]]>I’ve been writing since the 1900s (technically the late 90s, but still) on the web, about the web, and, over the past twenty years or so, about software development and publishing.
I’ve been here a while and am not going away.
But I’d like to write more, make more videos and podcasts, and specifically look at the problems we have who are now outsiders in our own industries, whether that’s in software development or in publishing.
For that, I’d like your help.
Hence, a Patreon.
It’s going to offer exclusive material, support tiers, and hopefully a few novel goodies that I’m working on at the moment.
Currently, it has two membership tiers:
Any support you can give is very much appreciated.
As I wrote in my last newsletter, software developers don’t seem to be doing well.
I can relate. I’ve been unlucky enough to work for dysfunctional software companies and startups in the past, and those dysfunctions have increasingly become the norm across the industry over the past few years.
The response was greater than I expected, both on the newsletter and elsewhere, so I wanted to pause and try to put those responses into context.
I had already written and recorded the next couple of videos and newsletters even before I uploaded the last one, but I’m postponing those, because I think it’s important to sometimes stop and listen instead of constantly lecturing at people.
Even though most of the responses were positive – at least, positive in the sense that they could relate to or recognised what many software developers seemed to be going through – some were less supportive.
This is the internet. Obviously some people are going to be annoying. Most of it you can ignore, but a few of them highlighted the big shift in attitudes towards tech that has been taking place over the past decade.
People aren’t on “our” side any more. Quite a few have gone from having largely positive feelings towards tech – considering it to be a force for progress – to thinking it’s an industry that’s ruining the world.
Tech is the new tobacco.
So, if we’re miserable, the attitude some have is that it’s our own fault for making the world we live in worse.
Or, that we deserve what’s happening to our field because we didn’t do enough to prevent bad things from happening.
Or, our work in the tech industry, no matter what it was we actually did, means we have it coming.
This is what falls out from the now relatively common public sentiment that tech is the new tobacco industry. How that framing has played out in media coverage and discourse, has quite correctly emphasised the abuses, the legal shenanigans, how tech is spending money to manipulate the public, and other strategies that the tech industry seems to have copied from big tobacco.
But the other consequence of that shift in public sentiment is: if your industry gets the reputation of being like the tobacco industry, people stop having any sympathy for those of us working in that industry.
Nobody cares if a sales person in a tobacco company burns out from stress or pressure. If your job is selling opioids to college athletes – “but it’s legal! I’m only helping doctors decide on the correct treatment” – hearing that you’re suffering will only make people smile. Now, finally, a sign that the world is just place.
This is a little bit unfair to many of us for two reasons:
First, the industry wasn’t this bad when most senior people in the industry started. You don’t have to have gone into coding thirty years ago, like me, to have had reason to believe it was an industry with promise. The sentiment shift has been happening for a while, but it was a gradual one for a long time.
Second, quite a few of us have spent our careers avoiding the kind of work we felt was harmful to society. We’ve tried to do good and our careers and finances suffered for it.
Related to this is another idea that came up. Some people seemed convince that we who work in the industry could have prevented all of this, if we’d done this or that. Most of them mentioned unions. If we’d unionised years ago, none of this would have happened.
The problem is that this is almost certainly false.
Unions are largely absent from the software industry in the United States.
But software development is largely unionised in quite a few European countries. Those unions, many of them large and relatively influential, haven’t stopped the job from changing for the worse here in Europe in many of the same ways it’s been declining in the States.
Union participation in Iceland is well over 90% and is almost certainly higher than that in software. We’re still seeing lay-offs in software development, fewer opportunities for junior developers, a push towards using Large Language Models to make up for all those fired colleagues, and a collapse in college enrolments in computer science.
It’s hard to see how software developers and other employees could have prevented this change when it’s fundamentally driven by much greater forces in policy, economics, and deregulation. These are problems that can only be fixed through politics, not unionisation.
But even if we could have prevented it by forming unions in the States, that still doesn’t make it our responsibility to fix a toxic employer.
Think about it this way:
Imagine that a friend of yours is working retail. The manager is awful. The company has abusive policies. The retailer’s overall strategy is to treat employees as disposable and cheat the customers as much as they can get away with.
You’ve shopped there. You know what I’m talking about.
A labour union will absolutely help prevent the worst abuses your friend is facing. It’ll keep them safer while they’re working for the abusive retailer, and it might give them some leverage when dealing with their employer.
But the union won’t fix the retailer. It won’t make the manager less toxic and won’t stop them from micromanaging. It won’t prevent the retailer’s abusive tactics against their suppliers, which will come back and impact your friend. It won’t make the retailer less abusive towards the customers. It won’t prevent lies, monopolistic tactics, mismanagement, financial fraud, or the pervasive outright incompetence of much of the management. It won’t prevent middle-managers from resorting to superstitions or coercive manipulation.
It certainly won’t prevent them from hire a sociopath CEO.
A union can make a workplace safer, fairer, and more equitable. A large union can function as a political force that will help change society for the better. The big reason why Iceland is a largely progressive society despite having had very right-wing governments for most of the past four decades is at least partly thanks to our strong labour unions that advocate for their members.
But once you’re in the situation where deregulation, financial incentives, mismanagement, sociopathic managers, or owner politics have turned a particular workplace toxic, a union won’t suck out the toxins, and it won’t fix that broken employer.
It’s all well and good to talk about the industry as a whole and how it needs to be fixed, but individuals need to think about their own health and their own survival first before they can worry about saving the world.
Fundamentally, it isn’t the job of an employee to fix their employer. If your workplace is a broken mess and that’s causing you to suffer, the sensible thing is to try and look for an exit while you still have your health.
Because you can’t buy back your health once you’ve lost it.
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]]>Some of this is down to laziness – people scan the text and react to what they assume you wrote. Sometimes it’s an actual misunderstanding that’s either down to bad writing on your part or poor reading on theirs.
