the mystery of what we are as human beings. With his measured directness in movement and a watchfulness so acute that we feel how perception is itself action, Murphy comes to manifest what Oppenheimer told Edward R. Murrow in his 1955 CBS interview: ‘There aren’t secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men. Sometimes they are secret because a man doesn’t like to know what he’s up to if he can avoid it.’”
Song Recommendation: “It’s Alive!” by Ratboys