So your brother is telling you he’s opened up a Robinhood trading account. Ta-da! Confetti rains down from the top of the screen after he enters into an options call forecasting a 40x overvalued ev company’s price to double by next month. You on the other hand just realized you’ve been scrolling through instagram stories for the past 20 minutes and that doesn’t even make any sense, you don’t even have TikTok installed on your phone. Something’s off and it’s been off for a while now. The marketing agencies depicted in Mad Men have long died off and the actual product developers are now marketing trailblazers themselves. Although it’s only recently that technology has actually been able to start whoring out reward systems in our brain for tasks that should be mundane and dispassionate or at least separate from our own behavioural disorders. Yes, these are behavioural disorders.
Ok, so then what. Well a few things I suspect: One, the Fortnitification of these systems turn everyday tools that should be non-incentive based into something akin to the strange free to play Sky Raid Shadow game they keep advertising to you on youtube. Two, for some bizarre reason your friend that’s been toting ‘Black Lives Matter’ for the past 2 years got lost in the algorithm and now she’s quoting Ben Shepiro to you, incessantly, non stop. You understand her point of view deeply but she won’t accept the fact that you don’t agree with every single ideology she’s articulated to you, that she also just happened to have learned last we- wait, sorry, why is your BLM friend quoting Ben Shepiro now? Three, every now and then submerged amongst pointless click-bait is something presenting itself: equally piecemeal and pointless as everything else, but on second glance actually has something meaningful to say. I think almost all of us were always aware that we are guinea pigs in the land of Tim Bezosberg, but I think the more interesting topic for the dinner table will be: what happens when these infractions on our time, money and behavioural patterns don’t come from the free software we chuckle at for asking us to pay a dollar for their monthly premium service.
Harmony Korine said that:
“Cinema has changed. Cinema is now a 30 second youtube clip”.
“Clear your mind”
“Think different now”
Which I at least took as critical advice for young filmmakers and by extension any commercial product person. And he’s not responsible for really any of what Im talking about right now, obviously, but I would forgive you if you felt that the first quote was being weaponized by Full Stack Developers. And I don’t necessarily mean to suggest something as absurd as: the entire process is a negative thing. No. It is good that super star programmers are thinking of new ways to engage people even with the very few avenues to explicitly ask for money in exchange for a service. But whenever something is extended beyond a boundary that it once encompassed, that always means that the realm of responsibility for others increases. I’m talking about us as consumers.
Let me get back on track. You know that Robinhood, TikTok and Tinder have incredibly pernicious effects on your brain and inner reward system. What is going to happen when these systems implement something more sophisticated than GPT-3? Anyone in IT is painfully aware of this reality and even still, I don’t intend to posture, you don’t need to know how to make a linked list to know this, there is a significant amount of people in general that are aware. But the issue is less being aware of what has already occured, but rather being aware of how fast these systems are metastasizing. The french post-structuralist Baudrillard anticipated the wrong outcome when he asked “Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?”. I’m telling you that’s not even relevant anymore. The real issue that I’m positing is: everything is already Fortnite.
A playful, welcoming front facing UI bedazzled with cartoonish accents reminiscent of the shows we used to watch as a youth. Behind that? A well oiled enterprise software architecture, logging every action or non-action you take, pinpointing each way it can monetize your own insecurities whether its at your expense or not. I am describing Fortnite. GTA Online. You don’t use those, I don’t either. But here’s the thing, it’s probably not the worst description for a decent amount of the other apps you use on a daily basis too. You can leave the page now if you’re over this, you can leave the page whenever really it’s the internet. There’s a million other pages you could be surfing apps you could be swiping through right now, but for those that are willing to stay, let’s consider the financials. According to eMarketer, it was estimated in 2011 that Myspace would make $183m in ad revenues that year, down from a peak of $605m. ByteDance, the entity that owns TikTok doubled its revenues from $7.4b to $17b in 2019 alone according to Bloomberg. These systems have been sharpened to a point that the previous tech giants of the past – the shoulders of which modern apps are standing on – pale in comparison to whatever domain you spend 4 hours a day on now. The landscape is competitive and every app’s features are open for plagiarization. That’s why every app is essentially TikTok (hence you watching 15 second videos of complete strangers on Facebook owned apps) and by extension everything is Fortnite: a fanciful virtual landscape with pernicious backend systems designed to play on our behavioural disorders.
