SOCIAL UNEASE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 350/ 07 Sep 2023 10:58 Ten years ago this column might have listed a handful of online apps that assist my everyday work, commenting on their effectiveness, but I can no longer do that – the plethora of apps and social media platforms have so merged, interweaved and entwined that they’ve now become my workplace. I spend much of each day in front of a screen reading, writing, communicating, drawing, coding, listening, the various apps coalesced into a complete world more real, and far more useful, than virtual playpens like Zuck’s Metaverse. It goes without saying that I’m writing this in Google Docs, and when finished will send it to Tim with a couple of keystrokes. I still prefer to communicate by email even though most of my friends have defected to WhatsApp, mostly for the free video calls. I detest it (as I also do Instagram) because I’m still laptop- rather than phone-oriented so their UIs don’t really work well. I do get out of the house occasionally for a walk, and take a few phone pictures. When I get home they’ll be there on Google Photos and I’ll edit one in Snapseed (or Artflow or Sketchbook, using Share to flip between them). I mostly post the result on Facebook nowadays, more rarely on Flickr because posting there feels increasingly tedious. I have a paid-for Premium account on Spotify, mostly to research new music, but I consume more music on YouTube when good videos are available. Any fantasies I once entertained about making money online have evaporated. To get monetised on YouTube nowadays you need a home studio, proper lights, and to cultivate winning/irritating mannerisms, none of which I’m prepared to do. But in any case, getting rich online nowadays means TikTok, OnlyFans, Substack – not YT – and being 20-something and wearing false eyelashes, none of which I’m prepared to do either. I’ve given up writing blogs (too mean to pay to promote them) and rejected podcasting as it requires a greater frequency of new content than I can muster. I do however spend/waste hours reading podcasts by those more motivated, like Andrew Hickey’s monumental ‘A History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs’. By and large I don’t pay for these, Patreon notwithstanding. I also do enormous amounts of reading online, almost always in PDF or Kindle format, from platforms like Medium and the Atlantic magazine as well as academic papers. Articles that might be useful I print-to-PDF and store in my own (local) database. At this point it would be traditional to enter into the debate about whether this vast and spreading digital ecosystem will eventually completely supplant the older media, like paper newspapers and books, cinema, live music concerts. I’ll spare you most of that, to merely say that there are many omens that suggest otherwise. The original premise of this ecosystem was that internet access would democratise media production, allowing anyone a shot at online fame (remember an age ago when this was called Web 2.0, tee hee?) It sort of did though the result has been an explosion of volume with an implosion of quality. The amount of clickbait content on YouTube makes it a real chore to use. Digital streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon and co. are all in financial trouble because of the expense of generating endless streams of ever-more witless content, and because the cost-of-living crisis precipitated by Covid forces people to stop subscribing to stuff. Meanwhile the sheer hubris of macromoguls Musk and Zuckerberg tempts them to self-destruct their own platforms (though that cage fight would be worth watching). Unsettling enough, but there’s worse to come, from several directions. The telcos are grumbling about having to invest in ever more bandwidth to feed the streaming moguls audience, without getting a fair share of the profits: 16 European telcos last year signed a joint statement calling for Google, Meta and Microsoft to pay more, since they have to spend €50bn (£44.5bn) annually building and maintaining full-fibre broadband and 5G networks. Then there’s the increasing pressure by governments to regulate online content, lead by the EU’s Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts which seek to curb online hate speech, child sexual abuse and disinformation by law, and end Silicon Valley’s status as its own gamekeeper. Even the UK’s Online Safety Bill might add a face-slap to the EU’s arse-kick. And then there’s the Hollywood writers’ strike, which threatens to go beyond matters of current payment and become an all-out offensive against the possible future deployment of AI content generation by the studios and streamers. And I still have paper subscriptions to the London and New York reviews of books, partly to support the future of long-form journalism, partly because they’re easier to read in bed over coffee and toast… [Dick Pountain likes to kid himself that he’s an analog influencer]