The grass is greener on the other side
Big Tech is the troll under the bridge
Never before has the future of the internet hung in such a precarious balance.
I’ve been drip-feeding you articles in The Offcuts over the last couple of weeks on ‘rewilding the internet’ and ‘decentralising social media’ and I have not been able to stop thinking about the potential for life online to be different. The idea has been buzzing around my head like a fly I cannot swat. Dazed’s piece on the ‘social media death spiral’ was the nail in the coffin sealing the fate of this week’s newsletter.
Social media as we know it is ‘broken’, so where can our communities flock to online instead? If we remove our resistance to social media somewhere off-platform, are we paving the way for Big Tech to take complete control?
Social media as a conduit for political gain reached a pinnacle in light of Donald Trump’s return to office. Mark Zuckerberg, who once oversaw the suspension of Trump’s Facebook account ‘indefinitely’ for undermining the peace, pledged $1 Million to Trump’s inauguration fund (along with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Open AI’s Sam Altman, and Google’s Sundar Pichai who all followed suit matching donations). The stance is as clear as the waters lapping the sand on a tropical island beach.
Google has stormed ahead above the rest in making fast-acting alterations in the weeks since the inauguration. Gone in a puff of smoke is the Gulf of Mexico, it is hereby the Gulf of America now! Google Calendar has seen the removal of key DEI-related celebratory or remembrance dates. The culture wars are a’ waging. They’ve even removed their pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance, too. Not all that surprising given their devoted support of Israeli warfare.
I can’t even be bothered to get into it with Elon Musk but the TL, DR is that after purchasing Twitter, his stampede into the centre of political consciousness worldwide has been unprecedented. His rebranding of Twitter to X has been his not-so-secret weapon in doing so.
I agree with Dazed. Social media is broken beyond repair.
It was only two years ago that whispers of Chat GPT began to circulate, quickly turning into booming shouts after the platform launched in November 2022 leaving Google search terms forever altered. Society adapted to AI at the click of a finger and the future of technology, particularly online, looked set to never be the same.
The consequences of life online are far-reaching, particularly between AI and the environment. Trump has initiated rollbacks on public access to climate change discourse and near-total censorship of related data, references, and information for American citizens.
AI has and will continue to infiltrate our conduct online; it is inevitable. But there will be severe ramifications. The amount of water needed to cool the reactors used to generate Chap GPT or similar responses, prompts and emails is excessive - the amount of one water bottle per request for AI to create you an email. With Keir Starmer promising to ‘rapidly increase the amount of AI used in the public sector’, there is a wonder how we’ll be able to keep up. When the UK regularly faces pipe bands and water shortages in certain areas in summer, and privatisation creating critical problems like the near-collapse of Thames Water, and poor infrastructure meaning around 20% of water in the UK is lost through leaks - will we pick people over technology if the heaven-forbid Sophie’s Choice question comes?
Another deep-seated fear of AI is that it would steal our jobs. A notion dismissed with an eye roll and a chuckle at the thought of robots taking over the world. Ha! But if the UK government’s proposal for changes to copyright law comes into effect, copyrighted material can be used in generative AI models, “ripping off” the artist and encroaching on creativity. The change to an opt-out model would dramatically reduce the rights holders' control over the redistribution and fate of their work.
How do we strike a balance?
To remove ourselves from the equation we will be signing our own death warrants when it comes to excluding ourselves from the unavoidable future of tech. In its short period of learning, AI has already resulted in a harmful gender bias with patriarchal tendencies. The case is similar to social media. If we remove ourselves from mainstream platforms, we risk retreating further into cultural and political echo chambers, allowing radicalisation to flourish.
But do we really even like the apps we use aside from the community they provide us with? Every update is met with a groan and lest we forget, the great mind behind Facebook first invented a website to rank the attractiveness of female classmates at college. We all overlooked that because like sheep, we wanted to flock to where it was popular and copy what others were doing. For how much longer can we overlook the disgusting, patriarchal and regressive views held (by male founders or executives of our chosen social media platforms) because we wish to maintain a presence online but have nowhere else to go?
Perhaps we can fight tech with tech online. Tools like AllSides that aim to combat bias in media may help to become part of the solution in better educating people on navigating spaces online. However, I have a niggle. If platforms like these depend on AI to generate answers on whether or not a website or a news source has bias, but not everyone yet has a seat at the AI decision-making table where a diverse range of inputs and opinions are helping to form AI’s outputs, how can we rely on it?
Or maybe we are too far gone. How has it come to the need to “be less online for your mental health”? That we repeatedly submerge ourselves in destructive behaviours willingly just to be part of something. That we have become dependent on memes as a coping mechanism for the overexposure to cruel and unfathomable hatred we’re regularly force-fed.
How can something [the vast swathes of the internet] that plays such a prevalent role in our lives and modern society, knowingly having detrimental and damaging effects at an individual and societal level, be allowed to continue as it is? Something needs to change and we need to make sure we’re a part of it. Or else we risk giving up the valuable real estate we hold for the future we want to see and create for ourselves online.
