The future of blogging – and the world

I have not blogged much in the past couple of years. Why? Many reasons, including workload. There’s also the inescapable social fact that written long-form blogs are well past their heyday. But more crucially the problem has been what Cory Doctorow calls the ‘enshittification’ of internet services.

Let me go through all those, starting with workload. I write full time for a living. It’s hard, and blogs don’t sell books. I post links that nobody clicks. I put up posts about my books – for which the usual result is that Sybil Fawlty doesn’t look up from knitting. “That’s nice, Basil.” Writing takes time, and when I’ve got publisher deadlines I can’t divert my most precious resource – time – into something that won’t help me meet those deadlines. Nor can I devote much time to something that won’t generate income once the material’s out there.

My Adler Gabrielle 25, seen here on the Wellington waterfront (hey, typewriters don’t often get fresh air…)

Socially, I figure long-form written blogs had their peak about a decade ago. I was blogging back then and recall a vigorous community that worked well, particularly because of the ease with which the wordpress.com system enabled commenting. Now? Well, there’s been a good deal of enshittification of the platform – more on that below – but beyond that is the fact that video blogs and podcasts have become the new place for these things. For now.

Finally, there’s enshittification. This is true for all internet platforms: we’re in the end-game phase of the American neo-liberal version of capitalism introduced at the turn of the 1980s across much of the western world. One of the outcomes has been mechanisms enabling corporates to wholly dominate markets and – through scale – national economies. The internet grew up during the period when this happened, with the result that online services are dominated by a handful of gigantic companies that have no ethics, no genuine moral values, and whose sole purpose is to make ever-increasing sums of money for their shareholders, a task at which they will not stop – ever – irrespective of the damage done along the way. They are adept at lying to users about this intent, and have thoroughly enshittified their services in order to keep costs down and profits up. Everyday users – even paying users – aren’t customers, they’re product, and boy do we know it. Everything is riddled with advertising for products we don’t want and will never buy. Quality of support is close to zero. Even paid services keep changing without warning, often wrapped in terms and conditions that are imposed in a one-way mechanism that reveals just how powerless users really are.

WordPress hasn’t been immune. Their blogging service had always featured advertising, but about 18 months ago the quantity exploded to the point where there was no point blogging – these intrusions broke page designs, made it impossible to read the blog, and so forth. That was pegged back. But it was clear that they didn’t want users on that platform – even now I’m fairly sure that WordPress throttles reach. My readership keeps changing in abrupt steps, independently of anything I post, which cannot be due to organic changes in reader trend. Along the way I’ve been barraged with offers to switch to a paid service. I haven’t. One of the ways in which platforms are enshittified is by first making it impossible to use the free service, then capturing paid customers, and then ratcheting up the price once they’re inescapably entangled. Besides, what I have to spend on social media goes elsewhere (here, since you ask: www.matthewwright.net).

A key enshittification mechanism – click bait and capture, then demand payment for the info. Anybody spot the irony here?

Into that mix has come the darker side of human nature: a vigorous and sustained effort by other parties to defraud and mislead users, driven by malign intent and operated at industrial scale both from third-world economies and by malicious state actors. So-called ‘click farms’ are rife to the point where nobody can trust messages from postal services or their household service providers, where misinformation riddles social media, and where social media itself is filled with fake accounts designed to pursue those illicit goals. I get them on this blog: WordPress frequently tells me that someone whose name is a random string of characters has just subscribed. As we say in New Zealand, ‘yeah, right’.

None of this makes me eager to keep on engaging with the internet. As for this blog – well, I had been looking at switching to a service such as Medium, but the research I’ve done makes clear that this – too – has been enshittified of late. I’m still looking at podcasting, probably audio only at this stage. We’ll see. It’s hard to find a service that looks good. It’s symptomatic, as I say, of late-stage neoliberalism, which leaves me worried about the future of the world. But that’s another story.

Meanwhile, if you’re on Facebook, jump over to my author page there and subscribe. It’s where I post a lot of hot goss and news these days: https://www.facebook.com/MatthewWrightNZ

And, as for the way users have been exploited as product by internet services – any thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2024