Synthetic Schemes

I took a long social media hiatus, starting around 2016 and really doubling down in 2020. I'd been quite active for a while, but personal and world events happened, as events do, and I decided to refocus my limited energies. Events kept happening without me, and that was fine. No thanks, I'm good. I'm over here doing my own thing.

Platforms come and go, and the pace of their arrivals-and-departures has always been rapid. Yesterday's Geocities begat MySpace begat Tumblr begat Facebook begat Instagram begat SnapChat begat TikTok, to trace one lineage. One advantage to having seen these rises and falls is the luxury to recognize the cycles, and know they'll come again. It's autumn now where I live, and our rainy season has begun, and the trees are being stripped of their last determined leaves. I know in the spring they will bud again. At some point, there will be a new begetting in the platform ecosystem as well. "Too big to fail" doesn't apply to novelties.

That doesn't mean the too-bigs are going down quietly, or (to belabor the comparison) that the occupants of the trees have given up. This is also a mast year for oak trees, a term I just learned a few weeks ago, and which means a time of unified, prolific seeding. It's a natural event, a synchronous phenomenon where members of a species somehow coordinate and produce a hopeful volume of seeds, to survive predation and loss. For me, it means a surplus of acorns crunched underfoot as I talk walks. For the squirrels, it's a buffet.

So I've returned to social media in a controlled, #branded way, connecting it to this blog and the books I'm working on and those still in planning. Publishing DIY on nominal budget means also full DIY for marketing, and looking at the lineage, Instagram falls in the "not quite dead, but also I can tolerate it" category. I'm a relic and a tough, slow rhino. I prefer my media not move around so much. It's overwhelming.

What's also overwhelming now, here on my return, is the vast amount of LLM-driven profiles that have been set up. As long as they drive "engagement" then they are supporting the mother platform in its ecosystem, because engagement delivers advertisements, and advertisements nourish the environment. OK, fine. That's the deal; it's free. The rate of the spamming, though, and the number of transparently fake authors and "services" is stunning. They're not even pretending now, with fake profile A pointing to fake aggregator B claiming I can purchase fake followers D through Z for very ream sums of money. I'm not shocked, I'm not deceived, but I am sad. It's very much a pyramid scheme, driven by artificial people, with almost-convincing photos, and vaguely-human profiles. As a skeptical, nearsighted rhino, I snuffle at these sorts of things carefully, and there's always the obvious tells as AI loses its continuity in the details. But it's sad to see. The tree is diseased, and unfortunately, all the trees are growing in the same plot, tended by the same arborists.

 I'm still over here, doing my own thing, and I'm (shudder) participating and actually encountering real humans here and there. But it's changed, coming back. It's a mast year for the platforms, dedicating energy and effort to survive the winter to come. I do thing there will be a platform dieback, just as I expect new ones to sprout and thrive in the niches of the old. I can't predict what they will be or how they will thrive, but I do wonder how many actual humans will be present when they rise.

🧩🦏