But more and more I’ve had to face the possibility that my thought processes are just substantively different from the way the majority approaches the world.
Occasionally, I get reactions from intelligent people who clearly read the text (or watched the video), understood it, but nonetheless decided to reply with what to me is a non-sequitur at best or wilful misrepresentation at worst.
It’s only when I started to seriously read up on autism that I began to realise that the issue probably comes down to different types of thinking, which isn’t a misunderstanding per se (though, that might be my literal-mindedness again).
I tend to think from the bottom-up. I gather facts, observations, ideas, and references and build up to the overall thought or idea, brick by brick, concept by concept. My understanding of pretty much anything, anywhere – work, theory, society, communications, culture – comes from this very labour-intensive process. And, yeah, that includes any form of social interaction, which is part of why I find it difficult and usually overwhelming.
But most other people seem to operate from the top-down: they seem to start with what’s supposed to be, or with the values they hold consciously or unconsciously, and then pick and choose the facts and observations that support that.
For example, there have been periods when – looking at the news and facts we had access to here in the West – it looked like Ukraine was having a hard time fighting off Russia’s invasion.
But saying so to my dad at the time made him outright angry. To him, by making a simple factual observation of that moment in time, I was effectively declaring support for Russia, which prompted a lengthy explanation that, no I wasn’t doing any such thing. Invasions bad.
Top-down thinking: Russia bad, therefore you look for facts that show that Ukraine might be doing well. Looking for other facts meant you didn’t believe in the “Russia bad” value.
(And, yes, I’m exaggerating to drive the point home.)
Bottom-up thinking: look at the facts and try and figure out what kind of big picture the facts, when taken together, show you. Sometimes things go well. Sometimes they don’t. Values don’t play a part.
Of course, it’s more of a spectrum than a dichotomy. Most things are. Training and education affects your thought processes. Your approach can vary depending on interests, subject matters, and energy levels. But people tend to lean more to one side than the other. I’m very much on the bottom-up end while it seems like the majority is top-down.
This explains why I’m so often accused of being pessimistic in something I wrote when I know for a fact the writing very much wasn’t pessimistic or optimistic. The text didn’t have much of a position on the future course of events at all. I’m perfectly capable of pessimism, but not in these cases.
It happens because, to many people, bad news is pessimism.
This feels like a bunch of hot nonsense to my extremely literal mind. It’s already happened, has systemic causes, and bad things with systemic causes are very hard to unwind. Describing the present can’t be pessimism. The pessimism-optimism axis points to the future not the present.
It’s like calling a report of an earthquake “pessimism”.
This may sound silly, but it is how many react. If you write a report about people who disregarded safety guidelines and built on a fault line, only to subsequently lose their homes in an earthquake, you will get replies like “well, I live on a fault line and I haven’t felt an earthquake yet.”
To them, your factual report of an earthquake elsewhere is pessimism as, when they hear the news filtered through their top-down, value-driven thinking, it sounds more like this:
“I like where I live and hope there won’t be an earthquake. But he’s talking about earthquakes elsewhere so is effectively saying that there will be an earthquake where I live. What a pessimist.”
Replace “earthquake” with “effects of climate change”, or “real estate bubble”, or “deteriorating work environment in the software industry” and I think I begin to understand why I keep getting what feels like very odd responses to what I write.
So…
“My job isn’t like that!”
I wasn’t writing about your job or your employer. Glad you’re in a good place, though. I was making an observation of what’s happening to many people in the industry, how their jobs are increasingly making them miserable, and pointing out that the sensible thing for an individual in that situation to do is to leave. You can’t feed your family if your health fails or burnout takes you out of the job market entirely.
As the airline employees say: “put your own oxygen mask on first before you help others.” Because if you’re unconscious, you can’t help others avoid suffocation.
The mismatch between my mode of thinking and that of much of the rest of the world has always been an issue. People keep hearing things I didn’t say, assume I have value positions I don’t, interpret my general observations as personal criticism of them, and read an emotional dimension in text where there isn’t one.
That last part is especially frustrating because I generally try to make the intended emotions of a text as explicit as I can in the writing without spelling them out directly. I use tone, vocabulary, and style to try and project annoyance, excitement, anger, joy, or sadness as appropriate, and much of the time people choose instead to make up an emotion out of their own biases instead of reading the text.
I could just litter the text with emoji, but that’d be just outright obnoxious and people manage to misinterpret those as well.
I’ve realised that I can’t fix this by adding more detail to what I write. More detail comes across to most people as rationalisation or excuses, and often makes them more sceptical, not less.
Even this, a short note where I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, trying to understand where people’s reactions come from, will probably be interpreted by some through a top-down value-centred lens.
“You’re being judgemental! My reaction to your writing is valid.”
Of course, it’s valid. I’m just saying that I have a hard time understanding it.
“Saying you don’t understand it is being judgemental.”
No, it’s factual. Don’t hear what I didn’t say. My mind works differently. When I say that I don’t understand something I mean exactly that. I don’t mean it as a roundabout way of saying “I don’t understand why you said that,” which is a completely different sentence and thought.
I’m a literal-minded, bottom-up thinker. I generally mean only what I say – except for the occasional very obvious literary or cultural reference that you might be missing, but that’s genuinely your fault, not mine. I can’t read Tolstoy for you.
I’m sincerely trying to understand why people react the way they do because I need to function in a world that for the most part thinks along very different lines than I do.
I do appreciate the effort that it takes to convey a reaction to me, and I’m always grateful for feedback. I’m thankful whenever people take the time to convey appreciation or criticism. It’s valuable to know that I’m not just throwing words into an unappreciative void.
But I often just don’t understand the responses.
