Part Of Why Everything Feels Like It's Always Getting Worse

(It's corporations and social media)

I imagine the feeling I get after five minutes on any social media is a bit like the feeling medieval peasants got when a plague was sweeping the realm.

One of the things I’ve been noticing lately is these spammy, content-farm/AI-generated “Tedooo app” crafting posts. Tedooo calls itself “Social Commerce for Crafters,” which itself sounds like AI-generated corporate-speak nonsense.

These posts appear on Facebook and probably Instagram (which I don’t use), and they all read like tacky dramatic creative writing exercises, and all feature some trauma or tragedy that was somehow made right by a serendipitous coincidence courtesy of this crafting app, which is always referred to as “Tedooo app.”

Not “the Tedooo app,” not “Tedooo,” but “Teedooo app,” which is either broken Eastern European content-farm English or a bit of irreversible shame the company forces its copy writers to impose on themselves, like how the mob makes you kill a man before you’re really part of the family.

Here are three of these posts, from Facebook, which I came across randomly thrown into my feed:

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah.

One element here is the internet randomly tossing extremely distressing topics into your consciousness like an ersatz, possessed slot machine. I really think this has a lot to do with the whole discourse over “safe spaces” and “cancel culture” and free speech and words as violence—we don’t quite have a vocabulary for the injury that is in fact imposed on you by being non-consensually exposed to distressing content. That is a real thing that happens, almost irreducibly, simply by existing on the internet, and we struggle to describe it and form legal and social rules around it.

But what I’m really interested in here, in this piece, is how Facebook, which is part of a huge, top-tier American technology firm, feels like a completely unregulated Wild West of advertising and slop. Why is this sort of “content” not an instant ban? It’s as if this company has absolutely no pride, no reputation, no shame. I mean, it isn’t as if, they just don’t. But it’s weird. I’m not naive about the profit motive, but I’m sort of shocked by how little big companies today seem to care at all about standards of professionalism or customer experience.

You see something similar with Amazon, with its pages and pages and pages of identical junk with spammy titles, blatantly illegal and counterfeit products which might even, strictly speaking, be a crime to own, with the way its messy returns departments (not surprised they’re busy) colonize space in physical stores like Whole Foods (which of course it owns).

Or Google’s AI, which forces itself to the top of your search results, and which comes up with…novel bits of history like this:

Or you see it with a weird bug I have with my smartphone camera, where pictures taken in the same orientation will randomly come out flipped 90 degrees, or flipped 180. You look up the problem, and literally nobody can explain why this device with infinitely more computing power than a 1960s mainframe and as good a lens and sensor as most consumer-grade digital cameras ever made can’t reliably produce a photo in the orientation that it was taken.

Why does my printer about 10 percent of the time fail to print the second page I attempt to print? Always prints the first, almost always prints every job sent to it, but once in awhile number 2 gets stuck. How is it possible that nobody with any sort of professional standing can explain it? How does nobody in a position of power or influence in these companies not demand all this garbage be cleaned up? Doesn’t anyone ever get sick of it? And don’t even think of asking on the Microsoft forum. “Hi, it sounds like you’re having a problem with your printer!” Yes, it rather does, doesn’t it? I see why you might come away with that impression, now that I think about it.

I think the sense that things are fractured and falling apart has a lot to do with this kind of thing. Obviously a lot of is our political situation, inflation, etc. But I think a lot of it is just the sense that everyday stuff doesn’t work anymore. The fact that these everyday things are getting more sophisticated or tech-ified only adds to the frustration.

I could go on—supermarket self-checkouts that don’t work because people steal too much stuff because they’re checking out with a robot; airport check-in kiosks that burn up several minutes before the clerk comes over and checks in for you; deskless hotel check-ins; airlines charging for checked bags, so people bring more carry-ons, so the carry-ons don’t fit and you have to check anyway.

These are not just normal adult inconveniences, the background noise of life. They’re technocratic and policy problems, which means that they’re fixable, which means that they’re optional, which means that they’re chosen. They are a million little indignities and degradations imposed on public life by companies which have abdicated any sort of responsibility to their customers or to their own sense of pride in work well done.

One of the foundational reasons for chains and large companies in America was standardization: aside from the question of quality, you could at least get a uniform product or experience when dealing with a large organization. You could achieve tight oversight when every branch was overseen by a corporate office.

That aspect of bigness and concentration—reliability, certainty, uniformity—seems to be degrading everywhere. Yet the worst effects of bigness, like decreased competition, seem to be getting worse.

I think when people/voters talk about how bad everything is, how insecure they feel, etc., despite their own finances being comfortable, they’re not just making stuff up. They’re intuiting something about the moment we’re in, where it feels like things are seized up and ossified, but nobody is really in charge.

What do you think?

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Related Reading:

The “Vibecession” Was (And Is) Real, But It’s Not About The Economy

Respites and Little Luxuries

Stress Cracks

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