Enshittification, anxiety and mountain tops

Happy New Year

‘State of the world’ pieces are common at this time of year. There are more of them than ever and most of them begin with a description of ‘our anxious times’. There is a sharp focus on the state of us - writers are asking why so many people are anxious and/or angry. There are a lot of riffs on our mental health.

There are questions about the young where there is some evidence of sharply increased anxiety levels. In the domain of political economy, why has our anger prompted us, with honourable exceptions, to turf out governments that have delivered increased prosperity?

One example of the latter: Robert Saunders describes ‘democratic discontent’ while discussing David Henig’s question: why is there so much dissatisfaction when we have never had it so good? (I paraphrase only slightly.) Both these distinguished commentators post their thoughts on BlueSky, the platform that many of us adopted because we are so angry at Twitter/X.

Another way of asking the same question, with a suggested solution:

Kelly writes about anxiety and ego, suggesting that if we paid less attention to the latter we would have less of the former. One reason for our panic attacks, suggests Kelly, is the impact of wounded egos of powerful men (usually). In particular, Elon Musk’s damaged psyche reveals itself via an increasingly demented tyrannical world-view. Musk’s attempted purchase of the job title ‘most powerful unelected politician in the world’ looks like a success story. He, and so many others like him, are angry and want us to be as bad tempered as him. A recent example from Musk’s posts:

Kelly correctly describes an immature man with an ego that is battered with every departure from X - and cannot handle disagreement. She extends the idea to suggest that too many of us are like Musk: utterly self-absorbed. Kelly comes up with the not entirely original suggestions that we should all get out more, pay attention to others and ponder truth and beauty.

Unoriginal ideas, especially clichés, deserve much more credit than they usually get. The late David Foster Wallace was a great fan of clichés:

I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

Back in the day, Kelly could have been an associate member of the Bloomsbury group, some of whom followed philosopher G. E. Moore’s prescriptions on how to live a good life in a godless universe. She may be aware of the famous Harvard study of what makes life fulfilling. She may have read

Shane O'Mara

’s superb book, In Praise of Walking, in which the eminent professor of neuroscience explains why getting out more really is good for us. I’ll come back to these ideas at the end of this post. For now, I’d merely encourage anyone who has got this far not to roll their eyes at what they see as cliché or statements of the blindingly obvious. Yes but no!

Other big egos

Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s man in Moscow, looks back at 25 years of rule by Vladimir Putin. Russia’s President has followed the historically inevitable path of tyranny, reminding us why America’s founding fathers thought term limits were a good idea. Other Presidents-for-life around the world supply ample evidence for the notion that that the longer in office you are, the madder you get.

Rosenberg quotes an ex-boss of NATO who observed about Putin:

"The Putin I met with [at the start of Vladimir’s reign], did good business with, established a Nato-Russia Council with, is very, very different from this almost megalomaniac at the present moment," former Nato chief Lord Robertson told me [Rosenberg] in 2023…”I think that Vladimir Putin has a very thin skin and a huge ambition for his country. The Soviet Union was recognised as the second superpower in the world. Russia can't make any claims in that direction. And I think that ate away at his ego.”

That ego thing again.

One of the reasons why these egomaniacs get inside our heads is our newish habit of doomscrolling. That, of course, is yet another reference to the idea that social media is responsible for increasing levels of anxiety, particularly for younger people. Our attention seeking devices suck us into information-free cesspits of clickbait, conspiracy and AI-generated slop. We are constantly exposed to the mental ill-health of billionaires, plutocrats, dictators and neo-fascists of many different stripes. If acquisition of great wealth and power leads to madness, so does the anonymity afforded by social media: any nutcase with access to X can now get an audience.

The internet as a source of mis and disinformation is hardly a new idea. What is novel is the notion that pretty much anything on the web these days is not to be trusted. Without trusted sources, how do we know what is true? Cue yet more anxiety.