Knowing what kind of thinking produced the response is helpful, but only up to a point. Sometimes the reaction comes from an expectation of a shared reality that doesn’t exist, so I just don’t have the context or information needed to understand where people are coming from.
Not without mind-reading, that is.
This is fine as long as people don’t expect me to reply to every response or come up with a witty comeback to every point.
As long as “I don’t know what they’re saying or why, but I’ll like it to show that I saw and appreciated it” remains a valid response, we’ll be fine.
]]>There’s an old saying here in Iceland: “Guð launar fyrir hrafninn”, which could be translated as “God pays the raven’s way”. Basically that feeding ravens will bring fortune.
]]>You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed.
It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice.
People in the software industry don’t seem to be doing too well at the moment. There has been a spate of “I’m leaving my tech job” videos – some because they’ve been laid off, some leaving preemptively – but the interesting action has been taking place in the comment sections, replies, and discussion forums. The replies are where it’s at. The videos themselves vary in quality.
Facebook’s aborted “AI coder” transition: Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI. Here’s how it imploded.
The drop in new students in Computer Science in Iceland. (The drop was 30%, not 40% as I said in the video/podcast.) Nýnemum í tölvunarfræði og tengdum greinum fækkaði um þriðjung milli ára
We’re not doing well in the software industry.
We’ve all sensed it. Things are a bit off.
It’s not just the “AI” financial bubble, or the debates that have been taking place – arguments, more properly – or the ongoing shift in public sentiment regarding the software industry.
I’m talking the fact that people who work in software – specifically developers and user experience designers – are not doing great.
I keep coming across videos of people talking about burning out, being unable to work, and in some cases fairly serious mental health issues. And, obviously, people are getting fired. But often in these videos, those who are doing videos and announcing they’ve been laid off mention that they were thinking about quitting anyway and are now planning on leaving tech entirely.
It’s not just senior people who might have memories and a fondness for how things used to be – stress mixed with nostalgia. It’s also students. I’ve found several videos of students who announced that they had switched majors, had been studying user experience design, but now decided to switch to something else.
With a few notable exceptions, these generally aren’t people who are against “AI” – or, at least, they weren’t against “AI” until very recently.
These aren’t people who disliked the technology from the start, who have had very severe criticisms about the way it’s made, the way it’s forced on people, or have severe doubts about the long-term benefits of applying this technology to our industry.
They seem to have all embraced “AI” at some point and assumed that what they were told was true, that this was the future. “This is where things are going.” This is what software development will be like, now and forever.
After all that, one of the reasons why quite a few of them are leaving, is that they believe this promise. When they’re told that this is the future of the industry, they accept that statement as true. They’ve tried it; understand it and think to themselves: “I see your point, but this isn’t fun any more. This isn’t enjoyable. This is bad for me.”
And decide to leave.
There are a number of systemic factors for why this is happening to them, for why the software industry is an increasingly inhospitable work environment.
What software developers are facing is a case of “incentives”.
Namely, managerial and executive incentives, specifically. The industry’s incentives for those who run the industry give them a strong motivation to try to undercut labour and their workforce at every turn.
And they have been giving it their honest best.
Facebook attempted, for example, to replace a number of their software developers directly with AI tools.
They had to dial that down because the technology simply isn’t capable of what they believed it could do.
But the intent has always been there to reduce the headcount of the industry. A number of incentives for managers and executives that are lined up to push them in that direction.
The fewer people you have working for you, the fewer stock options you have to pay out, the less resistance there will be to watering down the product, collaborating with the military-industrial complex, or helping authoritarian governments control and murder their citizens. Over the past two decades, one of the more effective forces for keeping tech companies in line have been the tech workers themselves who have tried resist corrupt and unethical behaviour. It hasn’t always worked. There wasn’t enough of it. But what little there was it added meaningful friction at several important moments in tech history.
The less influence and power the labour force has, the more power goes to the executive class and the bigger their share of the pie.
If they lay people off that means there are few people working in any given organization doing the same amount of work. That means more stress and more pressure.
As bad as the added workload and burnout is, that isn’t the only change to the job.
There’s also less novelty.
I’ve noticed that even though there’s an increasing number of apps or software being deployed, they’re all either the same “AI” products or “AI” features released everywhere. Or, they are agent-generated clones of existing software.
None of it is novel. It’s almost exclusively old ideas poured into new containers.
One of the problem we have as software developers, and I definitely count myself as somebody with this problem, is that we are a novelty-seeking group.
These changes mean we’re doing more with less time, probably less reward as well, and the job itself is less interesting.
It’s also the nature of the agent automation to feel more like delegation to a clueless junior developer than automation, and that changes your relationship to the work.
In woodworking, the power tools didn’t reduce the woodworker’s emotional investment in what they made. The worker still felt like they’d made that thing out of wood themselves.
Some woodworkers might still use hand tools for a variety of reasons – some of them romantic, some of them, you know, just because it’s more fun.
But having a table saw doesn’t make you feel like you’ve asked somebody else to make the shelf, or table, or chair.
The nature of automation with Large Language Model tools feels substantially different from prior attempts at automation in coding. It’s an abstraction that feels like a delegation, not an automation, and separates you from the output.
That has an effect of making you feel less invested in the output and that takes away much the joy of coding. The flow state is also gone, the sort of focused state of mind that you get into when you’re really deep into solving a problem.
On top of the changes to the job itself, the industry itself has changed as well.
There is more uncertainty. People know there are layoffs every quarter. They know they’re probably next on the block. Or, if they aren’t, they’ll be on the block next quarter instead. They know the reasons for dismissal are going to be arbitrary. They know they generally aren’t going to be able to do anything to improve their odds.
And if they talk about how bad all of this makes them feel, the “AI” true believers will turn around and say that it’s a skill issue. It’s your fault.
There’s a lot of stress, and worry, and pressure in the industry that wasn’t there before.
