The grimacing mug now taking up screen realestate on all the feeds is consuming what's left of public attention, as content creators use it in a desperate attempt to capture the dregs, like an alcoholic busser after the table has moved on. These diatribes, horror stories, and even some serious journalism, are hardly sufficient to hold benumbed readers beyond the topic sentence.
We remember, somewhere in our overloaded and trauma-frozen grey matter, when there seemed to be real possibility in technological innovation. Literacy was blossoming everywhere. Culture itself was going global, I had friends and relatives in China teaching English, and learning even more. We thought if we worked at it, good governments would keep making sure food was safe and plentiful, and everyone would have a place to live, medical care, education, and dignified work. Everyone would be able to go anywhere, for any reason, and find the people there welcoming and happy. And war was going obsolete. The Cold War was over.
There was just this one little defect: the whole system still ran on profits, aka return-on-investment.
When the Internet got started it was a military project. It was constructed to withstand atomic war (a revealing fantasy). It wasn't secret, but when it was announced, it was so creepy and repulsive they had to change its name and move it into a sub-sub-basement of the Pentagon and pretend it had been shut down.
When it was released, or escaped, the nerds in hot tubs who understood it best thought it could Save Humanity. But they couldn't make it pay. That was long before porn, which requires advanced video processing on both server and client, and took several years to develop. When it did, and vast fortunes were made, the business model still had to conform to the same laws that govern land ownership and riparian rights (who gets to use the river). The sole criteria for success. The laws of the Roman Empire. The same structure as the bricks-and-mortar client-server system long known as "the oldest profession."
"Content" is the word for whatever appears on a screen. Each pixel of screen realestate has a price. The popular notion is that advertisers purchase them to attract business. That worked so well that the major platforms, like Great Googlymoogly and BookOfFaces, and the Amazone, nearly went bankrupt. And who would have thought distracting, intrusive and annoying junk would induce anyone to buy anything but an ad-repellent (it sells a lot of those). But moving the classifieds online was like building a canoe the size of an aircraft carrier, cumbersome and useless and prone to tipping over. Not everything scales up.
But something else does. It was there all along, like a wad of thermal paper receipts. And it will aways be there: it's like the sweaty, smudged paper the Pony Express rider handed to a telegraph operator, who tossed it in the corner after keying the content down the line. It's what keeps your computer connected to the internet. It's how your search engine finds you when it comes back with an answer. Every time two machines establish a connection, bits are stored so they can continue the exchange. Afterwards, it sits there until something else needs to use that bit of, um, that bit.
On the search engines, where the ROI on the massive speculation bloating the "dotcom bubble" was zero, somebody noticed that all those crumpled notes had to be readable, or nobody could connect. All that info was just sitting there, keyboard and mouse activity, email and web addresses, hover-times and so on. A detailed history of the user's activity. Just the motion of the mouse can reveal some medical conditions. From crunching those numbers they soon learned what people want from this machine. There's an epidemic of loneliness. It doesn't matter what the content is, if it offers the possibility of relationship.
Those ingredients simmered on the back burner for two or three decades. "Social" media platforms had tried advertising to pay for "free" services, but the old newspaper business model didn't work online. Even "targeted" ads lost money. The big money wasn't in access to the totality of human knowledge, but access to the minute details of our private lives, the virtual condensate that dripped from the digital pipelines:
...there was extra data that was produced, that they didn't need for service improvement. Those data, back at that time they were called "digital exhaust-- these left over data, they were haphazardly sorted data logs on servers... ...had tremendous predictive value... I call them "behavioral surplus"; it was surplus because it was more than they needed...
-- Shoshana Zuboff, author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" in an interview with Harry Shearer, "le Show" (2019) ryshearer.com/le-shows/june-02-2019/#t=04:08
When they realized the cash was flowing the wrong way, the search engines were slammed into reverse. They had been information providers; they are now information extractors. The top commodity, Information, was displaced by far richer ore.
The new commodity was aggregated Attention:
"The amorphous shapeless concept of attention was transformed into discrete, comparable pieces that can be captured, priced and sold; buyers and sellers can quickly evaluate opportunities and transact in attention at mass scale without individually evaluating each opportunity."
-- Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet(Click Here) by Tim Hwang, former global public policy lead for A.I. and machine learning at Google, general counsel at Substack.
