9 months ago
45
Right now, with millions of people busily shifting their alliance from the online home of of one egotistical, unchecked billionaire to that of the other egotistical, unchecked billionaire, there seems to be hope that the shift will, at least for awhile, throw off the accumulated cruft of trolls and Nazis, allowing some sign of a vaguely remembered golden age to be restored. Good luck with that.
We live in a capitalist society that has spent centuries inventing tools to aid in the concentration of wealth. The end result of that evolution is corporations: money-moving engines which remain, to date, the most efficient form of turning the work of thousands—and the needs of millions—into a fat stack of cash for a very, very few.
Social media plays the same role with attention that a corporation does with money. Since the long-departed site Six Degrees first appeared in 1997, social media has been iterated with the speed that only online activity has made possible. Each one of those generations has resulted in a better machine for taking the interest generated by millions of users and turning it into fame for a handful of “thought leaders” or “influencers” or other labels which have passed as quickly as the sites that spawned them.
And the result is the outrage economy.