I suspect that everybody’s suffering. Some are just better at pretending.
This makes people want to get ahead of the lay-offs and quit. Especially those who have some savings.
But even that lines up with the incentives of the executives who are running these companies. People who quit don’t get a nice severance package. People who quit might not be fully vested.
And even if you have savings, you can’t time your quitting based on your finances if you have to get out to preserve your mental health.
Once you’re gone, the company can hire somebody to replace you out of the vast pool of now unemployed software developers at what will probably be lower pay.
Executive incentives are aligned to perpetuate the situation and even to make it worse. From the perspective of the executives who are running a software company, this perpetually precarious situation for their employees makes up for their inability to replace software developers completely with “AI”.
Instead of being able to outsource all your software development to an “AI”, they can effectively semi-outsource it to “AI” and have the automated shitstorm managed by a group of people in a perpetually vulnerable state, who are unable to ask for a higher pay, unable to negotiate for a better position, and unable to say no to unreasonable demands.
It lets management lower costs and strengthens their bargaining position versus the labour class that they’re dominating.
This isn’t a situation that will fix itself when the “AI” financial bubble collapses.
The bubble will pop. It’s much too big to be sustainable.
But that won’t fix software industry employment because the Large Language Models don’t really need to work that well for this process. They only need to sort of work.
As long as you can find more overworked software developers, and push them hard until they burn out trying to maintain a minimum standard of quality, you can keep the “AI”-driven labour alienation going. They can use cheaper Chinese models. Or, if they switch to local models, they can make owning a high-end laptop a job requirement.
“You need to spend $5000 USD on a laptop before you apply for this job. That filters out the ‘AI’-generated resumes, you see.”
Why take on the massive costs of RAM when you can use that cost to lower developer pay by proxy?
The overall dynamic doesn’t change once the costs increase for the hosted models. Those models will just get more stagnant; they might not get updated as often; the training data will be stale; the code it generates will be perpetually on the verge of outdated; and they’ll be run with more errors.
Management won’t care.
The work of making up for that is going to be pushed on the developer adding to their load and pressure.
My worry, based on the research I’ve been doing and looking at the systemic incentives of the companies in the software industry, is that this is probably about as good as it’s going to get for a software developer at a large company in the tech industry.
This misery, this pressure, the overwork, the underpayment, the detachment from the work – this is probably what making mainstream software is going to feel like from now on.
It doesn’t surprise me that the people within the software industry who seem to be spotting the issue and leaving preemptively seem to be user experience designers.
Designers have slightly more training in looking at the system within which the user operates, and it doesn’t take that much of a shift in framing for them to understand where they stand themselves.
But software developers are coming to this conclusion as well, especially students. There was a new story recently here in Iceland that year-on-year, sign-ups for computer science at the universities here in Iceland had declined on the order of 30% decreases every year.
And Iceland doesn’t seem to be alone in this.
People are realising that this is a bad career to be in and an industry that’s hostile to its workers.
I suspect many more people over the next few years are going to be having identity crises on top of the career issues.
“Who am I if I’m not in tech? If I’m not a software developer?”
Because if you’ve built your entire identity around software and tech, around being a programmer, around being a tech person who works to enable “progress” and drive the world to the future, you’re going to have a bad time after being pushed out of that role and seeing your former industry studiously dismantle everything you thought you were building.
I don’t know what we can do, except understand and accept that this is happening.
It’s a horrible thought, but you can’t deal with change if you stay in denial.
I think it might be time – if you’re working in software – to think about a possible future outside the tech industry proper.
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]]>You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed.
It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice.
For fans of video, there’s both the YouTube channel and the TikTok account.
The “parasocial” illusion that’s created by social media platforms helps deceive and misguide you, the audience.
Those people aren’t your friends.
By those people I mean social media influencers and similarly popular accounts on your preferred social media platform. Obviously online friendships are real. I’ve based my entire career on the relationships I’ve built online. None of my work over the past 25 years would have happened without the mutual connections that you can build on the various social media networks. And those friendships are as real, as rewarding, as the ones I’ve formed in “real life”.
They might possibly be better because I have a problem with eye contact for various neurodivergent reasons. It’s quite a bit easier to communicate with people in text or mediated through a computer in some other way without having to think about looking at their eyes. So I’m hugely grateful to the relationships I’ve built on social media, but that isn’t as much the case with social media today as it was when I started.
I benefit from the fact that the social media experience twenty years ago or even twenty-five years ago, when I first started blogging, is very different from what passes as social media today.
This is a bit of an informal series on how the design of social media – the technical side, the media design, the format of it – affects the way we get our information.
I first covered the limitations of short-form video like TikTok. There are plenty of limitations to the form, but I focused specifically on the length and how that forces you to use editing to create an impression of an argument, as opposed to making an actual argument.
In the last essay I focused on the context collapse that exists in most social media, but I focused specifically on text-oriented media such as X, Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon because on those platforms it destroys our ability to deliver the specialised discourse that is needed to cover difficult topics.
This time, it’s the false promise behind the term we use to label the platforms where we find each other: social media.
Because that’s where things get dicey.
I’m not focusing on anxiety or mental health or similar issues in this series, but instead on how it affects the way we get our information. When it comes to social media the asymmetry that now defines it wasn’t there at the beginning.
The asymmetry I’m referring to is what danah boyd, an academic I’ve referred to before, called the parasocial nature of the current social media networks.
In a recent paper she has argued that these networks have long since ceased to be “social” and are more properly parasocial networks:
To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
Many social interactions on these sites have become largely an illusion.
They don’t exist to build a symmetrical, two-way relationship between people. They’re there to give you the illusion of interacting with anything ranging from a minor celebrity to a major celebrity. You might talk to somebody on social media who has hundreds of thousands of followers, and you might actually get a reply. But that gives you the sense – the feeling – that you’re in a relationship with them and that there’s a mutual connection between you. But there usually isn’t.
