In the past couple years I’ve been thinking about an aspect of 21st century technology that I’m not sure has a name. I thought about it again when I read this recent post by Cory Doctorow on “The ordinariness of evil”. Cory talks about gen-AI CEOs touting the impending danger of their products as a weird and evil way to promote them as something with immense potential in the near future. Something you’d want to invest in now. It’s basically snake-oil salesmanship:

In other words, AI is mostly a novelty, a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction. Where AI does produce value, that value is comparable to a plug-in, a new feature for your word processor or image/sound/video-editing package that might help you do your job somewhat better, or it might not.

That doesn’t make AI useless, it just makes it a normal technology: useful for some, useless for others, capable of being abused and likely to waste a lot of time when used unwisely.

And so this relates to that thing I’ve been thinking about: that there have been an increasing number of technologies that seem useful for some use-cases, but that we were somehow sold as useful for everyone. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of examples of this phenomenon:

• From the 1980s to the 2000s, 3D-movies were mostly a novelty in theatres. And then some people figured they wanted to turn this into mass-market appeal. We got 3D televisions, 3D cameras and camcorders, and 3D video game consoles. People saw it for what it was, and the market for 3D consumer equipment died in the mid-2010s.
• Virtual Reality was at first either for novelty entertainment gadgets and R&D projects. When the technology had enough breakthroughs, some people identified several relevant use-cases, from architecture to therapy to dedicated entertainment spaces. But once again a few corporations insisted this was the next big thing, pushing VR headsets as mass-market products. They still are, despite consistently failing at it.
• Blockchain, the technology underlying crypto-currencies, is interesting. It was originally meant for digital document signing and other cryptographic use-cases. But it was then decentralized (again, an interesting innovation) and applied to one of the most mass-market products of all: money itself. Many startup CEOs tried to apply this idea to other mass-market products such as art or video-games. They were rightfully ridiculed, but somehow this is still going on.
• And now we have generative AI, which is also based on interesting and useful technologies, from statistical algorithms to machine learning. Anybody can think of a few use-cases where that technology would be incredibly useful, but it’s all been spoiled because, once again, corporations and people with too much money are trying to push it as a mass-market product. And because, unlike previous technologies, the cost of training LLMs is astronomical, we are seeing an equally astronomical push.

Each time this same phenomenon can be observed: some smart people make a cool technology, and it can be very useful in some specific or niche applications, but greedy people instead want to sell it to as many people as possible. Ideally, they want to sell it to everyone. To make it even shorter:

A technology that could be useful in limited markets is utterly ruined by some assholes pushing it to be mass-market.

The incredible financial successes of the iPhone and Facebook and other similar staples of modern society have rewired the brain of executives everywhere. Any new product or company is a failure unless it makes a gazillion dollars from a billion users. Everything needs to be mass-marketed, even when it doesn’t make sense.

I’m sure this phenomenon has already been noted somewhere, but frankly it’s hard to search for it online when you don’t know what it might be called. So until someone points me at prior art on the topic, and until someone comes up with a better term, I’m going to call it “corporate gavage”, where “gavage” is a French-borrowed term for force-feeding, especially force-feeding animals. I think the metaphor is unsubtle enough that you’ll get it.

I’m going to tentatively use “corporate gavage” liberally from now on, but I’d be happy if anybody could point me to prior writings on this topic! Again, I did some online searches, but didn’t find much that was relevant.

Granted, I didn’t search very long. I’m lazy.

This article from NiemanLab titled “I’m a journalist and I’m changing the way I read news. This is how.” didn’t start particularly well for me. It read less about ways to read the news, and more about the inability of some people to just, you know, keep their phone in their pocket when they’re with other people. I know some people truly struggle with this, with connectivity, social media, and all that stuff leading to real mental health issues but, well, I don’t get it.

Anyway, there’s a great bit in the middle of the article, when the author decides to change their ways:

I’ll read news, not other people’s reactions to news. I have resubscribed to print newspapers because they are finite; when you’re done, you’re done

Cryptocurrency critic, technology researcher, and software engineer Molly White recently published this great primer on the “POSSE” philosophy in her “Citation Needed” newsletter:

A simple technique offers the best of both worlds: total control over your own work, while still maintaining a presence on third-party platforms.

POSSE is a pretty bad acronym (standing for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”) describing a pretty good approach where you publish your writings, status updates and cute pet photos on your own website before some sort of (preferably automated) system posts a copy to various 3rd party proprietary services (aka “cross-posting”).

The next time a new social media site comes along, you can plug it in to your existing system. And the next time a social media site dies or becomes untenable, you just disconnect it. With this model, even when a platform goes under, you lose relatively little: your posts still remain live and under your control on your site, even if the copies of them on the disconnected website are abandoned or deleted.

There are many advantages and inconveniences about the POSSE philosophy, and Molly outlines the main ones very well. For what it’s worth, I’m with her when it comes to engaging in conversations originating from the 3rd party services: I don’t “backfeed” replies from Mastodon or Bluesky or whatever into comments on my website, and instead I just check those services every now and then and reply there. Anyway, check out the original article if you’re new to that sort of thing, and share it if you’re not!

I’ve been following the POSSE approach for about 8 years. Like most people, I’ve written my own ad-hoc tools to implement it, and for a bit more than 6 years this tool has been SiloRider, available on Sourcehut (using Mercurial) and Github (using Git).

The interesting thing (to me) about SiloRider is that it works independently of your website. It fetches and parses your blog’s HTML markup, looking for microformat information, which most blogging engines implement, at least partially. SiloRider extracts your latest updates from that, and can cross-post any new ones to a variety of services. It currently supports Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter, and Facebook Pages. When I moved away from PieCrust and returned to WordPress, SiloRider kept chugging along.

Of course, SiloRider isn’t super user-friendly: it’s a command-line tool written in Python, and is therefore meant for tech-people. Sure, I have a super barebones WordPress plugin that invokes it after I’ve published an article, but that plugin is so rough I hesitated a bit before making it public just now (as usual, it’s available on Sourcehut and Github). But if someone is motivated enough, it should be feasible to make it user-friendly enough for a vanilla WordPress user.

Anyway, if you want to give POSSE a try, SiloRider might do the job! I may even reply to questions and bug reports…

I’m always impressed by people who treat their online presence as easily discarded stuff. They abandon their Twitter accounts with the same shrug as when they abandoned Yahoo Mail or Live Journal or whatever, leaving all their emails and posts to rot. I suppose that life is too short to care about emails from 2004 or DMs from 2011, but I so often find myself grateful to be able to refer to some of those old archives that I can’t see myself ever discarding anything. Does that make me a digital hoarder?

Joan Westenberg misses the internet:

The real internet. The one we used to have. Before it all got so much less – and somehow so much more – complicated.

[…]

The one that existed before terms of service. The one that existed before social graphs. The one where being a User meant having a degree of respect, not being treated like a retention/churn statistic.

I Miss The Internet

The article goes into a lot more aspects of the internet that changed over the last two or three decades, but that part made me think about something else I read recently:

I’ve been thinking about online vs real-life communities, and how in the real-world, there are many aspects that separate individuals, but also groups apart from each other. And yet, I’d estimate that most people feel more connection to people in the real world than on any online community.

[…]

We’ve gone from having small local communities, to what can feel like at times, having the entire world in your living room.

Small Communities

Sure, those who jumped onto the social media bandwagons, from MySpace onwards, did face all the problems created with algorithms and engagement metrics and millions of people online on the same website. But that “older” internet didn’t go away. Small communities didn’t go away.