Hideo Kojima and Tomokazu Fukushima are often commended for predicting the future commodification of information as a tool to encourage political movements fueled by “convenient half-truths” in the video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty. What’s so jarring about this is that we are now fully entrenched in it. Applications like youtube or reddit, while may not have a vested interest in submerging users deep into ideological echo chambers. The nature of their multi-billion dollar recommendation systems practically ensure that this reality manifests, every single day. It’s why your friend who had no interest in politics at all, is now repeating word for word every conservative anti-masker talking point they can recall. Is it because they’re generally big proponents of perspectives espoused by conservative names like William F. Buckley and ex-President Reagan? Is it because they want to go to some wack ass bar on the weekend? The problem is not the perspective itself, the issue is that the advocates backing them are not genuine. Ideological movements are convenient which is why we use them. Although when they are only convenient to narrowly defined selfish wants, that’s when meaning and truth become tertiary.
So what do you do when every comment you say is strawmanned by your recently converted All Lives Matter, ex-Black Lives Matter friend. Well, you’re a big boy (or girl (or gender non-binary ( 2021, we’re here ))). Just accept it. You can lie to them in acquiescence, telling them you agree long enough until the conversations’ over. Any legitimate conversation that you’d like to have can only occur in the context of being around less impressionable minds. You and I know that it really doesn’t matter what side you’re on, but rather the ability of both of us to be able to understand, genuinely. As long as there is incentive in fighting for a cause using ideas that are borrowed from the gloss of obviously partisan and biased online communities, we can assume that we’ll face this at differing amounts within our own lives. So now it’s a matter of personal responsibility, as if it wasn’t already in the first place.
But what of responsibility? Is responsibility out of touch? It at least seems so just a little bit. I would personally attribute this to the rise of many socialist systems, but maybe that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We have many socialist systems that we rely on every day such as the police system to protect our communities, we rely on fire departments, publicly paved roads, etc. I may be the biggest proponent of capitalism among people I know, but I find myself coming to terms with the inevitable rise of New Deal Liberalism. If the realm of agency for the wealthy few (incidentally or otherwise) is so large, is responsibility a lesser important virtue that the rest have to carry? This is of course in the context of highly developed ‘first-world’ nations with heavily regulated fiat currencies that have the magical trap card called “Stimulus”. If free health care becomes statute that can be seen as less responsibility to the individual. And it is possible that it may even be a good thing, even considering the fact that such a large amount of the health industries rapid growth stems largely from the competitive free market. For every action there must be a reaction. Simply put – and I hate pointing fingers at the wealthy – if Jeff Bezos has 1/10th of his net worth liquid, representing his realm of agency, which continues to grow exponentially and you have $22 dollars in your chequing account that is being devalued at a discount + inflation everyday, what is the likelihood of more violent Occupy movements not rising up in the immediate future? I’m not saying you can’t be Jeff Bezos. That’s your choice. Especially in a first world country. I’m simply making a statement as to whether or not it is better to infantilize the rest of us peasants via indirect wire transfer’s (higher business taxes to pay for larger socialist programs) to reduce civil unrest.
The result that this would have on personal development and accountability for individuals as a whole? Detrimental, but that’s not up to me to decide whether people should value that or not. So, the logistification of nearly every business model into an app has turned us consumers into guinea pigs and it seems highly likely that we will continue to absolve ourselves from responsibility considering the inevitable rise of New Deal Liberalism. I swear to you I’m more liberal than you think I am.
Gamification, responsibility, what of meaning? I believe that it is impossible for us to live in peace for long periods of time without seeking meaning. And yet, a decent amount of us spend a lot of time on these applications. What I’ve realized is that beneath the bed of seemingly nonsensical and obnoxious content, it is possible to find others that are just as keen to the current state of affairs. “You motherfuckers on TikTok are a different species, I don’t even know where ya’ll come from, the botness & cringeness that ya’ll have created in this matrix is immortal” rambles on Spiritual So regarding a TikTok video that for some reason is claiming he was found dead the other day. If the majority of online internet content consumed succeeds based largely off of how incessant, piecemeal, obnoxious and absurd it can possibly be, that doesn’t necessitate that it all be absent of any meaning. Take for example this video of Call of Duty streamer Jordy2d trolling a kid into thinking he would buy him a content subscription for the game. Depending on who you are you might say that the video itself is mean spirited or insensitive. For others, it could look as if a kid that expected some benevolent act from a complete stranger learned the incredibly valuable lesson that you should not expect anything from others, especially if your reaction to the problem is to fish for pity.
I wasn’t intending to write this much originally but I feel there are some important transformations happening as we start moving along into the decade. In any case, I hope you reading this wasn’t a waste of time. I was really just trying to check if my brain was still working and I’ll leave that up to you to arbitrate on.