That effect is an illusion that comes from the design and structure of the social media platform. The asymmetry is designed such a way that it makes you feel like it’s a symmetrical relationship.
This design was invented. This wasn’t the way that social media was at the beginning. Like if you look at the early days of, for example, Facebook.
Facebook used to be symmetrical. It didn’t have public pages you could just follow. When you friended somebody on Facebook you had to have the friend request accepted and it went both ways. That was an actual symmetrical, two-way connection which limited its availability and use for celebrities and politicians, because it was purposefully designed to create a network of peers.
(Then to “monetise” and control that network, of course. It wasn’t a benevolent attempt to unite humanity.)
That design meant that the interactions that took place on the on in the early days of Facebook were actual social interactions.
They were often annoying, but annoying in the same way as a never-ending high school reunion would have been annoying.
Twitter broke that mould where it let you follow somebody without them following you back. That created this environment of instant social media influencer – micro celebrity – that had a ten, hundred, or thousand times more followers than they followed themselves. The interactions they had with their followers would give their follower the feeling of mutuality, of sort of being peers and equals, but in effect you were dealing with a broadcaster.
It was just a broadcast that was wrapped up in an illusion of equal social interactions. That’s where the term “parasocial” comes into the picture.
This “feature” then became a hard requirement for any other social networking platform to succeed and has been causing problems ever since.
It is harmless for certain uses. Like having a parasocial interaction or relationship with an online cat. Somebody posts pictures of their cat, and you know you like it. You feel like you know the cat. But you don’t. Because the cat doesn’t even understand or know what the internet is, let alone what an internet friend might even be.
The other end of the parasocial spectrum are relationships with, for example, people in your field of practice or study.
These are people you might encounter somewhere outside the social media platform. You might have a realistic possibility of encountering them if you go to a conference, or if they’re invited to talk at your university, or if you go to a meetup in the town where you live. There is a very real difference between the parasocial interactions you have with people who you might have a social relationship with at some point, versus the people who you’ll never ever see.
The people in the latter group is never going to be your friends.
Consider the field of web development or industries like certain parts of publishing. Quite a few of the relationships I have online – both in web dev and in publishing – started off parasocial. Either they followed me because of something I was writing, or I followed them because of something they were writing. Then I ran into them at a conference, or we started talking and a symmetrical social interaction grew from there.
That’s possible in some circumstances. That’s not possible – that’s not going to happen – with the celebrity. That’s not going happen with a politician, or a columnist, or reporter with millions of followers, or a musician with a global audience. And once you get into the sphere where that symmetry is never going to be available to you, that’s when you get into dangerous disinformation territory.
We are, as human beings, hardwired to trust what people – our peers, our social environment – tells us. This is, for example, how superstitious nonsense like homeopathy and naturopathy, and all sorts of quackery and snake oil, gets distributed.
A friend of yours tries it, they feel better, they talk about it to you, and you’re like “oh my god, my friend got better!” That feels more real to you and feels more convincing than the entirety of science ganging up against what is actually complete and utter bullshit.
Your friend feels it works so you feel it probably works.
This is already problematic. It’s one of the ways that our brain short circuits our ability to reason about the world around us and figure out how things work.
But it gets extra problematic when that friend isn’t actually your friend – when your trusted peer will never know your name and will never care.
They won’t miss you when you stop going onto their pages. They won’t notice if you stop commenting, or if you unsubscribe. They are not your friend.
This supercharges misinformation. Where people are isolated and have fewer friends, they might not have social interactions at work, but they have the influencer, the person on the podcast, or on YouTube or on Tiktok, who feels like their friend. That influencer is taking advantage of that relationship by um scaring them, by hyping up their anxiety and worry, and then selling them something. Selling them, again, the same snake-oil that usually tends to get distributed via the superstitious network built on hearsay and peer recommendations.
It’s also one of the reasons why we feel betrayed when somebody like Hank Green or Adam Conover on YouTube does something dumb, or says something ridiculous, or turns out to be, you know, an asshole.
The feeling of betrayal is there because we have formed this relationship on our side, in our mind, and we have the expectations of a friendship. We feel like there’s a relationship there, but they only expect a semi-passive audience. Letting these asymmetrical relationships hold the same role in our emotional lives as actual relationships is only going to lead us to misery and all sorts of crises.
For example, recently there was referendum here in Iceland on whether we should restart negotiations on joining the EU. It failed.
It didn’t failed because voters looked at the question, at all the facts, and made a choice. That would have been fine.
I understand being sceptical of things that are proposed by large institutions that might not have your interests at heart. But, after the vote was completed, much of the “information” that had been spreading, that people were basing their opinions on, were simply outright lies.
They had come from TikTok, from influencers, from discussions online, from the individuals that large groups of people had parasocial with, and it was largely wrong. Some of them implied that the EU had an army and mandatory military service. Some implied the EU had banned their favourite type of car. Both statements are false.
But the youngest voters trusted them because they trusted the person they felt that was their friend. But they aren’t your friend.
I’m not your friend.
(Unless you are one of my friends reading this then… Hi!)
For the most part we are in a parasocial relationship online. We are having unequal, uneven asymmetrical relationships to varying degrees. I might interact or respond to some of your comments, but I will not know you.
I won’t know you to the same degree that you might know my voice.
I don’t know your voice, whether in writing or in speech. I don’t know the cadence that you speak with. I don’t know your personality or what matters to you.
Be careful with trusting people like me who are posting on social media and YouTube.
More importantly, since we’re on these networks in the first place, since we need to be on them, try and focus your relationships on people whose connection to you might become symmetrical at some point.
People who you might run into at conferences. The people who you might get in touch with via friend of a friend. Those are the connections – the loose connections – that are valuable, that you can make through social media networking, that are harder to build outside those platforms.
