Shitposting, Shit-mining and Shit-farming
This is where we are with surveillance capitalism and Facebook/X:
Social media platforms are improved by a moderate tincture of shitposting. More than a few drops though, and the place begins to stink up, driving away advertisers and users. This then leads platform executives to explore the exciting opportunities of shit-mining. Social media generates a lot of content - it’s gotta be valuable somehow! Who needs content moderation if you can become a guano baron? But that only makes things worse, driving out more users and more advertisers, until eventually, you may find yourself left with a population dominated by two kinds of users (a) chumps, and (b) chump-vampirizing obligate predators. This can be a stable equilibrium - even quite a profitable one! But otherwise, it isn’t good news.
See also a recent story in the Garbage Day newsletter (https://www.garbageday.email/p/what-feels-real-enough-to-share) about Facebook, and how its disaster-relief FB groups are becoming overrun with AI slop images:The Verge’s Nilay Patel recently summed up the core tension here, writing on Threads about YouTube’s own generative-AI efforts, “Every platform company is about to be at war with itself as the algorithmic recommendation AI team tries to fight off the content made by the generative AI team.” And it’s clear, at least with Meta, which side is winning the war. This week, Meta proudly announced a new video-generating tool that will make AI misinfo even more convincing — or, at least, better at generating things that feel true. And there’s really only one way to look at all of this. Meta simply does not give a shit anymore. Facebook spent most of the 2010s absorbing, and destroying, not just local journalism in the US, but the very infrastructure of how information is transmitted across the country. And they have clearly lost interest in maintaining that. Users, of course, have no where else to go, so they’re still relying on it to coordinate things like hurricane disaster relief. But the feeds are now — and seemingly forever will be — clogged with AI junk. Because you cannot be a useful civic resource and also give your users a near-unlimited ability to generate things that are not real. And I don’t think Meta are stupid enough to not know this. But like their own users, they have decided that it doesn’t matter what’s real, only what feels real enough to share.
Given that Meta are _paying_ users to pollute their platform with low-grade AI slop engagement fuel, shit-farming seems the perfect term for that.(tags: garbage-day facebook meta ai ai-slop spam shitposting shitfarming shitmining dont-be-evil)