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The Global Web Index (GWI) told me that I’m spending, as a social media user an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes per day multi-networking across an average of 8 social networks and messaging apps. 144 minutes per day! Now comes perspective: that’s 52.925 minutes a year, equal to 882 hours, equal to 37 days/year. One whole month and a little bit more of my year squandering with my scrolling thumb. And then I don’t have time!
GWI: More than 4.5 billion people are using the internet at the start of 2020. Active social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark with this number increasing by more than 9 percent (321 million new users) since this time last year. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population is already online, and trends suggest that more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year (Global social media research summary 2020
In 1966 Galactus first appeared in the Marvel Comics Universe. He was a cosmic entity that needed to devour planets to maintain his existence. He was everlastingly hungry. Sometimes actual internet with actual capitalism can be as voracious as this supervillain, like a ‘living force of nature whose existence is necessary to correct the imbalances between the conceptual entities: Eternity and Death’ (Silver Surfer; vol. 3; #10; April 1988).
Beside god-like figures like these one the digital universe of internet has also black holes (Centralized Social Networks), spacetime entities where nothing, not even light, can enter or escape.
Pool of Knowledge
Centripetal forces drag us to the online realms, to a part of the Pool of Knowledge that Steve Jobs spoke of, from which we get so much and demands from us in return, nothing more and nothing less, than just our identity. “You know, we don’t grow most of the food we eat. We wear clothes other people make. We speak a language that other people developed. We use a mathematics that other people evolved… I mean, we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge
We need internet, do we not? It has become as important as air. A Wi-Fi password, being online, connected is like breathing. We heard the calling not so long ago and we cling for it. As we navigate towards that nucleus of understanding calling us we encounter friends and foes, to the left, center or right. Billions wanting to be heard, speaking simultaneously about money, fitness, cats, and joys giving us hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper of different colors in the form of posts, stories, reels, videos, and photos. We are all pamphleteers.
Paraphrasing Marcos (Ricardo Darin) in Nueve reinas (2000) the pamphleteers are there, but you don’t see them. That is what it is all about. They are, but they are not. So, take care of the briefcase, the suitcase, the door, the window, the car. Take care of the savings, take care of the ass. Because they are there, they will always be there.
What’s the lesson? What’s the takeaway? What’s the knowledge? What’s the gig? Kleptomaniacs of time that always appear without fail. To know how to steal time has become the most valuable obligation, and then trade it for money. Do we know who wins in this fast and almost imperceptible mess? How do they win so much and so fast?
By using our data. The fingerprints of our imperative need to consume and produce content (relevant or irrelevant, it doesn’t matter). Social networking changed our way of doing, being and posing. For a brief dip in the Pool of Knowledge we left days of our time that multiplied by billions in obscene sums of money for the Big Techs aggregators.
To say the internet has created astounding pathways for opportunity and success is an understatement. It has democratized access to information, created boundless economic opportunities and connected people worlds apart.
Web 2.0 a Big Tech Oligopoly
Today’s internet looks less like its inventors’ visions of a decentralized, democratic information network and more like an oligopoly controlled largely by the companies that own the data. Big Tech platforms know for whom and what we search, who are our friends and family, what we like and dislike. These companies capitalize on our digital identities for their lucrative advertising-based business models, capturing enormous value at the expense of the privacy of their users.
Do we want our personal data to continue as the engine of the internet economy? Is there a better path forward for the internet of 2030?
In a few years, all companies will need to rethink their operating models to treat their users as crucial partners from the start. Proprietary platforms might start to become open-source protocols. Companies’ sustained competitive advantages will come from product and technological superiority but also from user loyalty and trust. To succeed, companies will need to move toward more open services with plentiful value capture opportunities for users along the way.(Pooja Shah. How Web 3.0 Creates Value for Users, Not Platforms
My fingerprints are all over LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time browsing, commenting, and writing, searching and contributing. But at certain times my daily visit to that social network overwhelms me.
Pamphleteers know what they are doing, they understand the rules of the game, they know the algorithm and that is why the links do not go on the post but in the first comment. They do not want to be punished by the Artificial Intelligence, so they interact in a threesome on the 2.0 choreography. In the first place, the companies that own the social networks that keep the transactional data generated by this content, accepted by all of us in the Terms and Conditions (Privacy Policy). The second dancer are the authors of what is generated who maintain the intellectual property of what is published. Finally, readers, viewers or content consumers who lower or raise their thumbs on what is offered.
