Let’s just rip the non-branded self-adhesive bandage off of this one right now.
Platforms are not your friend. And you are not their customer.
To quickly define ‘platform’ in the context of the oncoming text vomit, a platform is any media space to which you post text, photos, videos, creations, shares, or whatever to be consumed by people who are NOT you and is controlled by NOT you. Your books of face. Your BluSkies or YouTubes or Nazi Child Porn Machines.
Some folks are nodding their heads, some are thinking this is an anti-capitalist bit for Komrade Klicks (I mean, it is the former, but do you see ads?), and others still are getting ready to ideologically defend their addiction to platforms as necessary for family, business, socializing, or buying used, fairly damp mattresses from a local parking lot.
To the first group, good job. Early recess.
To the second group - yeah, fuck your humiliation-kink religion masquerading as a form of economy. Come back when you realize it’s not a government or an ethos.
To the last group, you’re who I wanna talk to. Have a seat. Are you thirsty? Is RC OK? I know it’s not. You can stop yelling.
First, I’d like to offer an opinion. Don’t try to take it. Not yet. I just want to put it in a room and let it get a feel for the place. Like a sidewalk raccoon pup you’re positive you can tame. Like that raccoon, there’s a 50/50 chance it’s just going to piss all over the chairs and try to eat your face. But it’s a gamble you’re willing to take, right? I mean…free raccoon!
The opinion is this - any tool or meeting space loses all of its intrinsic moralistic integrity once it becomes monolithic enough to be considered a platform. This is a shutupnerd way of saying I firmly believe in Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification hypothesis. If you don’t know what that is, please read up on it a bit: https://en.wikipedia … iki/Enshittification
Any platform with a significant number of users that is publicly traded will eat itself. That’s why it’s so important to deplatform on your terms. All platforms will crumble. Better to not be taken by surprise.
I believe Enshittification, or platform decay, or the inevitable outcome of shareholder ownership, or whatever you want to call it, is at the heart of the Fascist handbook this time around. The concept of taking something useful to a group of people, expanding that group by adding bloat to it, providing it for ‘free’ to create a value proposition that seems consumer weighted at first, then selling the users in some way to larger business partners is so pervasive, a lot of folks are just going to say, “yeah, that sounds like business.” But…does it?
The exchange of goods and services in trade for other goods and services or abstractions thereof makes logical sense to most people. I’d argue that the lens of American consumption has distorted the image a bit, but if you take it down to the core components - you have and/or provide A and I have and/or provide B and I don’t want to learn how to provide A, so let me just trade you some B for some A - most people follow. This is disregarding basic humanity dictating we should also provide for people who can’t ‘pay us back,’ but for now, let’s just focus on the simple trade concept.
From here, all the dragons of the world were born. Because if you really really need or want something, but cannot provide it for yourself, you will likely be willing to fork over more of what you can provide than is a fair amount to acquire it. Scarcity will make you pay more. Novelty will make you pay more. And this is the domain of the Medio-cretin. The selfish middle man. I know that’s not what it means, but I like it. This entity sits between you and the things you need or want and takes a little cut of everything for the hard work of ‘being the person who bought all of it so it’s scarce and you can’t have it.’ Sometimes they provide services like moving the goods from a place you aren’t to a place you aren’t aren’t. Sometimes they were born into enough land to house the goods so that they can sell them when they are out of season, and therefor even more scarce. But mostly, medio-cretins just ‘extract wealth’ as commerce flows through their tolled spillways. This isn’t the thesis at all. I really just wanted to spend a paragraph bagging on capitalistic dogma that seems totally normal until you inspect it even a little.
99.9% of human history happened under this sort of thing, but with few exceptions at least you were getting something out of the deal. Figs in February, that sort of thing. But as the economy of services started booming after our boxes for tax paperwork and pornography were tethered together, the product became more and more abstracted. For a while in the early aughts, services were still all about connecting you with a product. But just the ability to reach anyone, anywhere, at any time started the ball rolling on what would become our current false economy and our current platform dependency. Come, Ebeneezer. Take my hand. Let’s go back to the bygone age of Pets.com and SpaceJam.
