"For You" Consideration

Is social media possibly getting even dumber?

I have been trying, of late, to distance myself from social media.

This is not a performative act. This is mental health 101.

I’ve forced myself to write long form prose every week.

I used to gobble up comics and graphic entertainment and sit for hours playing video games.

Instead, I have been working my way through the Cormac McCarthy Border trilogy. And reading newish non-fiction like Frank Bruni’s the Age of Grievance and Marcus Collins’ For the Culture.

Fine, I also read a Don Rickles bio. As Homer Simpson once said, I’m not running for Jesus.

But I’ve been making a conscious effort to spend the time I used to devote to endless scrolling on Facebook or Instagram or Tik Tok on actual, tangible things. Things with weight and depth. Things made of paper, or vinyl, or honest to god film.

Yet here I was, taking a brief break from the computer the other day. Sat in bed for a minute, picked up my phone.

I don’t recall if I’d fired up Tik Tok or opened Instagram or what, but I clicked on a video that started with a little kid and his dad, the dad coaching the kid on some sort of jujitsu move, and the kid just hauls off and punches his dad in the nuts.

Cut to a guy working in his garden and someone steps on the business end of a rake and the guy gets it full in the crotch.

Ok, I’m laughing.

A misplaced 2x4 in the next scene goes right up heaven’s highway. Skater on a rail; nuts. Parkour runner misjudges: nuts.

Here I was, a 54 year old, self-respecting man, taking a quiet break, happy as a pig in duck shit, watching people get hit in the balls.

There was a little pop up display ad on the bottom. Clearly, this was monetized “content.”

You’ve seen Idiocracy, right? I mean, everyone has. It’s the official harbinger of our times.

I was literally, amusedly, willingly watching “Ow! My Balls!” And someone was making money off it.

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“For You” was the idea behind Tik Tok — you didn’t pick content, it picked content for you. It knew what you wanted, like magic.

Tik Tok’s video feed has gone through a few changes - at first, for me, it was mostly videos of women dancing - it started innocent, then the “spicy” content intruded.

You could see Tik Tok battling it, like Porno Whack-a-Mole.

That got cleaned up. Then cooking videos. Then movie clips and trailers. Ads for FX shows.

Instagram and Facebook got in the game, with Reels. These, again, tend to be lots of Cinemax-lite. Lots of workout videos and a woman who seems to enjoy rebuilding her garage in purposely revealing overalls.

Occasionally, weird subliminal porn videos desaturated and superimposed on some benign outdoor footage will pop up, daring one to click on them.

Malware. Bots. The STDs of the Internet.

The videos come and go, I assume, with tweaks to the algorithm. Whack-a-Mole. Some weeks I’ll get a lot of cooking videos on Tik Tok and on Facebook. I love those obscenely large woks with enormous vats of oil, filled with chili and ginger and garlic by the bucketful, hundreds of pounds of brightly marinated chicken, unrecognizable sauces and spices being fried into crazy street food.

Other weeks it’ll be a lot of corporate TV stuff, like TV show trailers, or the occasional drab Pete Holmes comedy video.

But then it drifts back to clearly disguised porn content with the “corn” emoji or whatever this week’s symbol is for not-quite Terms of Service-verified material. There must be thousands of industrious hours backlogged of inventing new ways to trick Tik Tok or Facebook’s nudity filters, thru misnaming, misspelling, misidentifying.

But this is Facebook, where you cheer on your high school buddies’ kids, or wish a happy birthday to your Aunt Joan.

Or Tik Tok, which clearly started with young middle school and high school girls posting videos, or teenage boys posting video game streams and pranks.

Or Instagram, where you could invent, out of thin air and a digital camera, a new you, with fabulous food and exotic vacation photos.

And now? They’re all a slag heap of inappropriate content. Definitely not something you’d show good ol’ Aunt Joan. And certainly not where you want your son or daughter hanging out.

I’m not slagging porn or demeaning women who choose to work on Only Fans or whatever. But that world steadily encroaches on the rest of social media, clearly promoted by Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and every other platform.

“For You.”

I don’t want to sound disingenuous. I know you all are waiting for the inevitable meme. I don’t want to keep you waiting.

