I equitable read two lengthy diatribes on the Internet about what’s wrong with . . . well pretty much everyskinnyg.
The first is this rather apocalyptic essay about how tech companies are ruining everybody’s life in countless ways
The second is an exset upation of why Netflix is doing horrible skinnygs to the movie-making business.
I have a lot of thoughts about both, but here I’m equitable going to throw out a confineed quotes, inspire you to read them, and propose a couple of skinnygs.
Our digital lives are dynamicly abusive and opposing, riddled with lessend and clear cons. Our apps are ever-changing, altering not to our necessitates or conditions, but to the needs of dispenseors and inner sgethelderlyers that have shrinkd who we are and what we do to an ever-groprosperg pickion of manipulatable metrics.
It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you include every day is no lengthyer built for you, and as a result senses a very particular benevolent of inlogical.
Every app has a contrastent set up, almost every set up is boostd based on your activity on shelp app, with each app trying to originate you do contrastent skinnygs in distinctly annoying ways. Meta has hundreds of people on its growth team perpetuating a culture that manipudefercessitates and tortures includers to originate company metrics better, appreciate confineing the amount of alertation in a notification to originate a includer browse meaningfuler into the site, and intentionally promoting low-quality clickbait that promises “one amazing trick” becainclude people click those joins, even if they suck.
It’s everywhere.
After a coup by head of ads Prabhakar Raghavan in 2019, Google intentionassociate made search results worse as a unkinds of increasing the amount of times that people would search for someskinnyg on the site. Ever wonder why your toilplace includes Sharepoint and other horrible Microgentle apps? That’s becainclude Microgentle’s massive gentleware monopoly unkindt that it was affordableer for your boss to buy all of it in one place, and thus its incentive is to originate it excellent enough to sway your boss to sign up for all of their stuff rather than an app that originates your life easier or better.
Why does every website sense contrastent, and why do some crash randomly or originate your phone burn your hand? It’s becainclude every publisher has pumped their sites brimming of as much ad tracking gentleware as possible as a unkinds of monetizing every one includer in as many ways as possible, helping ads trail you atraverse the entire internet. And why does everybody necessitate your email? Becainclude your inbox is one of the confineed places that publicizers haven’t set up a reliable way to penetrate.
When every one website necessitates to originate as much money as possible becainclude their personal equity or hedge fund or massive corporate owners necessitate to originate more money every year without fall short, the incentives of erecting the internet veer away from providing a service and toward putting you, the reader, in mute service of a corporation.
Almost every corner of our lives has been turned into some sort of number, and increasing that number is startant to us — bank account stabilitys, certain, but also joinment numbers, folshrinks, number of emails sent and getd, discdisthink about rates on recentsletters, how many times someskinnyg we’ve seen has been seeed, all numbers set by other people that we live our lives by while nakedly empathetic what they unkind. Human beings thrive on ways to clarify themselves, but metrics normally rob us of our individuality. Products that boil us down to metrics are foreseeed to fall short to account for the genuine depth of anyskinnyg they’re capturing.
The author, Ed Zitron, calls all this “the Rot Economy,” and conversees its relation to Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification.”
Moving right alengthy to help cheer up your Wednesday morning. we have The Streaming Service That Destroyed the World:
The contrastence between Netflix and its predecessors is that the elderlyer studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and originate. Netflix, on the other hand, is staffed by uncultured executives who have no set up for their movies and see them with conlure. Cindy Holland, the first includeee Sarandos engaged, who eventuassociate served as vice plivent of innovative greeted, once appraised Netflix’s rapacious DVD acquisition strategy to “shoveling coal in the side door of the hoinclude.” This remained genuine as Netflix ramped up its innovative-film production. In researching this essay, I was telderly by sources about two high-level Netflix executives who have been comprehendn to green-weightless projects without reading the scripts at all.