The DotCom bubble was a harbinger of a new way of ‘extracting wealth’ (I’ll keep putting it in single quotes until they stop using it as a way to say ‘fucking over the poor in service to the slightly less poor in service of the very very rich. Also, that’s just too much to type every time). Use a technology few people understand to do a little song and dance for people whose ancestors stole a bunch of wealth so they didn’t have to and get them to give you a metric shitton of money, a tiny bit of which you’ll put back into the business, but most of which you’ll spend on tacky parties with people who married their step-daughters and made insulin the printer ink of medicine. Then get bought out (by whom? Who knows! It’s DotCom baby!) and find the next scam. The big problem from the investor perspective with the DotCom boom was that it was still, mostly, based in actually giving the customer a tangible, shippable good. From the medio-cretin’s perspective, the issue was keeping the investor whales fooled just enough to let them extract everything they possibly could out of them. This was usually accomplished by making the customer feel like they were getting an impossible bargain. Because they were! 800.com gave away DVDs for the cost of shipping when DVDs were still transporter technology. Amazon started their expansion by undercutting everyone not by having the best contracts with suppliers, but by eating the cost of discounted goods with investor capital. The entire play is keeping the charade up long enough to be the last one standing and GOING PUBLIC. The heaven of the capitalist religion. Going public means you’re now part of the imaginary shitgibbon known as ‘the economy.’ And the economy can’t let you die lest it lose shareholder value. I’d say this is all an oversimplification, but it’s really not. You can come in with deeper definitions of all of it or better analogies or charts and graphs and quotes from people Matt Damon spewed in that movie where he was a genius in a jumpsuit. Stuck on You. But the truth is, it really is this simple. Charisma and pre-existing wealth from generational hording is the number one way to be a success and hard work and dedication are so far back they might as well still be at the starting line.
A side effect of people cashing in the CD they got on their cereal box for a free month of ‘Buy Stuff Without Talking To Anyone and Also We Have a Lot of Chatrooms Your Kids Don’t Want You to Know They’re In, But They Are! THEY ARE!’ is that the internet - back then, still called the Internet - became ubiquitous very quickly. It was adopted faster than cable and was far more adaptable to daily whims of a world that watched the twin towers tumble and felt a vulnerable need to retreat into comfort and distraction. As access became cheaper and more widespread, online services started becoming a bigger draw to nearly everyone. The first service to really give investors painful all-night hardons was search. And for good reason. The internet was mostly a word-of-mouth series of disparate endpoints all behind a naming system that had a 90% chance of getting you there and a 10% chance of showing you something that would turn your soul into that black, smoldering ball from the end of Time Bandits. Search engines provided a service that was two-fold. They helped you find what you were looking for AND they ranked things in such a way as to mostly prevent you from stepping on a mine made of beheaded journalists and jam jars living up to both parts of their name. They were based on emerging patterns that mapped big data in a way that allowed it to be cross-referenced with incredible speed. And those results could be hashed and cached to provide similar searches with even faster results. It truly was indistinguishable from magic.
But, what if they could also be a secret THIRD thing? Enter the medio-cretin. They realized that your search patterns identified you with shocking precision. The same tools that made search seem like a magic trick made categorizing the people searching practically free. They realized that people didn’t mind seeing ads on basically anything if they didn’t have to pay to use it. And finally, they realized that the people who control search can get paid on every single step of every single transaction. From displaying results to providing a link to get you to a place to serving the ads ON that place with the data they just stole from you - the person eating saltines and ketchup at 3:12 am looking for a lunchbox from your childhood to make you feel like the hole in your sole isn’t filling you with the cold, existential dread of the heat death of the universe every minute you’re not distracted. SEO. Search Engine Optimization. The great grand cousin of all of the bullshit we’re steeping in right now. The bubble had burst. Long live the bubble.