The 5 Big Techs (Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook) can sell, on average, $ 200 billion annually for their services (Forbes, 2021). In 2020, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn made $ 8 billion in revenue, about $ 10 annually for each of its nearly 800 million users. What is the profit of an influencer on Linkedin? As of June 2021, zero. YouTube, owned by Alphabet (Google), had profits in 2020 of about $ 19 billion. The biggest YouTuber is a 9-year-old boy named Ryan Kaji, who earned nearly $ 30 million annually (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2020
According to the data from Inequality.org and AFL-CIO Paywatch the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation can be from 264-to-1 up to 320-to-1. Can we measure a similar ratio of Social Networks and Content Creators? Maybe. Let me deduce that the ratio will be 9.700-to-1, or 99%/1% for the Big Techs. What’s the tradeoff: privacy, data, oligopoly, power. Silicon Valley new Digital Bourgeois are taking the obscene biggest portion of the cake and that’s irritating many people by the minute.
In addition to taking most of the cake, the Big Tech Burgesses turn out to be very serious, becoming censors of what they consider to be political correctness. The ‘Public Sphere’ of freedom, of which Jurgen Habermas spoke in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1992), in which critical discussions were held outside the control of the State and private interference is becoming smaller and smaller and even disappearing. No one has the right to decide what can or cannot be said, real or virtually. Everyone can say what they want, but they must pay the social and legal consequences that this implies.
From the moment Big Brother Tech defines who speaks and who does not, well-thinking people flee from those places to places where they can be free, truly free. George Orwell said, speaking about the culture of the pamphlets, that is a one-man show. “One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and “high-brow” than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals…” Pamphleteers cannot be told what can and cannot be said and done.
It’s amazing how similar the world of the late-eighteenth century pamphlet wars is to today’s social media+
Mortals, hear the noise of broken chains, see on the throne the noble equality of the Blockchain, the revolutionary commandos of the New Democratic Internet.
‘Virtual Communism’ on the Web 3.0
Instead of relying on trusted intermediaries to coordinate users, Web 3.0 systems use mechanisms such as cryptographic proofs and economic incentives to guarantee users that the system is working as expected. As a result, Web 3.0 networks are trustworthy, yet decentralized. And because these projects succeed only if their users cooperate, their creators have strong incentives to align with their users’ best interests (Pooja Shah. How Web 3.0 Creates Value for Users, Not Platforms, 2020).
If it were not true, I would think that it is a delusion, but the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1848) seems to have every day more chances of being fulfilled in the virtuality of internet sites than in the reality of a territory. It would be interesting to imagine what the general program of 10 short-term demands would have looked like today. The promised paradise by Marx and Engels is virtual, it always was, it is not analogical as they believed. The emancipatory revolution is with tracking not with rakes, it’s with overwhelmed creators not proletarians, it’s with coding not with base slogans. Just thinking about it gives me chills, but I wonder how much more voracious this Galactus-like-capitalism can endure rampant inequality.
As with the productive system of the economy, it seems to me that the content generation system must go towards the lost loving feeling of unity, altruism, and fairer distribution, and/or need to innovate by improving what exists a lot! This means, continuing with the productive analogy, leaving behind the extractive linear process of the Web 2.0 of generation, production, use and disposal of things. It is necessary to rethink the generation, production, ownership and surplus value of the contents and the consumers. The possibility to be owners of what we generate without being sell as merchandise in the meanwhile! A Reuse Economy (bluntly marketing) does not work, a true Circular Economy of internet content is needed.
These almost virtual paradises could be in existence now. Places where instead of storing all data on servers owned by a central authority which gives them complete power over the data, it is stored as blocks or chunks of data chained chronologically in servers all across the world not owned by any particular entity (Bhahik Soni, 2021
Decentralized Social Networks has no central proprietory authority and are built on Blockchain. All.me, disaspora, DTube, Earn, GNU Social, Indorse, Manyverse, Mastodon, Memo, Minds, Peepeth, Sapien, Social X, Steemit, Synereo are some examples.
Creators make money. We do not yet know what the ratio will be between the owners of the platforms and the authors. The ratio will probably be less than 99/1 or 9,767 times. It remains to be seen how much it will go down, but if it goes down it will be good news, the true revolution of a more egalitarian virtual society. We will reach the egalitarian paradise. We will have succeeded.
Unless Big Tech renounces Gatopardism (the strategy of advocating for revolutionary change, but in practice only superficially modifying things), awake soon and be less selfish. Then…
; Freddie Mercury, 1986.
+ Everyone a pamphleteer? Reconsidering comparisons of mediated public participation in the print age and the digital era; Hallvard Moe, 2010.
Decentralized vs Centralized Social Media: Is it time to delete Facebook?SocialX NetworkWhy will decentralized social networks thrive in the future?Christopher LeeExamining Decentralized Social Networksgetstream.io; Synereo Builds the World’s First Decentralized Social Network by BIZCATALYST360°
