I floated a theory of mine to Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel on this week’s episode of Panic World that content moderation, as we’ve understood, it effectively ended on January 6th, 2021. You can listen to the whole episode here, but the way I look at it is that the Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating, companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.

After 2021, the major tech platforms we’ve relied on since the 2010s could no longer pretend that they would ever be able to properly manage the amount of users, the amount of content, the amount of influence they “need” to exist at the size they “need” to exist at to make the amount of money they “need” to exist.

Under Zuckerberg’s new “censorship”-free plan, Meta’s social networks will immediately fill up with hatred and harassment. Which will make a fertile ground for terrorism and extremism. Scams and spam will clog comments and direct messages. And illicit content, like non-consensual sexual material, will proliferate in private corners of networks like group messages and private Groups. Algorithms will mindlessly spread this slop, boosted by the loudest, dumbest, most reactionary users on the platform, helping it evolve and metastasize into darker, stickier social movements. And the network will effectively break down. But Meta is betting that the average user won’t care or notice. AI profiles will like their posts, comment on them, and even make content for them. A feedback loop of nonsense and violence. Our worst, unmoderated impulses, shared by algorithm and reaffirmed by AI. Where nothing has to be true and everything is popular.

I think hardcore Twitter users have rose-colored glasses about the site’s coolness. The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture.

The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were.

I subscribe to the belief that internet trends are defined by a ratio of laziness to social reward. Users will always do the laziest possible thing to achieve the maximum amount clout. So, if every platform becomes either a Twitter alternative or a short-form video feed, but all with their own unique requirements for virality, users won’t make individual posts for each. They will instead shotgun blast all of them with the same posts and bet on the odds that something will breakthrough eventually. Which means everything eventually just becomes a reuploaded video or a screenshot from somewhere else.

While trying to track down the actual hyperlink to a post I found a screenshot of on a closed social network I was struck by how on an internet full of closed platforms, broken embeds, and crumbling indexes, the last reliable way to share anything is a screenshot.

the camera roll is, at this point, the real content management system of the social web. This is something that TikTok realized faster than other platforms, with their downloadable watermarked videos that have now become ubiquitous on every platform that allows video.

My theory as to why New Yorkers were so allergic to independent content creators is because for all the tedious guffawing about being a city of hustlers, most of the people who live there crave, on some level, institutional legitimacy and influencers, by definition, don’t get it or really need it. It could also just be that New Yorkers hate tourists and content creators are, in some form, permanent tourists of their own lives.

I actually think the post-COVID New York TikTok boom is already cresting. I think once these trends become calcified enough to report on, they’re already on their way out. I also don’t think Gen Z TikTokers are driving rents up, but rather documenting its rise due to other factors, like landlords being able to blame TikTok hype to jack up their rents.