More is more

The sun in the sky with clouds.

You know how extremely smart people when someone does something a little authoritarian say “there’s nothing new under the sun?” That’s complete bullshit! There’s a lot of new things under the sun! Tic Tacs! F1!

Twitter’s ill-begotten For You algorithm is ostensibly mimicking TikTok’s For You algorithm. Lots of companies want to follow TikTok’s success. But this isn’t Assyria. We didn’t see the Hittites using big, wheeled machines and think, “Oh my god, if we started driving around in big wheeled machines we could gain a similar advantage over our enemies. This will revolutionize warfare!”

Imagine the scale of copying TikTok’s algorithm. Imagine the sheer data. Twitter can sniff at reproducing this technology because they’ve been squatting over the vastest surveillance mechanism ever conceived outside of religion. (I mean the data market as a whole, not any one app.)

We are long past the point of elegant solutions. Brute force is the greatest technological advancement in history. What we wrestle with now could not have existed at any point before now.

I’d say there’s kindness buried in that message, and most of us should be kind to ourselves — you can’t pull your attention off of TikTok because it’s a totally unprecedented stimulus — but let’s not give a pass to power structures that do dangerous things just because we’ve never seen the consequences before. Gianluca Mauro talks about the “Chaos Monkey experiment,” arguing that tech enacts world-altering changes while denying accountability. It is the proverbial monkey in the proverbial Netflix server room, unplugging shit and making you miss Dated & Related.

@gianluca.mauro The Chaos Monkey experiment #learnontiktok #tech #siliconvalley #ethics ♬ original sound – Gianluca Mauro

Or to put it another way: “Move fast and break things”  sounds like a lot of fun until you break things. Which someone probably would have known if they ever played outside with other people.