SEO allowed medio-cretins to make entire industries out of gaming your searches, then gaming your thought processes ABOUT those searches, then gaming the entire chain of events to make you feel like you were in control of your interaction with commerce, all while guiding you to a false choice of two doors to the slaughterhouse. Amazon took this further by pricing out brick and mortar stores thanks to subsidies for warehousing in rural areas, fleet vehicles, fuel, and a slash and burn employment model that had a retention rate of about 18 months for developers and about 2 months for laborers. Somewhere in this chaos, a new idea of services started cropping up. Instead of providing a single service at the end of a chain of SEO, why not just become that chain? Instead of being IMDb or Wikipedia, why not be a place where people go to mill around until they think of a place to go? Why not take Microsoft Comic Chat and make it the worst thing to happen to modern civilization? I mean, they didn’t have anything else going on that day.
Platforms started popping up as places where you didn’t have to have anything in mind to engage. Just being on the platform WAS engagement. A BBS, but with no usage limits and live interactions and games where you pretend to be a little mob boss and spam your friends relentlessly to get 50 more MookPoints so you can put a little hat on your little murderer. A comment section where you didn’t even have to misread a headline to say racist bullshit. Classmates.com but without a fee and with new images of your highschool crush not giving a shit about you.
Some platforms did try a little harder to be scoped. YouTube popped up, powered by Flash Player - dear god I’m old - and made sharing your videos much easier. Provided you had a camcorder, capture card, software to edit and title…but trust me, it felt like the world was moving toward some kind of technological paradise where ideas could be freely exchanged on bulletin boards read by millions of people. It launched careers. Being someone on a platform with a following meant you could advertise yourself without having to take out ads on billboards or whatever those small billboards that come rolled up with a rubber band on your doorstep are called. Search speed ran becoming a greybeard technology faster than anyone could imagine and suddenly, platforms were the way to consolidate wealth. SEO still played a huge part. And search wasn’t out of the picture, but the star players were upstart companies that grew out of things like ‘a site made for frat bros to rate women and just be gross animals with each other.’ A site that your grandfather now uses to tell you Obama has a secret dog meat factory under the Marie Calendar’s.
Google realized that search alone wasn’t enough and so they platform-ized their entire whole self. Some of it took. Tons of people use their office productivity suite today. Search has remained a massive part of their identity. They acquired YouTube almost immediately after it went online - that whole story is a weird one. One day I’ll tell you how an emerald heir working in the US illegally wrote code so badly that he had to make bets to his coworker’s skeevy finance friends with his parents’ fortune until one stuck and now we have a guy with skin like the belly of a trout calling people NPCs 100 times in a row but never seeing the irony in that. I digress. Google quickly started realizing that all of the data they’d collected on people for ads was valuable in and of itself. As did the nascent MySpace. And Facebook. And Microsoft Spac…I’m just kidding, I can’t even type that with a straight face. Everyone quickly learned that ecosystems and platforms weren’t valuable because of what they could offer. They were valuable because of what they could harvest. And business users became the primary customer. On the other hand, business users - advertisers, people there to collect demographic data, governments spying on their citizens - were locked in because platforms had all the people. The medio-cretins were living the LIFE. This then snowballed and now we have forest-devouring wrong-answer machines that shit out child porn for nazis. Helluva callback to that first paragraph, huh? Platforms sell you. So diminishing yourself on a platform or removing yourself from it entirely is inherently an anti-fascist act. Every tool they introduce is a way to get you to submit more of yourself to the slurry they pipe to their real customers. Every single thing they offer is a shiny to catch the eye of the crow that lives in your amygdala. They want you to argue and be mad. They don’t ban the most extreme assholes because they drive the most engagement. Your time on any platform is spent putting money in the pockets of the actual and literal worst people in the world.
Time to cut bait.
