Digital Pollution and the Commodification of Humanity
In 2002, DirectTV DSL released a commercial where a man had reached the end of the internet. Even to a moderately savvy online audience of that time this premise was very silly.
An audience of today would immediately recognize this sentiment as drinking the ocean.
Wyzowl’s Adam Hayes writes that to watch all of the content on YouTube alone it would take 17,810 years of consecutive watching.
That number was arrived at using some fuzzy logic, but the picture is crystal clear and you likely have an expiration date that says, “Use by 55.” Point is at your best you’d never watch more than 1% of YouTube.
And the internet isn’t even just YouTube. It’s like 10 YouTubes!
And this means that every single day there is more content produced than you could reasonably consume in your lifetime. Did you know time is your fundamental resource for which you Faustian bargain your whole life.
THE VALUE OF TIME
It is important to understand that capitalism has converted both work and time into a broad concept called labor. Labor is the commodification of human life into the spreadsheets of corporate profit.
Hey now, I love capitalism. I have a little mug that says this, so don’t come after me! Boo Mister Marx! We good yet?
Regardless, it is important to recognize the trade for what it actually is. It is trading parts of your life for monetary abstract value that can be exchanged for goods and services according to the economic scholar “The Simpsons.”
In this regard we should think about minimum wage in America as costing $7.25 per hour of human life.
According to this data from Dreams we get about 692,040 hours on earth and assuming we get rid of those pesky labor laws, it only costs about 5 million dollars for every waking hour of someone’s life.
For context, Governor Doug Burgum recently spent 2.5 lives on his presidential bid. And still retains more than 200 human lives of value.
This information has a few different important implications. The first is it makes a belief in eldritch horror more occupational than philosophical. The second is it gets us to think about the limit and value of time we have to be alive.
Now that we understand this we can start going back to the plastic ocean. No, not the plastic in our ocean, the metaphor about digital waste. One horror at a time please.
THE OTHER PLASTIC OCEAN
Content as a concept is kind of like cheese. It isn’t intrinsically good or bad by itself. But much like cheese, it does have drug-like addictive properties, some of it’s terrible, a lot of it is inaccessible, it can go bad real quick, and we all have certain tastes.
I think any content that is produced for authentic and honest means is good.
I think since time ancient when we were drawing little cute things on cave walls to make ourselves laugh, cry, or leave a legacy —then we’re dealing with the good stuff.
I think a child’s drawing on a fridge is beautiful. I think it adds to this world in so many meaningful and profound ways. It matters.
It’s your kid or your friend’s kid. It has emotional connection, it has value, and it probably really functionally sucks as a drawing if we’re honest, but they’re five, what did you expect?
Anyways, when is content a problem then? Pretty much every single other time. Here, watch this 4 hour video on plagiarism. I’ll wait!
The video above by…I don’t know who it is. I think I made it? Yeah no, that sounds right. In my video above I go to great lengths to talk about stealing other people’s content. And I really try to hammer home that it’s about the worst thing you can do.
I’m only an hour in and I definitely blacked out during making it, so I don’t know what the last Full-Run-Time-of-the-Titanic is about yet.
The point I want to make is that the unethical and lazy nature of plagiarism often creates bad content at best or often more noise.
We already have limited time in the world, must we drink the backwash of someone else’s mountain dew?
But this isn’t just a problem of regurgitated content, it’s also the problem that occurs with the echoing of content. Reaction videos, deep dives, lets plays, endless articles, and so on. These aren’t bad intrinsically if they qualify for my single qualification of honest and authentic.
But almost inevitably they’re structured around the algorithm. People approach creation as a top-down means from which to garner engagement.
How do I get people to engage? Click? Subscribe? And the dark secret that nobody talks about is what is buried beneath that mentality and what creates online pollution in the first place — the simple question:
“How do I extract labor value from people who use the internet?”
At that point you’re not even a content creator, you’re a full fledged capitalist. When we are not approaching content through a lens of honest creation or expression or art, what we are doing is commodifying the experience of content in a way that exploits people’s time.
It does not matter if someone enjoyed your content, it matters they gave their value of time to the benefit of ads or whatever data collection sales metric they use. A person’s enjoyment becomes secondary and inconsequential.
You are not a person, you are “Chat.” You are not a person, you are “follower,” “Like,” “Ad metrics,” and so on.
What!? No way Faye, content is for my entertainment and parasocially speaking I’m basically engaged to my Twitch Wiafu!
Ha ha, you’re only worth 40 dollars a year to Facebook Brah.
WALKING ON THIN ICE
To go back to the story of the man finishing the internet, when we’re looking at what is effectively infinity, how do we really engage in a way that is valuable to us?
I believe we’ve had a rather human reaction to this overwhelming stress of content engagement, fear of missing out, capitalistic exploitation of markets (member the mug), and no safe guards for our pleasure or privacy.
So, we engage with shorter content.
TikTok is the natural evolution because 30 seconds is virtually a free amount of our time. It’s nothing. And how those three hours disappeared is a mystery. I just watched 300 Tiktok videos and 300 x 0 is 0. Something is going on!
And basically every single online platform is designed to be addictive, keep your engagement, and do everything.
As people struggle for alternative incomes as inflation increases, wage decreases, there becomes hundreds of thousands of people playing the game by just adding to the noise and pollution both digital and real in the hopes of engagement, views, clicks, and profit.
Except you’re not an entrepreneur, you just have a vague boss like YouTube who has pyramid schemed you into exploiting others. Here is another video I think I made on that subject.
And this is not simply our entertainment sector. Non-profits, humanitarian efforts, community groups or churches are competing in the same market of engaging your time.
It isn’t your 9:00 to 5:00 jobs anymore, any time you’re connected to the internet consider yourself working for someone. And yeah, that means most of us don’t stop working anymore.
So, we’re currently in a sort of standoff between a BF Skinner world of infinite ads and information pollution and total revolt against the shittiest online world we can imagine. Piracy is back in a big way, baby.
All the beauty, utility, and ability...beautility…to use the internet in the ways we actually want it — to spread art, connect to people, and be entertained is extremely cheap. It is such a fundamentally important tool it should be free.
Huh, my mug just cracked. That was weird.
I think a lot of us are waiting for an internet 3.0 — which actually cares about humans first and not just commodifies us into our own Matrix battery cell of sadness. Something less predatory, invasive, and inhuman than addictive algorithms.
The internet is still actually new. And I think that’s worth remembering. It started as a weird, free, and creative and it can edge back to that. It can get better and I think it’s worth looking forward to that.