None of this was new. Porn always finds ways to infiltrate the newest technology. Musk’s Grok Gen-AI engine is supposed to let you create “spicy” content. X née Twitter now allows legit adult content if you pay the entry fee.

But this idea of “For You” — of the algorithm and other nefarious technological tricks that better serve you the “content” that you didn’t know you want. This idea has sunk the social media landscape even lower.

The democratization of content was always heading to the bottom.

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As the algorithms have gotten “smarter,” whether that means they’re actively listening to us, or watching our eye movements, or parsing behavior based on how many milliseconds you looked at one geometric shape vs another, the content we are fed has gotten dumber, baser, the lowest of the lowest common denominator.

(Rosemary and I tried to game my phone by whispering “Diapers. Pampers. Diapers. Pampers.” over and over to it — it outsmarted us. I guess it knows when you’re messing with it, too. Or it pegged us as dog people years ago and has had enough of our bullshit.)

The algorithm. That’s what everyone is trying to game. That’s what controls so much of the content economy.

The algorithm’s plumbing of your unconscious physiological reactions into Actionable Monetizable Opportunities is the grand, inevitable descent into doomscrolling and thumb-stopping.

Its end result - a nation of idiots on the toilet, staring into the black mirror that reflects your eyes back at you under the Brazilian weather girl who is somehow, impossibly, showing you both her entire ass and tits at the same time.

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Boo-fucking-hoo, I know. Being fed images of scantily clad girls on my $1000 phone. Woe is me.

My point is that Instagram and Tik Tok and Meta and their drive to For You Reels And Stories has porned up and dumbed down the social media conversation to a level heretofore un-sunk.

If you’re one of those people who quit Facebook or Instagram or social media in general? I envy you. Your performative act turned out to be the smartest thing you ever did.

The very notion of these social media platforms, and Google to a different extent, is vampiric. You provide the content, whatever it is that you post. You provide the audience, by “friending” people or generating followers. The platforms monetize you - your data, your content, your followers.

Yes, content has been democratized. But curation is valuable. When I was at Rhapsody, a key part of our thinking was that we still needed a person in the midst of the ranking and categorization and recommendation of music.

If you take away your favorite record store clerk, all that’s left is unmanageable inventory.

And as we’ve let the flywheel of the user-generated social media content ecosystem drift further and further away from its original value, it’s become a machine that’s only job is to keep you clicking and looking and building up sellable digital inventory.

Look at that flywheel diagram — in social media, you’re every part of it — except the “growth.”

Forget being an aesthete, or a curator; you’re just part of the machine now, a cog. Cogs don’t make money. Cogs work or break down.

I have been actively trying to unlatch social media from my life. Part of it is my long form writing here. Part of it is spending more time reading and weaning myself off the pablum that passes for journalism these days - much of which is generated by AI.

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Why do you think we’re in the state we’re in?

The culture is antithetical to thought.

Higher education is the devil to half of the population.

The system is gamed. And it’s gamed to feed you the content you want. Whether you consciously acknowledge it.

Nobody wants to pay for anything. Art has been devalued. “Everything is free now.”

And the free content you get is based on your basest instincts.

Your physiological reactions. And plumbing your past, your uploaded stories, your buying history, your family photos.

Whatever it was intended as — a network of old friends, a way to find community, — has devolved into a nonstop Lowest Common Denominator barrage of ads, groups you don’t belong to and never joined, memelords and other assorted irrelevant “content.”

The algorithm will sense what you’re unconsciously asking to see.

And not your super-ego, either. The Id in all its unshackled glory.

Everyone has that instinct to slow down and look at the car wreck. It’s inescapable, as much as we try to ignore it.

We’re letting that instinct, processed and parsed and mathematically organized, determine, and curate, the culture we consume.

There’s a reason it’s all free.

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Thanks for reading Are You Experienced. This Substack is about finding career and purpose after 50, ostensibly. Sometimes it’s about what it’s like to be over 50 in today’s cultural landscape. If any of this piece resonated, or pissed you off, or otherwise rang a bell in your general vicinity, get in touch. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

I’m Nick Tangborn, and I’ve worked in all kinds of digital media, including Generative AI-based advertising and streaming music, peer to peer media and straight-up music journalism. I’ve also sold pancake batter in a can. You can reach me at nicholas (at) areyouexperienced.co