This article was originally published by Charles Hugh Smith at Of Two Minds Blog.
Turn the crank of social media/search (SM/S) and you get highly profitable Digital Addiction and social destabilization leading to disorder and breakdown.
The extremely profitable inner workings of digital addiction are complex, but the business model is simple: collect user data and sell it to advertisers. The more users you addict, oops I mean attract, and the more time they spend on your platform, the more money you make.
The raison d’etre of social media/search (SM/S) is to collect user data to sell to the highest bidder. To maximize profits, the SM/S platforms stimulate users to post more content and spend more time “engaging” (i.e. creating user data) on their platform.
There are three mechanisms to accomplish this goal:
1. Financial incentives. By offering users a tiny share of a third of the trillion dollars in revenue (of just the top three platforms), users are incentivized to post more content and optimize that content to attract more views/engagement by other users.
The share earned by the few who attract an audience of millions is substantial, but the modest revenues shared with users posting content follows a power law distribution: a handful make millions, a few make $100,000 or more annually, a small circle make a middle class living ($60,000 annually), and the vast “long tail” earn a pittance at best.
Your song received hundreds of thousands of downloads? Thank you for the content and engagement. Here is your share of the revenues generated: $17. Your content attracted thousands of views, here’s your share of advert revenue: $73.
The share is a pittance, but it’s enough to drive a Darwinian frenzy that optimizes extremism and clickbait. This extremism can be measured, and as a result of the frenzied competition for attention, extremism
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at SHTF Plan