From User Generated Content to Creative Commerce — A Mini-Series Recap of the Decline of Signals in 2022 and Building for a Bullish 2023
PART 1: The Decline of Signals
But first, a word from the end of the 2022 timeline.
It’s been quite a year. Hard to imagine after the previous few, just what 2022 had in store for us. With war, inflation, CeFi pretending to be DeFi market mayhem, the Scooby Doo unmasking of an SBF + GG & the gang regulatory-friendly fraud implosion, continuing economic aftershocks from everything this bizarro world version of the roaring 20’s has brought to the forefront so far… It’s a wonder anyone has the stamina left to go through a full list.
Didn’t quite count on mass de-platforming, or general social account reset for all users not named Elon, happening in the blink of an eye because of the petulant whims of a sad tyrant exposed as far more ordinary, and less brilliant, or even less clever and entertaining, than we once would have guessed.
Have you used social media at any point in the past 20 years? Then you too can have all of the work you have put in building a following, sharing messages and content with friends, or saving your memories from the internet in public, wiped out before you can say Masto…
What do they say about situations like this, again?
Nobody thinks they need decentralization… until they do.
Somehow, there’s a bigger story still happening this year in parallel. Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT close out our list somewhere between endlessly curious inspiration and total obsession for anyone that’s put in some good faith time to try the new AI as ever evolving creative assistant and hallucinatory autocomplete for everything.
Where creative AI and the new social web come together is more interesting still. But HODL some more, if you have it in you. We will take a deep look at the upside in Part 2 and 3 of this series.
Bare metal assessment of the present mindscape first: Can we spot a common thread running through the civilizational shocks, highlighted by sudden spikes in demand for decentralized social media and creative AI?
It’s obvious when we pause to listen to the noise for a bit. Yes, listen… to the noise. There is a consistent hint we can hear in everything from the unreliability of Amazon deliveries to the tragedy of YouTube comment sections. It’s what we’re exhausted by, what we can loosely call “noise”, that seems to be growing and spreading across every channel of our lives, more than ever. It seems that way, because it is.
Look a bit closer, and what you find is a pattern in many varieties of Denial of Service attacks. Some emerge on their own. Some are intentional attempts by one faction or another in the open adversarial marketplace of the global net. Most are predictable symptoms of a system never built to handle the interests of users, modern methods and rates of use, or pretty much anything which the pipes that carry the signals we casually call the Web have crammed through them. Web 2.0 wasn’t built to handle all this.
No other way about it. The signals we send to each other and rely on for everything, are decaying. They are declining both in signal quality and delivery reliability. The ability for anyone to launch Denial of Service attacks, intentionally, or as side effects of long forgotten post-rationalizations and/or completely unrelated activity, has become so much less expensive than the practice of creating good material, that the entire pipework is overwhelmed. We can’t trust the messages we send will reach where they are meant to go. We can’t trust what we receive. We can’t even trust that anything we save — message, money, memory, or otherwise — will be waiting for us when we return for it.
Beyond the standard list, including the flood of network resources with false packets or bot activity, we find it helpful to think of Sybil attacks, social media platform cartels, and even copyright when used as a tool to suppress or punish creative activity, as matching the classic patterns of what makes Denial of Service attacks so damaging to open networks, and so difficult to resolve.
At their core, free transit and exchange of messages, money, goods, materials, people, and ideas, can’t exist without the free expression of creativity. It is our creativity that builds on the ideas and works that have come before us. It reimagines existing concepts. Refines, remixes, and repurposes them, in ways that may be entirely mundane, or accidentally brilliant, just as often as they might be new and interesting.
It is because creative works can be so transformative and powerful that attacks against free transmission — clogging pathways for exchange and access to markets — are so destructive. The anti-AI art trend of some digital era commercial artists, and clickbait happy journalists, fearful that there will not be a better model coming to replace the old copyright regime, is one of the most effective DoS attacks currently contributing to the chaotic diminishment of signal quality and deliverability.
The cartel-like behavior of centralized social platforms is more obvious and direct. What started with disbelief that large enough numbers of people would ever be interested in sharing pictures of what they had for lunch, their latest takes on entirely common experiences, and personal details of all kinds — for free!! they said — grew to eat the entire world. First as “software”. Then as FAANG. User Generated Content became the web itself. And the center pivot every life on Earth spun around. That we could predict it would end badly was easy. Coming up with a workable, better, and truly user owned replacement model has taken the better part of two decades of incredibly hard work. We are barely starting to see the fruits of it today.
Maybe that’s the great thing about 2022. Until this year showed us everything it had to share, it was still a plausible strategy to continue putting off for later any serious work on old systems that we knew would need replacement eventually. Not a good strategy. But an understandable one.
After everything we’ve seen this year, the bottom’s fallen out of that approach. It’s now worse than counting on SBF for a bailout.
Thankfully, a new model moving from User Generated Content to Creative Commerce is starting to show us how we can all look up from here.