Enshittification

The ‘enshittification’ of the internet is a term coined by the writer Cory Doctorow, just over three years ago. Enshittification was the ‘word of the year’ for the Macquarie Dictionary in 2024 and the American Dialect Society in 2023.

Most of us are familiar with what Musk has done to Twitter/X. And enshittification has metastasised into every corner of the web. AI-generated content is the big driver of this. Just check out YouTube, once a fabulous resource, which now resembles a British beach. A beautiful thing polluted with sewage - the good stuff is still there but you have to wade through a lot of crap to find it. Even then, the contamination is often all-pervasive.

The above is a recent headline from the FT. There is no sense of irony in the report, no suggestion that anyone thinks this is madness or just the latest stage of enshittification. Indeed, it is taken all too seriously,

Bot-generated content contributed to Twitter’s descent into the cesspit long before Musk took it over. Facebook is now going to rely on AI users for its future growth. Those lovely recipes posted by Betty in Brighton? Will you notice or even care if Betty is a bot? Your new AI friends will have the usual bios and pictures. And will live inside your head. Those of us convinced that Elvis is still alive will be happy to view his daily posts.

According to Doctorow, Facebook started as a closed messaging system designed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergraduates and then proceeded to get even worse. Users were sucked in, conned by the freebies made possible via the donations of billions of dollars of venture capital to Facebook’s founders. The original USP: “get off MySpace, it’s owned by a billionaire who is harvesting your data and will eventually have you for lunch. Join us, we are the good guys”.

After falling for all of that, users are locked into a network - any platform, not just Facebook - that is costly to leave. Then the user is lunch, but not before being fed mountains of slop, stuff that none of the users ever asked for. It’s force feeding, similar to what happens on battery farms. Enshittification then enters Doctorow’s third phase:

[In the 3^rd phase] … the share of content from accounts you followed is dialled own to a homeopathic dose, and the resulting void filled with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation. When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA: “I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

Doctorow has much else to say. His lecture, reprinted in the FT is well worth a read. He blames governments for failing to regulate and for not enforcing anti-monopoly legislation. He has some pretty direct things to say about Ireland as a haven of non-regulation. The image accompanying his FT piece says it all:

On Bullshit

Harry Frankfurt anticipated much of what we now know about social media. A 1986 essay became a 2005 book: ‘On Bullshit’. Frankfurt, a philosopher, distinguishes between lying and bullshit: liars know they are lying and do so to hide the truth. Bullshitters couldn’t care less about objective truth (they may not know what it is) and seek only to achieve a particular outcome. - get elected as President, for instance. Or become the multi-billionaire boss of a social media company.

Look at Donald Trump’s social media feed for the best example of a constant stream of bullshit. His latest piece demands Canada become the 51st state of the union. Watch any of his speeches, all available on YouTube. Or watch/view pretty much anything from the millions of real people and, increasingly, bots, who have learned from Trump, the blackbelt of bullshit. It’s an algorithmic thing these days of course. A big part of the enshittification of the internet is the industrial scale of the bullshit.

Bullshit jobs

Back in 2018, anthropologist David Graeber argued that over half of the jobs we do are meaningless, bullshit jobs. At least part of our anxiety arises from the fact we are taught self-worth comes from paid employment. The knowledge that much of what we do for a living is pointless causes considerable psychological harm.

Economists generally don’t like Graeber’s thesis because it offends their notions of efficiency. Bullshit jobs are like £50 notes lying on the pavement: something that simply can’t happen, says the economist. Companies that have organisational fat usually engage in rounds of cost cutting, precisely to get rid of the bullshit jobs. Say the economists.

Economists are one group who really do need to get out more.

The idea that self worth can only come from work needs to be buried. It’s another con. Many of us are well-off, middle aged miseries. The amazing thing is that we all want our kids to be the same as us.

The links between enshittification of the internet and the growth of bullshit jobs are sometimes indirect but are always obvious. Doom-scrolling while working in a soul-destroying Hedge Fund HQ (not all bullshit jobs are ‘unskilled’) produces the same effect: anxiety. The technology behind the internet is rendering - or risks rendering - many jobs obsolete. But not before they pass through the bullshit phase.

