Something is wrong on the Internet

I just read two long diatribes on the Internet about what’s wrong with . . . well pretty much everything.

The first is this rather apocalyptic essay about how tech companies are ruining everybody’s life in countless ways

The second is an explanation of why Netflix is doing horrible things to the movie-making business.

I have a lot of thoughts about both, but here I’m just going to throw out a few quotes, encourage you to read them, and suggest a couple of things.

Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons. Our apps are ever-changing, adapting not to our needs or conditions, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics. 

It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane. 

Every app has a different design, almost every design is optimized based on your activity on said app, with each app trying to make you do different things in uniquely annoying ways. Meta has hundreds of people on its growth team perpetuating a culture that manipulates and tortures users to make company metrics improve, like limiting the amount of information in a notification to make a user browse deeper into the site, and deliberately promoting low-quality clickbait that promises “one amazing trick” because people click those links, even if they suck. 

It’s everywhere. 

After a coup by head of ads Prabhakar Raghavan in 2019, Google intentionally made search results worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people would search for something on the site. Ever wonder why your workplace uses Sharepoint and other horrible Microsoft apps? That’s because Microsoft’s massive software monopoly meant that it was cheaper for your boss to buy all of it in one place, and thus its incentive is to make it good enough to convince your boss to sign up for all of their stuff rather than an app that makes your life easier or better.  

Why does every website feel different, and why do some crash randomly or make your phone burn your hand? It’s because every publisher has pumped their sites full of as much ad tracking software as possible as a means of monetizing every single user in as many ways as possible, helping ads follow you across the entire internet. And why does everybody need your email? Because your inbox is one of the few places that advertisers haven’t found a consistent way to penetrate. 

When every single website needs to make as much money as possible because their private equity or hedge fund or massive corporate owners need to make more money every year without fail, the incentives of building the internet veer away from providing a service and toward putting you, the reader, in silent service of a corporation. 

Almost every corner of our lives has been turned into some sort of number, and increasing that number is important to us — bank account balances, sure, but also engagement numbers, followers, number of emails sent and received, open rates on newsletters, how many times something we’ve seen has been viewed, all numbers set by other people that we live our lives by while barely understanding what they mean. Human beings thrive on ways to define themselves, but metrics often rob us of our individuality. Products that boil us down to metrics are likely to fail to account for the true depth of anything they’re capturing.

The author, Ed Zitron, calls all this “the Rot Economy,” and discusses its relation to Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification.”

Moving right along to help cheer up your Wednesday morning. we have The Streaming Service That Destroyed the World:

The difference between Netflix and its predecessors is that the older studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and craft. Netflix, on the other hand, is staffed by unsophisticated executives who have no plan for their movies and view them with contempt. Cindy Holland, the first employee Sarandos hired, who eventually served as vice president of original content, once compared Netflix’s rapacious DVD acquisition strategy to “shoveling coal in the side door of the house.” This remained true as Netflix ramped up its original-film production. In researching this essay, I was told by sources about two high-level Netflix executives who have been known to green-light projects without reading the scripts at all.

Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)

One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.”

Netflix’s “views” might look impressive on paper (even Sweet Girl, the TNM starring Jason Momoa as a vengeance-seeking survivalist whose MMA-trained daughter takes up his cause, was viewed 6.7 million times in the first half of 2024), but these figures remain a sham. To get to 6.7 million, Netflix first tallies the film’s “viewing hours,” the total amount of time that users have spent streaming the movie. Here, Netflix makes no distinction between users who watch Sweet Girl all the way through, those who watch less than two minutes, and those who watch just a few seconds thanks to autoplay, or skip around, or watch at 1.5x speed. All this distracted, piecemeal activity is rolled into Sweet Girl’s total viewing hours (12.3 million at last count), which the company then divides by the program’s runtime (110 minutes, or 1.83 hours) to produce those 6.7 million views. According to Netflix’s rubric, two users who watch the first half of Sweet Girl and close their laptops equal one full “view” — as do 110 users who each watch a single minute.

Such sleight of hand would be illegal in any other industry. Ford could never tell its shareholders that it sold two hundred thousand F-150 trucks over a single quarter, when in truth the company sold one hundred thousand F-150s to married couples who co-owned their vehicles. But for Netflix, a movie is an accounting trick — a tranche of pixels that allows the company to release increasingly fantastical statements about its viewership, such as the absurd notion that Leave the World Behind, a dubious Julia Roberts apocalypse movie produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, was “viewed” 121 million times. How could anyone believe that?

How to predict the audience’s taste — what will make money and what won’t — is a question that’s plagued Hollywood since its inception. The problem was captured by the screenwriter William Goldman in 1983. “Nobody knows anything,” he wrote in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work.” Netflix’s greatest innovation was that it found a way around this uncertainty: it provided a platform on which there are no failures, where everything works.

This is an important milestone for the largest Hollywood studios as they all set their sights on integrating artificial intelligence into their productions. In March, news outlets reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had held meetings with top studios to showcase his company’s text-to-video generator, Sora. Clips generated by Sora that circulated online alternated between drone shots of cityscapes that look ripped from video-game cut scenes and animals rendered in the 3D animated style common to Hollywood productions today. Streaming platforms are the only place where this garbage makes any sense — a place where it would never be watched at all.

Both of these long essays are worth reading in full. They both indirectly touch on a larger theme, which is why everyone is so annoyed by everything at the moment — a kind of cultural mood of inchoate dissatisfaction that obviously has a lot of political consequences, among other things.

People use the word “inflation” to refer, of course, to actual inflation, but I also think it means something broader, along the lines of “I’m paying for garbage that has gotten a lot worse and costs more.”

And all this is closely related to an astonishing statistic that I ran into when looking into the explosion in online sports betting I wrote about yesterday: The percentage of Americans with smartphones has gone from 35% in 2011 to 91% last year.

LGM commenter a la carte 3:

I don’t understand when we will understand the ridiculously corrosive effect of having devices that consume all your time, know everything you’re doing, and are programmed by the smartest people in the world to manipulate you and separate you from your money.

The smartphone in its current form is a mistake. Social media in its current form is a mistake.

Let’s accept the blindingly obvious and go ahead and fix 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 share yours.