Have capitalists killed the internet?

This col­umn first fea­tured in Huck’s cul­ture newslet­ter. Sign up here to make sure it lands in your inbox as soon as it lands.

Wow, I can’t believe ​‘Kamala is brat’ didn’t work. It’s almost as if a 107-day meme cam­paign direct­ly pan­der­ing to a niche of ter­mi­nal­ly online Char­li xcx stans wasn’t enough to win the pres­i­den­cy. The loss doesn’t rest square­ly on Kamala Har­ris, mind you, but on the Democ­rats for insist­ing that Joe Biden, inco­her­ent man of many gaffes, was fit to run again for so long. As a result, Don­ald Trump will become the first pres­i­dent to serve two non­con­sec­u­tive terms since Grover Cleve­land in the 1800s (which sounds like a long time ago writ­ten down, but you don’t real­ly deep just how long ago until you know that he was referred to col­lo­qui­al­ly by the pub­lic as ​“Uncle Jumbo”). 

The most annoy­ing thing, though, is that heavy­weight cham­pi­on of atten­tion econ­o­my bil­lion­aires, Elon Musk, will be join­ing the incom­ing admin­is­tra­tion as an ​“effi­cien­cy tsar,” head­ing up a new gov­ern­ment depart­ment whose acronym spells the name of a spoof cryp­tocur­ren­cy Musk post­ed about so fre­quent­ly it almost got him done for insid­er trad­ing (Depart­ment of Gov­ern­ment Effi­cien­cy… Doge). By all accounts he’s already get­ting on everyone’s tits, demand­ing a say in every­thing and hang­ing around Mar-a-Lago like a weed deal­er who just wants to ​“blaze one” with you and then has to be phys­i­cal­ly peeled off the couch at 1AM. Trump loves to fire peo­ple, so it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble that Musk’s tenure will end before the inau­gu­ra­tion in Jan­u­ary, which would be extreme­ly fun­ny. In the mean­time, we can enjoy the fact that X is kin­da dying.

There has been wide­spread dis­sat­is­fac­tion with Twit­ter since Elon Musk bought the com­pa­ny for $44 bil­lion in April 2022. User­ship has plum­met­ed since he laid off 80 per cent of the work­force, changed its name to X, and made it so that the top replies to every post are: the most fla­grant­ly racist series of words you have ever read in your life, an impact font meme from the ear­ly 2010s, and an Only­Fans girl adver­tis­ing free hole in bio. In that order. It’s unsur­pris­ing that peo­ple would aban­don a web­site that sim­ply doesn’t work, but since the elec­tion, X has been haem­or­rhag­ing users like it’s stuck in one of Jigsaw’s traps. When The Guardian pub­lished an edi­to­r­i­al on Novem­ber 14 announc­ing that it would no longer be post­ing on X, it prompt­ed a much larg­er migra­tion over to Bluesky.

Con­ceived in 2019 and made avail­able to the gen­er­al pub­lic in Feb­ru­ary 2023, Bluesky seems to trow stronger with every fuck up at X. When X was (tem­porar­i­ly) sus­pend­ed in Brazil in a stand­off over dis­in­for­ma­tion relat­ed to the 2022 elec­tion cam­paign, Bluesky picked up 3 mil­lion users. When X announced changes that would allow users to view posts from peo­ple who had blocked them, it picked up anoth­er 1.2 mil­lion. The day after the US elec­tion, more than 115,000 users deac­ti­vat­ed their X accounts – the largest-ever mass exit from the plat­form – and traf­fic to Bluesky went up 500 per cent. At the time of writ­ing, Bluesky has over 24 mil­lion users world­wide, up from 9 mil­lion in September.

