Influence
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 12.19.24
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
— John M. Culkin
With increasingly efficient methods for transmitting information, we have been forced to develop increasingly complex methods for routing and curating that information for relevant use by end users. In our sprint towards developing global social networks, we have lacked the necessary time to consider the far-reaching implications of the incentive models that underly our first-generation solutions for digital social infrastructure.
The algorithms and platforms we created were meant to grant us — as individuals — more freedom, independence, and influence. Instead, in our haste to keep up with the ever-changing technological landscape, we have found ourselves to be influenced by the algorithms. Our behavior morphs to fit the over-optimized mold of engagement, clicks, and attention.
Regulators, witnessing their hold over public perception beginning to slip, attempt to focus their power on those who control the flow of information. What they fail to see is that the corporations who constructed these walled gardens have lost control themselves, growing too dependent on these models to change course. When we route our information through black box algorithms, we concede the ability to forecast the consequences.
This week, we highlight writers who reflect on how our online environments shape the way we communicate and how we can reverse this dynamic, becoming the forces that influence these systems. By reclaiming our agency, we can build platforms that prioritize the efficient exchange of information and ideas, elevating meaningful discourse.
After Babel
Written by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business and author of multiple books including The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, along with editor and researcher, Zach Rausch.
“The story of Babel is the best metaphor I’ve found for making sense of the momentous sociological, cultural, and epistemological changes that occurred in many nations in the early 2010s, which gave us the chaos, fragmentation, and outrage that began to set in by the mid-2010s. There are many causes of the transformation, but I believe that the largest single cause was the rapid conversion, after 2009, of the early “social networking systems,” which made it easy for people to communicate with others, into “social media platforms,” upon which people stand and perform in pursuit of publicly quantified prestige and influence. There was a sudden increase in shouting and a decline in listening. There was a loss of shared stories, shared meanings, and human relationships.
Pondering that loss reminded me of Genesis 11 when the descendants of Noah arrive at the plain of Shinar. They decide to build a city with a tower whose top shall reach the heavens. God is not pleased by their hubris and says:
Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
Imagine what that would be like—to feel that humanity was on top of the world one moment, with grand achievements and limitless possibilities. And then, from out of nowhere, you find that everything you built together has crumbled, and you can’t even talk together or work together to restore it.”
Big Desk Energy
Written by Tyler Denk, co-founder and CEO of beehiiv and early hire at Morning Brew.
Death by a thousand substacks
If you’re not a breadwinner, you’re the yeast.
“They say that publications on their platform are independent voices and brands. But they present them all as parts of Substack. They all look alike, and they all look like ‘Substack.’ … It’s the illusion of independence.”
John Gruber, Daring Fireball
It’s a fundamental reorientation of Substack’s priorities to ensure that the Substack name and brand is front and center wherever possible.
“Imagine the author of a book telling people to ‘read my Amazon’. A great director trying to promote their film by saying ‘click on my Max’. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden.”
While this may seem subtle, it’s death by a thousand substacks. This is a calculated erosion of writers' brand identities and connection with their readers to build a successful social app on the back of the platform's top voices.
Said differently, Substack’s incentives are no longer aligned with their publishers.
Matt Pearce
Written by Matt Pearce, President of the Media Guild of the West and former reporter for the LA Times.
“When you take the satellite-level view of all these accelerating digital curbs worldwide, the ideal of a borderless open internet — like liberal democracy itself — is falling apart as a universal norm. Life online for billions of humans, like life in general, increasingly operates under a mix of political and commercial controls, some more intrusive than others.
As users, we live in a thicket of increasingly unstable contradictions: Online, we are hybrid citizens of our geographic nations and of a world community. Who gets to be in charge? More of our time is being spent in digital spaces beyond all democratic accountability, and more of the backlash to the loss of control is becoming illiberal.
For governments, one plain lesson, amid all of it, is that whoever controls digital infrastructure controls digital sovereignty, and maybe national sovereignty itself.”
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