And keep the parasocial relationships to a minimum.
Treat communications on social media like the broadcasts that they are.
I can watch an interview with Sandra Bullock – one of my favourite actresses. I don’t think I’m in any sort of relationship with her. I don’t feel like I know her beyond her work.
That’s healthier than feeling like I’m in some sort of friendship with somebody just because I watch their videos.
You can enjoy these people’s work. You can enjoy people’s broadcasts and their media without engaging in a relationship that is only going to do both of you a disservice.
You don’t need to be friends with authors. You just need to like their work.
As with so many things, it’s a question of boundaries. Social media is designed to undermine the boundaries that we set for ourselves and others
We would be well served to not let it do that.
]]>You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed.
It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice.
For fans of video, there’s both the YouTube channel and the TikTok account.
Why do jokes fall flat online? Why is it so easy to get into trouble by saying something you thought was fine, but others found offensive?
Turns out this is because of a basic feature of how these social media networks work.
Have you ever made a joke on Facebook, or some other social media site only for land like a lead balloon?
It might have worked for your friends – your pre-existing circle on social media – but as soon as somebody re-posted it or boosted it out of your circle, somebody utterly humourless reacted badly and didn’t get the joke. They got offended and angry about silliness merely existing.
There’s a reason for that, and it goes to the root of most of what’s wrong with social media.
Not everything that’s wrong, but it is one of the core problems, especially in short textual media.
As I’ve been getting into doing videos and podcast episodes and thinking about the role that social media plays in my media landscape and my contributions to that landscape, I’ve been revisiting some of the research I studied and read about in the past.
And it turns out there are reasons why the social media experience is so toxic for so many of us.
In the last video I addressed many of the issues that affect TikTok and other short-form video. It gives you the impression of an argument as opposed to letting an argument unfold.
The constraints imposed by the duration, by the screen size, limit the level of detail you can deliver in a video, which affects the argument they can deliver. This obviously is not great, since this is where much of our political discourse is taking place. But short-form textual social media – the ones that are all modelled after Twitter – aren’t much of a positive influence either.
They have a lock on the journalistic class, the political class, and on quite a bit of academic research. People of influence tend to disproportionately get their information from these networks. Whereas the public tends to get them from videos – short and long.
They are the first step in for modern information distribution.
An academic who wants to promote their paper will start by posting about it on X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon.
Politicians make their announcements and commentary on X and then on video.
Reporters rely on these sites to discover news and scoops.
These social media networks all have the issue where you can quite easily ruin your entire career – or at least your day – by saying something completely and perfectly innocuous that gets interpreted by somebody else as offensive.
Sometimes these things are offensive, but you’re used to voicing them in a more forgiving environment. So when you switch to social media, you don’t adjust your language and tone. You don’t code-switch. You don’t change your vocabulary and approach to suit a more public audience.
You might not even be aware that a more public audience was possible. Most of us only have our few followers and friends and people rarely notice our nonsense. But sometimes people do notice and it’s rarely pleasant.
There’s a name for this: context collapse.
It originates with the sociologist and psychologist Erving Goffman, but I personally first encountered it in the papers, essays, and talks, and books by danah boyd who is one of the leading academics on social media – especially the social media use of teenagers.
And the way that she describes context collapse is that, before, you’d have distinct spheres of social interaction – the high school hallway social interaction for students, the classroom interactions, the family interactions – each of these would have a different language, different vocabulary and different approaches. They would have different expectations for what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s healthy, and what’s unhealthy. What makes the other people in a context angry and what doesn’t.
What social media does is collapse all these contexts into one, so you now have to keep track of half a dozen different environments in your head when you’re writing online.
Any one of these contexts could find your discourse offensive.
This is particularly obvious with humour because jokes require an understanding of the audience and its expectations, because playing with expectations is what makes a joke funny. If your audience is completely different from what you expected, the joke is gonna fall flat or even be considered offensive.
But this also effects normal discussions about topics that are important to our media landscape, our culture, and our politics. Like how we talk about reading.
Reading is important, as you can tell from the fact that a text-based social media remains to this day the first line of information distribution over video. So reading is quite important and the media loves to debate declines or changes in literacy.
But when we talk about reading on a social media network, there’s a limit to how much context we can provide. There’s a limit to how much additional text we can include in each post to define which kind of reading we’re talking and what context we’re coming from. The length limits of the text exacerbates the context collapse.
When you try and discuss the various distinct features of audiobooks, print books, and ebooks what you have to say immediately gets mired in multiple different contexts.
One context is that there are snobs who try and elevate print over everything else. They are trying to exclude other media, especially the kind that they feel is making books too accessible, such as ebooks or audiobooks.
Conversely, designers and typographers who are trying to deliver the best designed textual reading experience need to be able to discuss the needs of each form without reservation.
When somebody wades into the online discourse and says something like “audiobooks aren’t reading,” both of those contexts – design and elitism – collapse into the same social sphere.
There is no distinguishing between the two. The designer, in saying this, might be making the point that audiobooks require very different considerations and very different engineering sensibilities such as acoustic design. They require things that just don’t exist in print. Print conversely requires a level of design and thought to the binding, paper, and the kind of ink. All of which are considerations that don’t make any sense in the context of an ebook.
The discourse of a designer trying to talk about the distinction between these, is collapsed with the discourse of the snobs who want to alienate entire sectors of society from reading. Everybody gets ganged upon for making an argument that they aren’t actually making. Because the context has collapsed. The designer get shouted at for being a snob. Or they get supported by the snobs because they think the designer is talking about the elevation of print.
But they didn’t actually say any such thing. They just didn’t have the space in three hundred characters to highlight the specific context of the print form.
These contexts are forced to exist within the same space and this makes nuanced discourse impossible.
