By being alive right now in our quasi-global technical civilization you are being bombarded with automated processes to steal your attention, and your wallet, by an increasingly narrow few.
Like Umair Haque has recently written “the internet has failed”.
So what are the implications of this and is there any way out?
Well, I have spent years writing online, commenting, building websites, and I have nothing to show for it really, and what little I may have can be wiped away by the whims of a couple of bigwigs whenever they want.
My tiny audience on Medium will not grow significantly I feel unless I give into so many a click-bait regime and I am just not willing.
If you read The Death of the Artist by William Deresiewicz you will find out that most musicians, novelists, and others, make pennies for their work. 94% of Medium writers make under a $100 yearly and the average Canadian writer makes under $10,000.
What a croc!
Truth is I never wanted to make a living from writing and I don’t. It remains an occasional hobby, unless you were to count my years as a technical writer which was purely a vocation with little relation to my artistic aspirations.
I did think recently I would experiment in trying to get that elusive audience but from research and practice it seems like too much of a mountain to climb (though for right now I am still here).
The World As It Is
I have mentioned in a past piece that my childhood was quite good only to see myself rapidly descend the socio-economic ladder in adulthood and even become homeless at various periods. I do blame myself for this, having quit many good jobs and repeatedly run away even as I got older although mental health issues played at least some role.
But there is more going on than simply this.
As a young man I read Z Magazine for fun and the philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin, and other anarchists and socialists so it is a wonder I wound up in the techno-capitalist sphere helping to develop software for corporations as a technical writer.
But after many years experience in the software field in Montreal, and reading many books culminating in Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu, and now to see the mass layoffs going on once again and the messes of 2022, from the metaverse bust, to the crypto bust, to Musk and Twitter, perhaps the best title ever about all this is Paris Marx’s for his podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, because I am increasingly convinced, as it is constructed now, it won’t.
Further, again with Haque, he is lately showing real nuance in his critique of technology which is in fact not his specialty (which is economics), as he nicely takes apart the ChatGPT hype in a recent piece, explaining how the technology is a pretty insignificant sleight of hand actually when what we really need is not a better chatbot but better ways to cultivate food, desalinate or otherwise provide clean water, and significantly improve our clean energy methods.
A million bots creating content is just another distraction it seems and is why I now call Haque my bullshit detector.
Is Medium a Scam as Well?
No, it is not a scam but it is very hard work I am finding out and far from guaranteed, there is some luck involved, to have the right look and style I think from the onset, and perhaps being somewhat a creature of social media helps, which I am not.
Even Sinem Gunel who looks quite genuine in her writing classes and tips but who I am afraid does not disclose the real challenge of making it on Medium or online in general and how fleeting it can be even if you somehow put together a fanbase. Previous generations of rock stars often died of drug and alcohol overdoses, many at that proverbial age of 27: I wonder how today’s influencers will weather the never ending algorithm tweaks that can wipe-away side gigs by the millions in microseconds?
What we Have Wrought
Back in the 90s as the internet was first spreading the hype, and possibility, these things seemed never ending. John Perry Barlow wrote his famed essay A Declaration of The Independence of Cyberspace and while the corporate world was looming, it still seemed like a much flatter democratic medium was being born.
Fast forward to now and see how much of the internet has been consolidated in the US — it is astonishing. See how the divide between rich and poor has been exacerbated and see how surveillance capitalism has run amok to the extent that even in the Western World levels of control are, although more hidden and nuanced, approaching the levels of countries like totalitarianist China with its social credit system.
The prophetic dystopian writers I love so much even beyond the anarchists, Orwell and Huxley, seem to have much more predictive power that even the best ChatGPT output in how the world has become way past 1984 and a Brave New World.
What is to Come
I have been experimenting with Mastodon and the Fediverse for years before the current #TwitterMigration and even I think that Mastodon is almost D.O.A. as the powers that be like Marc Cuban declare it too difficult to use. And I think this encompasses the whole fight — a decentralized democratic platform like Mastodon will be killed by the higher-up gate keepers as for them there is no money in it as they figure out ways to get to that trillionaire net worth.
I hope I am wrong about this by the way.
But it seems to me our world has so many existential problems and so much noise in its communication mediums as spread by the oligopolists and quite a few roque countries to boot that the kind of global conversation we need is simply being stamped out.
As far as I am concerned Umair Haque is one of the few doing such a thing but can one writer on Medium catalyze the revolution we need?
As far as I am concerned, we need a thousand Umair Haque’s on all mediums and only then will we be finally getting somewhere.
