The Brazilianization of the Internet

Spam filters don't help you when you're the spam

An article that still haunts me is this Vice feature from 2021 about gamers who stream to no one—there are thousands on the platform who broadcast their gameplay to single digit audiences. The piece seemed to signal the end of one era for social media, where everyone participates, and the dawn of a new era, in which a few people speak and everyone else listens. In the awkward transition phase between the two, which still drags on, many find themselves shouting into the void, posting to a dwindling audience and unsure what to do about it. Talking to no one is the near future of social media, the digital equivalent of warming your hands over an oil drum bonfire in an abandoned city—what you do when you missed the last bus out of town and have to loiter as comfortably as possible in the ruins. We may have once imagined that social media would ultimately end by imploding suddenly, releasing us from the last day of school into a summer of the real, but no such catharsis is coming. When institutions die now, they rarely give us the closure of ceasing to exist—they live on in zombie form, and we learn to tolerate the gradually worsening conditions they impose. We stick around Twitter because we need to for professional reasons, we may tell ourselves, but the real job is just scavenging copper wires from the wreckage.

Everyone assumes that spam filters exist to shield them from spam and rarely consider that they might be the spam other people need protection from. One of the benefits of having an email newsletter is that it makes you aware of this. A friend told me he’d “recently signed up for a bunch of Substacks” and then held up his phone to show me the email folder he routed them all into, which contained thousands of unread messages. As we retreat from the toxic, cluttered social media clearnet to the newsletter-and-messaging cozyweb, this is closer to the real future of the internet: Each of us armoring our digital selves with a carefully constructed array of filters to let in the good and keep out the bad—categories that are constantly changing, and never perfectly defined. The red badge notification used to be one of the most reliable indicators of signal amid the noise, but even that has degraded, thanks to proliferating groupchats as well as the feature’s exploitation by legacy platforms. Now you have to come up with your own system, or brace yourself for an onslaught of meaningless alerts.

The various mechanisms that partition the internet and determine who sees what—spam filters, login screens, captchas, algorithmic sorting—all face a tradeoff between suppressing too much of what’s legitimate and admitting too much of what isn’t. I recently wrote about how, as digital simulations of personhood become less distinguishable from actual humans, who are in turn behaving more like bots, this tradeoff will become more punishing and humans themselves will have a harder time competing for attention and access. In a landscape that feels increasingly noisy and polluted, this challenge is heightened even further, as the stabilizing elements steadily retreat from it, creating a vicious cycle where the spam and fury become ever more concentrated. Another 2021 essay, The Brazilianization of the World by Alex Hochuli, describes how “the fate of being modern but not modern enough now seems to be shared by large parts of the world: WhatsApp and favelas, e-commerce and open sewers.” As a small cohort of venal elites separates itself, physically and socially, from the much larger and poorer population in which it’s embedded, it creates an idea of interior and exterior existence. The Twitch streamer with no audience anticipates life on the outside, in the dead public space of a Brazilianized, enclave-gated internet, a ground that shifted under our feet with little warning, turning us into street buskers playing music we didn’t realize no one could hear.

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Reads:

• Sam Kriss on how to live without your phone. “I’m told that smoking has declined basically in tandem with the rise of the smartphone. This makes sense. They’re both something to do with your hands in the empty moments, before or afterwards, when you’re waiting for something else to happen.”

• Kazys Varnelis on Silicon Valley’s utopian project to build new cities, the aesthetic characteristics of AI imagery, and Thomas Kinkade. “The vision encapsulated by California Forever, while aiming for Utopia, mirrors the inherent tensions within the aesthetics of AI—between the pursuit of a transcendent future and the gravitational pull of nostalgic, kitsch imagery that dominates the collective unconscious in the era of Trump.”

• Driving is worse now because society is worse.