Our Creativity and Attention is Free Labour

Part 2 of "The Barbed Hook of Big Tech Capitalism"

(I’ve recorded a voice over above, if you prefer listening. This is part of a 3 part series on Social Media, and it’s implications Part 1 is here).

The 4.8 Billion Commoners

In Yanis Varoufakis’s novel ‘The Other Now’, the character Eva makes such a glaring point: 

"Our attention has become a commodity, harvested by the algorithms that power social media. These platforms profit from our free labour as we generate content, likes, and data, which are then sold to advertisers. It is a new form of exploitation, where our leisure and social interactions are turned into a source of profit for the few."

The picture being painted here is a more sophisticated and complex version of the industrial revolution. Back then, proletariat masses march into the mines and factories, exchanging their labour for pittance. Survival. They watched as the few got rich from the profits of their graft. Now our labour is no longer manual, it is mental and psychological. We labour with our creativity and our attention. Just like our physical labour, it’s precious, and finite. It’s not just content creation that is work. The act of consuming is attentional labour. Scrolling is a form of mental work, giving out energy to social media rather than our own lives. This point alone moves me to reduce my scrolling. 

I am literally giving away my precious mental focus to someone else's agenda, whether that’s the content creators, or the platform.

The striking piece for me is that the vast majority of us are not even getting paid for this labour. We are literally creating or consuming content for free, benefiting big tech’s profiteering, and simultaneously providing the fuel that keeps our beloved friends and family hooked on their phones. What makes it all the more pernicious is that we are sold various dreams surrounding the power of social media as a route to financial success. Whether that’s grow and find an audience, point people to your real world business, or make an income from content, the message is the same. Use social media to grow your income.

The Next Gen’s Aspirations

Young people’s aspirations for how they make money are changing. One report found that One fifth of 18-26 yr olds in the UK are aspiring to make their income from social media. Being a content creator and online influencer was more popular that many other traditional jobs, such as being a teacher, or working in medicine. Let’s hold these young aspiring content creators in mind during the next section. 

The Ideal versus the Real Deal 

According to an Adobe survey, of the 4.8 billion social media users, or should I say unpaid workers, 50 million people consider themselves content creators. Just 14% of those people are making any income, or roughly 7 million. Just 2-3% of those 7 million people are earning a full time wage. That’s roughly 175,000 people in the world that are actually making a full time wage from content creation. Or put it another way, that’s 0.0036% of social media users overall.

I’m not sure this is the story we’re perceiving because that tiny portion of people get propelled by the algorithm into most of our feeds. Those that are most benfiting from the profits are the loudest voices propelled by the algorithm, encouraging everyone else to join in the jamboree. “Hey this is great, make money on social media!” We are the factory workers, looking up into the glass offices of the 0.0036% fat cat managers saying “If you graft hard, you’ll be able to where a suit like me and sit in a chair!”. 

(Thanks, Ideogram App AI image generation!)

The very act of massive replication of these few voices is what earns them enough money to carry on. It’s the epitemy of inequality. As a receiver it’s impossible to comprehend all the other content that doesn’t reach the top of the pile, because we just don’t see it. My sense is the zeitgeist is similar to the American dream. The success stories are shoved in our faces as idols and role models for how to do it. The influencer proliferation leads us to believe it is possible and commonplace to ascend, whilst those who fail, and the deleterious aftermath of that wasted human potential, gets repressed into the shadows. 

Look at this way. When people sign up to currency trading accounts online, companies are legally obliged to disclose the risks associated with trading. It goes something like this. “Earn loads of money trading with us” Then underneath in smaller writing “WARNING, 70-80% of people actually loose money trading with us!” 

Imagine the same with social media. “Want to earn a living online?! Join us and become a content creator?!” “Warning, just 14% will go on to earn anything, and only 0.0036% of our users earn a full time wage!”.  

The next generation want a job that barely exists. 