A part of Bluesky’s pop­u­lar­i­ty is that it resem­bles how Twit­ter used to feel, which is prob­a­bly by design. The plat­form was ini­tial­ly devel­oped by Jack Dorsey while he was still the CEO of Twit­ter (Bluesky is now pri­mar­i­ly owned by chief exec­u­tive Jay Graber), and it func­tion­al­ly has every­thing that made it pop­u­lar in the first place. Music jour­nal­ists debat­ing the cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance of an artist with two EPs on Band­camp. Late night ​“just made a big soup x” posts into the void. Deranged hot takes about how enjoy­ing sports is a Tro­jan horse for the far right. And, most impor­tant­ly, the abil­i­ty for users to see posts from peo­ple they have cho­sen to fol­low or share links to oth­er web­sites with­out them being delib­er­ate­ly buried by an algo­rithm. Amaz­ing. A marked dif­fer­ence from the cur­rent state of X, which greets you every day with a recy­cled buf­fet of AI slop and body­cam videos of peo­ple being murdered.

Some are join­ing Bluesky with a venge­ful ​“that’ll teach ya” atti­tude towards Musk, post­ing about him con­stant­ly and refer­ring to X as ​“the oth­er place” (Musk, for his part, has start­ed refer­ring to it as ​“Blue­cry”), but at the end of the day most peo­ple just want a social media plat­form that actu­al­ly works – and Bluesky, cur­rent­ly, works. Who knows how long it’ll last, but for now it’s adding a glim­mer of sim­plic­i­ty and per­son­al cura­tion back to a social media land­scape that has become over­ly chaot­ic; a reminder that social media should be a tool to be used, not a spoon to feed.

Mean­while, the live music indus­try has reached its own mad­den­ing point of col­lapse. A recent sur­vey found that 72% of musi­cians made no prof­it from recent tours, despite the fact that tick­et prices have shot up. There are a bunch of rea­sons for this, rang­ing from ris­ing over­heads for venues relat­ing to the ener­gy cri­sis, hid­den fees and dynam­ic pric­ing from com­pa­nies like Tick­et­mas­ter and Live Nation that have a monop­oly on the mar­ket, and, in the UK, a hefty 20% VAT on tick­et sales. Then there’s the tax of sim­ply exist­ing. While an artist takes home £93.60 for every £150 tick­et for an are­na show, for instance, most of that is eat­en up by high­er trav­el, accom­mo­da­tion and pro­duc­tion costs, rather than going direct­ly back to the artist. In what is being called a ​“cost of tour­ing” cri­sis, many grass­roots and inde­pen­dent artists can no longer afford to tour at all.

Kate Nash drew atten­tion to the issue this month by launch­ing an Only­Fans account where she’ll post pho­tos of her arse to fund her upcom­ing tour. Cit­ing the ris­ing costs of trav­el, accom­mo­da­tion, food, pro­mo­tion and crew, the deci­sion was a finan­cial one as well as a delib­er­ate stunt to high­light how ​“com­plete­ly bro­ken” the music indus­try is. It comes weeks after Lily Allen launched an Only­Fans for her feet, whose 1,000 sub­scribers cut her a fat­ter month­ly wage than 8 mil­lion lis­ten­ers on Spo­ti­fy (if you’re inter­est­ed in why this is, which has to do with anoth­er huge but less sexy indus­try issue of label con­tracts, there’s an excel­lent break­down on Drowned In Sound). ​“Don’t hate the play­er, hate the game,” Allen told detractors.

We’re all aware at this point that the game is rigged. No one who should be mak­ing mon­ey from what they do is mak­ing mon­ey from what they do. No one who logs on is hav­ing a good time. There are no ​“bad­dies” and ​“good­ies,” the world doesn’t work like that, but it does feel like any­one cur­rent­ly prof­it­ing in the area of arts or tech­nol­o­gy – which, togeth­er, make up an incred­i­bly large chunk of our lives – is an active dick. Whether you’re play­ing a show, try­ing to get tick­ets to a show, or sim­ply want­i­ng to post about the artist to your friends online, there is a dis­tinct feel­ing that all of these things have become dif­fi­cult and also you are hav­ing the piss tak­en out of you along the way.

At the start of the cen­tu­ry, the inter­net was an escape from real­i­ty. Now, real­i­ty is an escape from the inter­net. Only now it costs a mys­tery amount between £53 and £400 (plus VAT) and a £9 Becks to go see Smash­ing Pump­kins. Hell.

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