Elon Musk limited the dissemination of links to Substack – a successful newsletter platform that many creators use to communicate with their audiences without intermediaries – for a few hours on Twitter shortly after it announced a functionality to share short messages. For those of us who believed in a free internet, for a message to be censored because it contains a link is the worst sin in a medium, precisely, founded on hypertext.
From the logic of the platforms, it is a matter of mere self-defense against the competition. On TikTok, for example, the creators avoid the word Instagram because they know it will be blocked: pragmatic, they speak algospeak, the language limited by the algorithm.
Musk's move symbolizes the new era. Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, said in a podcast that if the last ten or fifteen years have been marked by algorithms filtering the content we receive, the next few years will be those of algorithms creating that content through artificial intelligence.
For him, the media will be aggregators of firms, of brands, of talents to help: an economy of creators. The new content wars, those of the creators against the algorithms, will not be obvious, because they will be mixed with each other. AIs, tireless, will master the arts and sciences, photography, video, poetry and essays, and will help us in these efforts. We will all be creators.
I predict, then, that it will not be creativity that decides who wins, but a human weakness: the need to attend to fame. It happened in the first stage that Peretti was talking about: faced with the abundance of content, our minds resorted to emotions as a filter, creating the era of the viral: since we could not make a rational decision about each message, we let hate, anger or surprise will guide us.
In this second stage, given the overabundance of creators, we will use recognition as a shortcut. Familiarity builds trust. Internet celebrities big and small are being listened to. We desire, said the philosopher René Girard, what the other desires. There will exist—already exists—a ruling class of attention. For the rest there won't be much left.