Promoting ‘Real World’ Business

What makes the dynamic so pernicious and destructive is that it’s not even as simple as earn or not earn from content creation. Lots of people are content creators not to earn money, but to promote what they’re doing in the real world. So now we have to work twice! Once for free for Meta, and then again with whatever we’re actually working on in the world. This has created a jumbled up big soup of content creativity, marketing, sales, and actually doing your job, all lumped into one pot of vague promises. But the overall message is clear: “If you want your business to succeed, you’ve got to use social media”. The Centre of Humane Technology refer to social media as being a parasite that has woven into the fabric of our existence. [LINK] It is an apt description. 

Imagine for a second if we scooped up all the time and energy spent either scrolling or creating content and put it to better use. I believe the world would look like a very different place. Even just half the energy redirected away from social media each day… 

Big Tech owners as Feudal Lords

Back to Eva for a moment, from ‘The Other Now’.  She thinks this situation is the ultimate dream come true for the few techno-lords.

“Eva had become convinced that no self-respecting liberal could condone big tech’s mass manipulation techniques, more defend its gains as a fair reward for entrepreneurship. It’s returns were only made possible by a species of techno-feudalism that made billions of people work for it for free”. 

So not only do we not get paid for our efforts, we don’t own our efforts either. Techno-feudalism is a great way to describe it. Owners and shareholders of big companies like Meta and TikTock are the modern equivalent of feudal lords. They own all the power and the land, and they make us masses work for them, and pay them rent and tax for the privilege. The only difference now is the land is software, and the taxes are our attention and our creativity. Our added collective challenge is the new Feudal Tech Lords don’t just own the software lands, they hold substantial reigns over our culture. 

Beyond Economic Output: Culture and Passion

This creates a big problem for culture. The people and businesses that become influential are those that are good at marketing, good at attention grabbing, and good at manipulating the algorithm. These influencers are people are then favoured by the algorithm, and so they get under our noses more often. This creates a biased representation of reality. A therapist that goes viral has cracked the algorithm. It doesn’t necessarily make them a good therapist. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are still people that rise to the top based on virtue, and their popularity is warranted. The issue is it is very hard for us to distinguish what is genuine popularity and algorithm fuelled hot-air and over-inflation. So we have a culture of popularity and influencers that are often not based on virtue, but by their ability to play the game, and crack the code. Are those the kinds of people that we want to be culturally influential? 

If the majority of us are using social media as a lens to perceive what’s going on in the world, our very perception of the world is being influenced largely by those that are good marketeers, or good at highjacking the algorithms. Algorithms like content that incites an emotional reaction, because it keeps us engaged for longer. These emotional rabbit holes divide us, activate our nervous systems into fight or flight, polarises our perceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, me versus you. It is not uniting. It is radicalising and divisive.

It’s easy focus in on the large scale political radicalising that we see on the news, but I think it’s far more slippery that just the big stuff. Years ago when I moved to North Wales I shifted my enjoyment of cycling up a gear (sorry). I bought a proper road bike, started watching road bike videos. Followed road bike people. A few months later all my recommended videos were of road bikes better than mine, Strava was showing me how much faster I could go if I got this bit of gear and shaved my legs. Adverts on FB were showing me good deals on better bikes. I wanted it. I got sucked right in for a while. I bought a faster, lighter bike. My attention and interest was getting funnelled into this one expression of passion. For a while there I lost touch with many of my other interests. One day I remember seeing my youtube feed and realising hang on a sec, I like bikes, but am I really this keen?!” No. I’d been drawn in, and was complicit in the ramping up of my attention into a particular area of interest. It had hooked the inner magpie in me that’s interested in shiny things and being part of a tribe. Take away all the videos and adverts, stop following the online voices, do I want it all so bad? No. If this is just little old me with bikes, I can only wonder what’s happening on a population wide scale. How many red herrings are we all being teased into unwittingly, that are drawing us away from what really matters? 

I just hope people are still able to snap out of it, as I was. I still love riding bikes. Just less lycra!

OK, having explored a bit of the economic and political, Part 3 zooms in on the individual’s experience, exploring the myth of Narcissus, and how it relates to our phones.