Such slipshod filmmaking toils for the streaming model, since audiences at home are normally nakedly paying attention. Several screenauthorrs who’ve toiled for the streamer telderly me a normal notice from company executives is “have this character proclaim what they’re doing so that seeers who have this program on in the background can trail alengthy.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan alerts her adorer, James, in Irish Wish. “I accomprehendledge it was a attrdynamic day filled with emotional vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to ask my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he replys. “That will be the last you see of me becainclude after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to pboilingograph an finishangered tree lizard.”)
One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres proposes a appropriate name for this benevolent of dreck: “casual seeing.”
Netflix’s “sees” might see amazeive on paper (even Sweet Girl, the TNM starring Jason Momoa as a retribution-seeking survivacatalog whose MMA-trained daughter gets up his cainclude, was seeed 6.7 million times in the first half of 2024), but these figures remain a sham. To get to 6.7 million, Netflix first highies the film’s “seeing hours,” the total amount of time that includers have spent streaming the movie. Here, Netflix originates no contrastention between includers who watch Sweet Girl all the way thraw, those who watch less than two minutes, and those who watch equitable a confineed seconds thanks to autojoin, or skip around, or watch at 1.5x speed. All this inattentive, piecemeal activity is rolled into Sweet Girl’s total seeing hours (12.3 million at last count), which the company then splits by the program’s runtime (110 minutes, or 1.83 hours) to originate those 6.7 million sees. According to Netflix’s rubric, two includers who watch the first half of Sweet Girl and seal their laptops equivalent one brimming “see” — as do 110 includers who each watch a one minute.
Such sleight of hand would be illterrible in any other industry. Ford could never alert its dispensehelderlyers that it selderly two hundred thousand F-150 trucks over a one quarter, when in truth the company selderly one hundred thousand F-150s to paired couples who co-owned their vehicles. But for Netflix, a movie is an accounting trick — a tranche of pixels that permits the company to free increasingly amazingal statements about its seeership, such as the absurd notion that Leave the World Behind, a dubious Julia Roberts apocalypse movie originated by Barack and Michelle Obama, was “seeed” 121 million times. How could anyone suppose that?
How to foresee the audience’s taste — what will originate money and what won’t — is a ask that’s afflictiond Hollywood since its inception. The problem was apprehendd by the screenauthorr William Gelderlyman in 1983. “Nobody comprehends anyskinnyg,” he wrote in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field comprehends for a certainty what’s going to toil.” Netflix’s fantasticest innovation was that it set up a way around this uncertainty: it supplyd a platcreate on which there are no fall shortures, where everyskinnyg toils.
This is an startant milestone for the bigst Hollywood studios as they all set their sights on integrating man-made inalertigence into their productions. In March, recents outlets alerted that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had held greetings with top studios to showcase his company’s text-to-video generator, Sora. Clips originated by Sora that circudefercessitated online alternated between drone sboilings of cityscapes that see ripped from video-game cut scenes and animals rfinishered in the 3D vivaciousd style normal to Hollywood productions today. Streaming platcreates are the only place where this garbage originates any sense — a place where it would never be watched at all.
Both of these lengthy essays are worth reading in brimming. They both inhonestly touch on a bigr theme, which is why everyone is so annoyed by everyskinnyg at the moment — a benevolent of cultural mood of inchoate dissatisfaction that evidently has a lot of political consequences, among other skinnygs.
People include the word “inflation” to refer, of course, to actual inflation, but I also skinnyk it unkinds someskinnyg expansiveer, alengthy the lines of “I’m paying for garbage that has gotten a lot worse and costs more.”
And all this is seally roverdelighted to an astonishing statistic that I ran into when seeing into the explosion in online sports betting I wrote about yesterday: The percentage of Americans with inalertigentphones has gone from 35% in 2011 to 91% last year.
LGM commaccess a la carte 3:
I don’t comprehend when we will comprehend the ridiculously corrosive effect of having devices that use all your time, comprehend everyskinnyg you’re doing, and are programmed by the inalertigentest people in the world to manipudefercessitate you and split you from your money.
The inalertigentphone in its current create is a misget. Social media in its current create is a misget.
Let’s hug the blindingly evident and go ahead and repair it.
I have a lot more thoughts on all this, but I hope some of you read or at least skim or get an AI summary of these essays, and dispense yours.