In one key sense, all jobs are bullshit if the measure of their worth - their meaning’ - is the salary. Ask that individual in Hedge Fund HQ, “how much is enough?” and they will always have the same answer: “more!”. When your life goal is ‘more’ it is an unbounded process that is guaranteed, 100% certain, to lead to disappointment. The anxiety from never achieving your goal - more - is often crippling.

A theme that runs through the many a biography of rockstars focuses on just why the lifestyle involves so much self-destruction via drugs and booze. Authors often conclude that when a young guitarist reaches the top of the mountain they find nothing there. That, of course, is a well worn literary trope of not just biographies.

Even for those who manage to get beyond the unbounded ‘more’ thing, there is a giant screeching sound as they crash into the wall of abundance. The one source of solace from always wanting more is that it gives you something to do. Should you instead realise that you actually have more than enough, the next questions are the hardest of all: “Is that it?” and/or “What’s next?”

We are either in bullshit jobs or are fed a constant diet of bullshit. Or both. Crazy megalomaniacs, elected or otherwise, feed a us a constant diet of bullshit via devices that we cannot put down or switch off. Whether it’s Trump, or a nobody from nowhere, or an AI metaverse friend, or a U.K. water utility: it’s all crap.

Here is one hypothesis that flows from all of this and loops back to that article by Jemima Kelly, discussed at the top of this piece. We have all succumbed to a mass epidemic of Stockholm Syndrome. We know that it’s all bullshit. But we don’t care. We are willing hostages, unable to escape the flow of crap. The stream of ordure through our phones is making us ill. Our belief in the noble value of work is making us ill. But the thought of leaving Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn makes us anxious: how we will we find our friends? Get another bullshit job?That’s the con we have fallen for.

Browse the social media platform of choice for ‘professionals’. It boasts a billion people, many of whom post stuff that reveals their true belief in the deep meaning - if not nobility - of their chosen careers. The one question that can never be asked: if my job disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice?

Sometimes we don’t even know we are prisoners.

Solutions

The usual thing to be written at this point in articles like this goes something like:

“There are no easy answers. Philosophers wrestle with questions of meaning and rarely, if ever reach a conclusion. But cut back on social media, do a mindfulness course and take up yoga”.

All good, if somewhat boilerplate advice. But I think it’s even simpler than that. It’s beyond cliché to quote that line from Hotel California:

You can check out any time you like but you can never leave

A more appropriate line from the same song:

We are all just prisoners here of our own device

Maybe that device is the smartphone. Like the song, invented in California. Hosting all those bullshit social media platforms. All invented in California.

Once upon a time the telephone was a device for having conversations. Over half the world’s population now owns a mobile phone yet the spoken conversation rate is falling.

Once upon a time, what would we have done if a raving lunatic randomly called us up on the phone, yelling poisonous invective and toxic gibberish? We would have hung up. What a quaint, anachronistic, notion.

A study that began in Harvard in 1938 has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the key to a happy and fulfilled life is the strength of relationships. We’ve known this for decades. This is not something about which we need to consult philosophers or self-help gurus. There is nothing in this multi-decade, multi-generational study that says a diet of bullshit and/or a meaningless job (or, indeed, most any kind of job) will lead to fulfilment.

Don’t fret about your bullshit job - we all have to earn a living and there are plenty more crap employments like yours out there. It’s the system’s way of creating Universal Basic Income without telling anyone.

It’s about making better choices. Choose what to think, don’t let Moscow Musk tell you what to think!

I’ll end with another quote from that speech by David Foster Wallace (yes, there is still good stuff on the internet, we just have to choose to find it). He also references that ego thing discussed by Kelly and, in a way, me:

the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

Speak to your friends. Go for a walk. Get off social media. Hang up!

Happy New Year.