Elon Musk took to Twitter for a few hours to limit the spread of links to Substack – a successful newsletter platform that many creators use to communicate with their audiences without intermediaries – shortly after it announced a feature for sharing 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 of sins in a medium, precisely, founded on hypertext.
From the logic of the platforms, it is simple self-defense against the competition. On TikTok, for example, creators avoid the word Instagram because they know it will be blocked: pragmatists, 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 intelligence artificial For him, the media will be aggregators of firms, brands, talents: an economy of creators.
The new content wars, those of creators against algorithms, will not be obvious, because they will be mixed with each other. Tireless AIs will dominate the arts and sciences, photography, video, poetry and essays, and help us in these tasks. We will all be creators.
I predict, then, that it will not be creativity that will decide who wins, but a human weakness: the need to attend to fame. It happened in the first stage Peretti talked about when, given the abundance of content, our minds turned to emotions as a filter, creating the age of virality: because we couldn't make a rational decision about each message , we let hatred, anger or surprise guide us.
In this second stage, faced with the overabundance of creators, we will use recognition as a shortcut. Familiarity creates trust. Internet celebrities, big and small, are heard. We desire, said the philosopher René Girard, what the other desires. There will be – already exists – a ruling class of attention. For the rest, there won't be much left.