There’s a lot of aversion to that. So I’m going to go through my personal opinions on the common defenses to remaining on a platform that is demonstrably harmful to others for your own comfort.
“Butt,” I hear you say. And I laugh. Because butts are funny. “But I didn’t say ‘butt,’ I said ‘but,’” I hear you say. Killjoy. “But my friends and family are on platforms.” Yes. They are. And you can be part of the pull to get them to bail as well. Your friends and family were probably mostly there before platforms. And you can, as terrifying as it is, actually interact with them via phone, email, text, or even face to face. What most people mean when they say this is that they want the convenience of ignoring their family coupled with the credit for not forgetting them. “HBDTY” on a timeline. There. No more social obligations with Uncle KeystoneSkolSkinhead. But maybe you’ll get a card with a dollar in it when YOUR BD rolls around! Really consider if your interactions on social media platforms provides you or your family with meaningful connection or if it just proves itself a ping in an empty universe to prove that another ship is floating around in the void somewhere. If you’re using social media to provide a buffer so you can pretend to still be there after your family has said some absolutely vile things, consider actually cutting THEM from your life as well. If your only interaction with your friends is playing CoD on Playstation Plus, they aren’t your friends. I don’t mean this to discount online relationships. Well, yes I do. But I mean it in a way that begs you to make human connections with people. If you have real friends you made doing exactly that, you probably talk to them outside of the platforms on which you met. This is more important now than ever as LLMs are being shilled and pushed and hawked and danced out in front of us with such fervor simply because they want you to get pulled into them. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that people who engage in surface level friendships are very prone to being pulled in by AutoComplete With Extra Steps. I am also aware this is an ableist viewpoint. And there are concessions in every ’solution’ for access, so please understand this isn’t in bad faith nor do I expect bad faith reads in return. I’m really pleading with people to get off of platforms so that everyone else isn’t beholden to them. Because a platform can shut off at any time and there’s nothing less usable or accessible than a dead service. Ultimately, anyone who needs a platform is more likely to be beholden to it than to actually need it. It’s thorny, but Mark Zuckerberg does not give a shit about your family. He would not care one bit if he was shown incontestable proof that his platform was killing people as long as the fine for it was offset by not changing the behavior that lead to the deaths. This isn’t speculation. He’s done exactly this. A fine is just a tax you pay to do illegal things.
“OK, that’s fine. But I hate my family anyway. I’m just on platforms to make money.” Cool. Did you not read the part where I said to come back when you grew a conscience? But OK. Let’s talk about that. “I stay on Twitter because that’s where my business is.” “I stay on Facebook because that’s how I let my customers know about new stock.” “All of my creative connections are on YouTube.” I will admit, this was a hard fact to argue for a while. I mean, a very short while. Engagement is not about you. Your facebook page is not about YOU. Not about your business. Not about your growth or your hustle. It’s about making the most money for the shareholders who own the stock and do literally nothing day to day to improve anything, but just suck profit back from a roulette wheel that’s rigged to only take money from one sucker as the rest of the table gets a tiny bit richer. We’re the sucker. But you knew that. The current numbers I’ve read put bot traffic at something like 55% of all social media interaction across platforms. That number skews stupidly high on Twitter and it’s only going to get worse. Partially because of people like me who are taking a hike! But mostly because the false economy of engagement is bolstered by the new false economy of LLMs. As I said, ALL platforms WILL crumble. They can’t not do it. Once any company is publicly traded - the goal of technoligarchs - its only product becomes shareholder profit. If they can keep squeezing that out with the machines producing what they already were, they will. If they find that they can make more money doing something else, they’ll fire a bunch of people, say they are pivoting, and you’ll have a baby food company making napalm because it increases value for the endless hunger of the profit takers. The line can’t go up forever. So you have to find a way to make them look at a different line doing a Texas Switch while waving your hands wildly. Which is as good a definition of AI as any other.