It makes arguments and conflict inevitable. It degrades our ability to discuss important topics. The all-encompassing nature of social media degrades our ability to surface specialisation and knowledge from academia and experts. Their contributions are cut off right out of the gate, because textual social media is where information starts its journey to disseminate out into the other media.
This context collapse destroys any possible discourse before it starts spreading. We have crippled our ability to talk properly about society, the world around us, and understand the environment that we live in.
There really isn’t a way around this.
As long as these remain the spaces that academia, politicians, and experts are using to convey their ideas and as long as it’s only space that reporters and journalists really pay attention to, we will be held back by this mush that it turns our discourse into.
The only recourse we have as individuals is to be less reliant on these platforms and switch to other forms of discovering information and knowledge. RSS feeds, trusted websites, or anything really that delivers longer texts, audio, and video and, more importantly, is siloed into separate contexts.
We need specialised pages that follow each topic and give it the detail and nuance it needs without worrying about outsiders misunderstanding it, and then attacking it for offending them in a way that was not intended at all.
We need to be careful about our reliance on social media. Not just because of the mental health issues – there’s a lot of emphasis on the anxiety and mental health ramifications of extensive social media use.
One of the bigger problems with the dominance of social media is that it distorts our understanding of the world around us. It changes what we see, what we hear, and what we read in ways that diminishes our understanding of the world. It makes it harder for us to constructively respond to crises.
Try and spend less time on Bluesky or Mastodon, and just leave X entirely. No good comes from X. It’s just going to give you bad ideas.
Find a few good websites or podcasts and follow them on the topics you’re interested in. Read those. Don’t rely on search engines or social media to get the get your information.
Try to let the nuance of specialisation exist without attacking it. Because we need it.
It’s kind of the only way we can go forward from here.
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]]>In this opinion piece – very much my opinion based on my experience and practice, not on academic studies – I explain one reason why short videos, such as what you get on TikTok, are bad for learning and information.
Did I mention that this is my opinion? Well it is. Don’t go all “well, that’s just your opinion, man”. I already told you so. And the same goes for the academics who suddenly find themselves filled with the urge to debate me on how montage or Tarkovsky have been understood in academic writing over the years.
In. My. Opinion.
TikTok and its copycats have come to define how much of our societies consume information. The information that reaches us is bounded by the nature of the media that convey it.
By emphasising dubious theories that misrepresent neuroplasticity and “brain changes” we’ve managed to downplay that these platforms are doing exactly what they’re designed to do. Their form and design direct how we experience “facts” and how we learn.
I like to blame the Russians.
Not the current lot. Older Russians.
Though, if I’m to be fair, they more described the problem than caused it directly.
Specifically, I tend to blame Eisenstein and Tarkovsky.
Eisenstein was one of the early pioneers of cinema and was the first major filmmaker to come out of Russia in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet revolution.
His contribution was the concept of the “montage”. As legend would have it – probably untrue and apocryphal, but it’s a good story – early Soviet filmmakers struggled with shortages. That meant that they had a harder time of constructing films using the method that had been the norm in early cinema: a series of long takes spliced together, as you would if you were recording a play. They had to work with scraps of film.
So, as legend has it, they resorted to splicing together short bits of film and discovered that spliced end result worked very differently.
As he described the concept in his book (I think, it’s been twenty years since I read it, so I’m probably both misremembering and paraphrasing it badly):
If you record a long take of a man walking to a dinner table, looking down at the food, and licking his lips, you are very directly telling the viewer that the man is hungry and is about to eat.
But if you edit together a shot of the man entering a room, a close-up of food on the table, and a close-up of his face as he licks his lips, you are giving the viewer the impression of the same without actually showing it. You never actually visually show the man responding to the food one the screen at the same time. And if you change the shot of the food to the shot of another person, you transform the impression into a sexual one. Same core elements and shots, but because you aren’t directly telling the story visually – you’re implying it – you can transform the impression just by changing one shot.
The meaning, the scene, and the whole is constructed in the mind of the viewer without having to go through the effort of doing the thing itself on screen.
This is labour-saving, but it also means you can tell the story without having to show the story in detail.
The counterpoint to this approach came from another Russian – Tarkovsky – who made Solaris and Stalker and quite a few other movies. He believed that the montage was a bit of a deception. (Again, paraphrasing as it’s been almost two decades since I read his book as well.)
He saw the strength of film as being its time-based nature. It could show you time unfold, actions taking place over time, all on a large screen with detail and resolution that gave you the feeling of being there – gave you the sensation of a reality that impressionistic montage couldn’t and wouldn’t give you.
This is the point where, as a teacher, you’ve lost your students. As soon as you say “Russians” in any sort of cultural context, their eyes glaze over.
So, I always preferred to use action movies as examples to explain these two ideas. Back in the day I would contrast the Jason Bourne movies with Jackie Chan’s, but if I were teaching today I would probably instead use Marvel movies versus John Wick.
The Bourne movies are a stronger example, though, of the use of montage to deliver the impression of a fight without actually showing you the fight. They show punches, throws, and grimaces but at the same time they make it hard for you to follow the action in detail. You get the highlights – “he went out the window!” – but the exact scene itself simply isn’t shown. You get an impression of it through short edits. This is logistically quite convenient because it means you don’t have to actually shoot the scene you want to convey. You can conceal the fact that the actors don’t know how to fight, that fewer things are broken than you’d think, that the entire thing was much slower than portrayed, and the space was too constrained for an actual fight to happen.
You are given the impression of an experience that never took place.
Whereas in the Jackie Chan movies – or the John Wick movies if you aren’t familiar with early Jackie Chan – you get a broader view that often shows the full bodies of all the participants. You see the scene unfold as it happened in front of the camera. Every motion and action is shown in full detail.