Aggregated attention on the massive scale made possible by global computer networks soon became the dominant market commodity, providing fertile ground for a new economic logic that Zuboff named "Surveillance Capitalism":
The key point here is that when it comes to the market sphere, the electronic text is already organized by the logic of accumulation in which it is embedded and the conflicts inherent to that logic. The logic of accumulation organizes perception and shapes the expression of technological affordances at their roots. It is the taken-for-granted context of any business model. Its assumptions are largely tacit, and its power to shape the field of possibilities is therefore largely invisible. It defines objectives, successes, failures, and problems. It determines what is measured, and what is passed over; how resources and people are allocated and organized; who is valued in what roles; what activities are undertaken - and to what purpose. The logic of accumulation produces its own social relations and with that its conceptions and uses of authority and power.
-- Shoshana Zuboff, Journal of Information Technology (2015) 30, 75-89. doi:10.1057/jit.2015.5
This global network of networks is not an open virtual space of harmony and productivity and innovative ideas. To the contrary, Zuboff says, it "renders" us into commodities according to what captures our attention. You may enter a query in the context of equestrian sport, or antique furniture, or early childhood education, but you will be answered in the context of what will keep you engaged. This changes in subtle ways as your dossier in the "cloud" gets thicker. For example, I was a frequent visitor to a home in a very upscale area, and after a few trips, my GPS system began to find roads I had never known existed, through rolling verdant hills on well-maintained two-lane blacktop, bypassing the traffic lights and strip malls that had lined my usual route. Somewhere the machine had found a percentage of time spent in certain zipcodes, and assigned me to another social class. The same system, by the way, that sends me ads for liver pills whenever I go to the dentist, which is the next office down the hall from a specialist.
Business conditions are optimal when "consumers" are under constant low-level stress. The economy relies on this misery as a form of energy. The global network is controlled by profit-seeking entities with no legal, social or moral constraints, and powerful incentives to do mischief. Its leading enterprises function as global parasites. Its business model is prostitution and substance abuse.
The "Arab Spring" showed that peaceful political revolution is quite possible in this new realm of networked humanity. But targeted advertising can become targeted retaliation. Access to everyone's data can be purchased, stolen or expropriated. Since government databases from many agencies like the IRS were placed in private hands in 2025, ownership of your private data is in question. Possession is not. Like your attention, your body parts, and your future, privacy is now a commodity. More precisely, part of a commodity. A very small part. Valueless, to you. But not to a reppressive state, or global corporation.
Instead of synchronizing coherent public awareness, dismantling obsolete barriers, expanding and extending community, preventive healthcare, universal suffrage and so on, the internet had already been hijacked at conception by this parasitic machine that assigns us to separate cubicles in a social vacuum, isolated and alone, clinging to meaningless symbols of relationship, artificially sugared with ego-reinforcement. And why? Because that brings the highest return on investment. At the scale of global business, anything short of that is business failure.
Under relentless shock and awe, worldviews diverged, whether or not we noticed the perceptions we were being fed, but upon which we act anyway. In place of natural confidence we have self-doubt from constant microimpressions of body image and unworthiness designed to sell cosmetics. In place of awareness we have packaged opinions. In place of compassion we have deadly competition.
The media industry now consists of enormous narrative-factories, churning out algorithmically curated stories designed to attract as much attention as possible, while filtering out actionable information. Stories about stories proliferate. Journalists interview other journalists. Questions become facts and facts questions. What's on the screen is not about current events: it is the event. Since fear gets attention, we get more of it. And more of it, as our tolerance rises.
As to "social" media, content is fuel, the more controversial the better. Suppression only increases the octane. Whatever the outcome, there are winners and losers, and like a casino, the house always gets its cut. Since most content comes from users, it is a donation to the platform's owners without which they would not be in business to abuse their customers' privacy with such gleeful abandon. In this casino your mental wellbeing is at risk, to say nothing of autonomy.
The internet is not a free public communications utility extending the boundaries of human community, it is a private attention-extraction and processing machine designed to subdivide and isolate "users" for maximum profit. That's the essential business model described above. Whatever shows up on the screen is not there to inform, it's there to attract (and distract) more attention, and there is an additional function in the case of the aforementioned grimacing mug:
Lightning rods absorb lightning, rendering it harmless.
Accordingly, any bolt that hits the Dark Tower becomes valuable content fueling its sinister dynamo. Each expose' documenting heinous crimes, each escalation of secret police tactics, each Draconian deprivation of public good, each revocation of civil rights, each violation of federal or international law, every murdered fisherman, shredded child, carpet-bombed refugee camp, every genocide, just makes its terrifying eye burn all the more brightly.
It might be good to remember that none of this was ever possible at the hands of a lone actor.
In any war, which is to say, con-game, it is the mark who does all the work, and does it enthusiastically, ending only in self-harm. If we identify a perpetrator, it is most likely a decoy. If in doubt as to who might be the mark, if you are not running the game, it's probably you.
That's a very good piece of knowledge. It changes everything
1
1
1