“What about my history on the platform?” This one is hard to talk about. Mostly because I have to talk about abuse. And abusers. And the psychology of keeping someone in an abusive relationship. And that sucks and it’s sad to think about and it hurts my heart like bacon wrapped sausage. Or being old enough to make a Season 13 Simpsons reference and feeling like that’s a pretty new season, right? RIGHT? Platforms want you to do everything on them to build a history. If gimmicky features are the carrot, your sunk cost is the stick. The pangs of moving away from something you feel like you’ve built are not insubstantial. Many of us pour ourselves into posts. We use social media as a diary. Whole YouTube genres have been created just because people want to tell their tales and feel like someone is listening. History is the “do you think you can do better than me?” of the abusive platform. It’s the “look what I’ve given up for you” and the “do you really want to throw this all away because of one mistake” through crocodile tears to keep you from getting out of a cycle of abuse. The only thing I can really say to this is, really think about how anyone revisits social media content. Old videos show up when someone wants to torpedo another person from 15 years ago. Old posts are almost always used as a way to show hypocrisy in growth. Yes, you have 20 years of history on FaceBook. Are you the same person you were 15 years ago? Do you need a record of that? Are you caught looking into a pool at your past self ‘before you peaked’ instead of living a life that offers you more than nostalgic longing? Or is your history an existential life vest? Proving that you were here. Proving that you existed. Again, all platforms crumble. And they will take the mausoleum of shower thoughts of all of us with them. Look at Vox. A platform created by giving people a place to pour their hearts and minds and loins into only for it to shutter without warning. Look at Friendster or Google+ or Zune Social! Ok, maybe don’t look at Zune, but still. AO3 went offline for weeks because they were a target for cyber terrorism. If all of your history is in one basket, maybe you should be the one to hold on to the basket. Most platforms allow you to do full downloads of your data. If you are in countries outside of the US or a handful of states, they are mandated to do so. Even if you don’t leave, it’s just a good idea if you have a history to download it.
“That’s all well and good, but what about my progress? In things like games or reading challenges or the cookie clicker instance I’ve had running for 9 years?” Unfortunately, this is a concession I have to make. Some of that will be lost. Every game is different and you may be able to move your save files from a service (Cough Cough Not Really Coughing Fuck GamePass Cough NO FUCK GAMEPASS) to a standalone version of a game. Clair Obscur allowed me to do this, but many games will not. While you can still search for things and aren’t beholden to AI Fucts™ brand Alternative Reality Snippets, many games have individual instructions for recovering saves and moving them from where they be to where they ben’t. Many do not. Cutting out the roots of some of these monolithic horrors leaves scars. I do a couple of things to soften the blow. The first is remind myself that I only have save games as long as I’m paying for the service and if the service dies, so do my games and their saves. Stadia subscribers, thinking of you right now. Next is to frame this as an opportunity to pick the game up again and play it fresh. It’s a small concession, but it’s not nothing.
In conclusion, or whatever part of the essay I’m bailing on to jump to one, deplatforming can be scary. It can be tedious. It can be painful. But it can also be very freeing. It can be an incredible feeling of having a burden lifted when you take control of your own online presence. It may mean talking on the phone when it gives you anxiety. It may mean not blurting out every single thought that crosses your mind. But what it ALWAYS means is being more in control of your digital footprint. Now, here’s the little bit of cake at the end, for a treat. Go ahead. It’s good cake. You don’t actually have to leave all platforms to deplatform. I’m still on BlueSky. But I got there by pulling up stakes at Twitter. Literally the day the nazi bought it. KNOWING you can leave - truly knowing in your heart because you’ve done it - means they have no power over you. They have no leverage. At that point, they truly do become a service because your existence there is not in service to them. When BlueSky eats its own face, as these things are wont to do, I’ll just bundle my bindle and whistle a tune as I stroll to the next void into which I will yell my primal yells. You don’t have to go to the Grand Canyon to hear your own echo. A bathroom will do just fine. And most of these places are toilets.