It’s visual exposition, and it gives you a much stronger sense of being there, of experiencing the action that you’re watching, and it also gives you enough of an experience of the fight scene to be able to describe it to somebody else because you saw it unfold.
Try to describe a fight scene from one of the Bourne movies and, even if you’ve just watched it, you’ll only be able to convey the highlights of the scene because that’s all you were given.
Try to describe a fight scene from a Jackie Chan movie or John Wick, even a decade later, and you can often outline much of what happened because you witnessed it, and it felt real. It’s a richer and more vivid experience, especially when experienced on a large screen.
These two approaches are important because TikTok and YouTube Shorts – and many longer videos – are impressionistic and not expository.
Because they make you “lean forward” as you’re using the apps the expectation of a shorter duration is baked into the design of the software. You interact with streams of video – you don’t browse or forage – and are constantly ready to swipe to the next.
These services may let you upload longer videos, but the design itself enforces brevity.
This means the shorts themselves tend to resort to the economy of montage to deliver their message. Each short – brief already – is often composed of a sequence of even shorter clips. The stream itself sutures the many shorts together to create an algorithmic montage that’s specifically tailored to your tastes, constantly creating unfounded and even outright false impressions of what the stream is pretending to document.
They give you the feeling of having listened to somebody explain something in detail, but you haven’t actually – you just got convinced by an impression. You didn’t hear an argument. You haven’t actually heard through the reasoning of what you’re being told.
It becomes a mechanism of convincing people of political ideas, of news, of sequences of events out in the world that never actually happened, or are severely misrepresented through editing to create an impression.
This is the most effective medium to deliver a condensed message. Montage lets you create a dense message that is concise enough to fit within the duration parameters enforced by TikTok’s design.
These de facto duration limits our ability to use the Tarkovsky or the Jackie Chan approach of unfolding an argument or story over time.
You can’t deliver complex visual action or complex visual arguments as easily on TikTok using edited media as you can using a larger screen with linear time-based media.
One way to counteract this is through simplicity: the talking head video. A person, looking into the camera, outlining their argument verbally, doesn’t require much in terms of visual information and so isn’t constrained by the tiny screen size. Audio isn’t compromised by screen real-estate. It’s effectively just radio with a face on it, and it’s limited to the specific kind of information you could deliver on radio, but it suffers less from the limitations of modern short-form video.
They may not know it themselves, but this is probably the reason why many educators on TikTok tend to use this approach, or a similar approach with minimal editing, to deliver their work.
My own videos would be more convincing if they were two-minute videos full of short clips from various movies giving you the impression of my argument. (Might not pass content-id, but that’s a separate issue.)
This approach would be more convincing over a short duration, but I would not have the same time to explain the argument, and you would have a harder time integrating it and later on explaining it somebody else.
Because that’s the issue with the impressions created through montage – like the Jason Bourne fight scenes. If you’re sitting with a friend in a pub and trying to tell them about some of the scenes in a movie you just saw, you’d have a hard time giving them the details of a specific fight beyond a single highlight from the scene and how it concluded. You couldn’t describe the actual sequence of events because you never witnessed the sequence of events.
You were only given an impression of it.
Whereas the Jackie Chan or John Wick movies exhibited the event visually. That makes it easier for you to describe in your own words.
This tends to be missing from TikTok and the many YouTube videos that often to emphasize editing over explaining, over outlining the argument.
There are exceptions like the TikToker that goes by the handle Oddpride – Astrid Lundberg. She’s excellent at the genre of video you could describe as “sit down in front of a camera and explain a single concise idea directly to the audience”. She uses basically the talking-head approach. She sits down. Explains things in sequence. No cuts. Maybe an image or two is overlaid. Just a single camera; single shot.
It delivers the message.
When you’re trying to teach, or educate, or convince people of an argument the edited approach works, but it’s one of the reasons why misinformation is on the rise.
It’s so easy to deliver a false message that doesn’t have an argument but gives people the impression of an argument that they never actually watched unfold.
They come away with ideas that have no basis in factuality.
That isn’t to say the two approaches don’t have their place.
If you’re keeping with the action movie comparison, John Woo demonstrates how it can work. In his movie Hard Boiled there are action scenes with rapid editing, that build up a visceral impression that keeps the details intentionally unclear, before cutting to a wide and detailed shot that shows you where things ended up after the rapid sequence.
The impressionistic edits are used to strengthen and reinforce the emotions of the wider shot that follows.
In other scenes John Woo switches to extreme long takes – literally the time-based storytelling that Tarkovsky advocated – that show you the entire action sequence with two characters alternating and going through a hospital, fighting their way to their goal. This gives you the feeling of being there – of experiencing it with them. It makes the story feel much more real. He mixed the two approaches together to deliver a really effective action movie.
This is something you can do when you’re creating a longer piece of work, like a documentary, a movie, a series, or a longer YouTube essay.
Especially if you have the luxury of delivering for a larger screen, even if it’s just the larger screen of people’s living room TV.
This mix-and-match approach isn’t something that works on the phone. It doesn’t really scale down nor does it work with the constraints created by TikTok’s app design.
Talking head videos, like the ones I’m trying to make, kind of scale down. Sort of. For the most part. It’s one of the reasons why I’m using this approach to video.
This format is more likely to be able to deliver an argument that people will understand and integrate and then apply their own life.
Because they are more likely to be able to explain what they learned to others.
If I delivered this as a highly edited video, it would be more convincing, but it would rob you as a viewer of the tools you need to convince others.
The second order effect would be gone. The only way you could spread the message would be to share the video. The first order effect of manipulating you – the viewer – would be there, but if we’re trying to truly reach people and reach an audience we need to give you and ourselves the tools of explaining the things we learn ourselves.
That requires more time. Both in the duration and length of the work we make and in the experience that we demand of the reader or viewer.
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