Four small observations; day 330 / 2023
(1.) Everything seems to get more toxic. Every minor inconvenience online is now ornamented with death threats.
(2.) Corporations are governments. Besides the usual lobbying, the power that corporations have over our lives goes beyond legal and monetary. Corporations define culture, they adopt it, change it, and then bleed it dry. Wait for the next trend, co-opt it, repeat the cycle. Want to be offline? There’s an app for that.
(3.) If you were ever in doubt, corporations now define (i.e. limit) free speech. Your legal protections of what free speech is and isn’t is close to meaningless if you will not be given a platform.
Political allegiances of social network megacorps will therefore shape what content is available - what is allowed, what is shown/visible (shadowbanned), what is promoted, what is demonetized. Your opinions, more than ever, are up for sale to the highest bidder. Your mood is now a commodity too.
(4.) As Spotify showed, small creators don’t matter at all. For all they care, you can literally die. Literally. They don’t care. Their bottom line doesn’t depend on you in any meaningful way once enshittification is complete. They only needed you to monopolize the market and drive the competition into mergers or bankruptcy. You can starve, you can get an office job, you can give up on your dreams; what really matters is other corporate overlords and celebrities (Sony BMG, Sailor Twift etc).
(5.) Influencers are just temporarily glorified employees. The money well will dry up, the markets will consolidate. See points 3 and 4. They don’t care about you.