Ghost Exits
It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of platforms
The prospect of TikTok suddenly vanishing is a fascinating thought experiment that the United States might actually conduct soon: What if one of the pillars of contemporary reality suddenly vanished? How would we reallocate all those newly available hours of screen time? Would everyone start volunteering and baking bread and hanging out at the Elks Lodge? Would kids go outside and play flag football again? Would all the silly restaurant gimmicks end? I’m not optimistic enough to anticipate any of that, and we all know what’s more likely: Other social media will backfill those vacant TikTok hours; after a brief hiccup, regularly scheduled programming will resume. Nonetheless, a major rupture in the fabric of the internet, however momentary, would call attention to the all-encompassing media environment we inhabit and perhaps give us a peek at what’s beyond it. If that happened, would we like what we saw?
Every crisis nowadays seems to highlight an institutional failure or void, sometimes imaginary but usually real—the hollow space that the platform layer ordinarily conceals. Mike Pepi has written an important new book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, which just came out this week, making an argument that should be obvious but isn’t: We need more (and better) institutions and fewer platforms, and the latter have flourished at the expense of the former, advancing a specific agenda under an apolitical guise (it’s the rare book of criticism that describes a set of problems and then manages to synthesize a compelling solution). Pepi cites Josh Citarella’s satirical StateBook concept—“a public option for social media,” in which a Facebook-like service is rolled into the US Postal Service—as an example of the institutional approach needed. The book made me nostalgic for the kind of tech criticism that used to be more common in the late 2010s. Interestingly, most of what we said back then is still true, and many of the problems have gotten worse, but perhaps you can only write the same essay so many times, and since we’re all beholden to the same platforms Pepi critiques here, we all have to embrace novelty to get anyone’s attention. Or maybe the pandemic just induced Stockholm syndrome and made us realize we couldn’t live without the platforms. But, as Pepi argues, that is a purposeful illusion: We depend on those platforms more because our institutions have weakened. The present arrangement was far from inevitable and need not be permanent.
Another book published this week is Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, which resonates well with Pepi’s work. Spotify has always fascinated me because, unlike social media, it presents its users with a sense of real abundance—an offer you can’t refuse. Closer examination, however, reveals the tradeoffs involved. Pelly has been writing essential Spotify criticism for years (see here) and an excerpt from the book recently appeared in Harper’s, describing Spotify’s Perfect Fit Content program, which fills playlists with stock music attributed to fake artists. “Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days,” Pelly writes. “In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of song or artist they were hearing.” This finding opened the door for Spotify’s gradual introduction of tracks by “ghost artists”—music made by providers with names like Hush Hush LLC and Catfarm Music AB. While this active degradation of the listening experience is uninspiring, the more substantive concern, of course, is the reallocation of streaming revenue from real musicians, which is obviously why Spotify has pursued the strategy. And which brings us back to Pepi’s argument about platforms’ inherent tendency to extract value from their users and seek growth, while presenting the whole arrangement as a utopia. In an alternate reality, getting rid of TikTok would be easy: You’d just offer something better.
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Reads:
How Netflix changed cinema. “Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is ‘have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.’”
A meditation on the architecture of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. “Walking through the Oculus, I often become nauseated, the architecture’s beatific affect inducing a vision of heaven in a place that is in fact a hell. And sometimes, it’s better for our hells to look like hells.”