Have capitalists killed the internet?

At the start of the century, the internet was an escape from reality. Now, reality is an escape from the internet writes Huck Newsletter columnist Emma Garland.

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.


“At the end of the day most people just want a social media platform that actually works” Emma Garland

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.

“At the start of the century, the internet was an escape from reality. Now, reality is an escape from the internet.” Emma Garland

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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