I wonder if the worship of scale - Silicon Valley style - is the root of so many of our problems.

Used to be, we had an environment with some number of gatekeepers. HUMAN gatekeepers. At newspapers, book publishers, record labels, and so on.

Now we have Twitter with its algorithmic timeline. Facebook with its algorithmic timeline. Spotify with its algorithmic.... you get the idea.

All in the service of SCALE. An algorithm, a kind of robotic gatekeeper, can filter so much more material than a human-staffed publisher ever could.

The twist, really the twist of the knife, is that the (very human) developer who programmed the algorithm, and the oligarchs they work for, have a different set of values from the old gatekeepers.

The old gatekeepers wanted to hold onto power and run a profitable operation, sure, but they also were interested in the music, the books, the newspapers themselves. And they had at least a grudging respect for the creators who wrote, sang, authored, performed the material.

The new masters are different. The only value they have, and I mean the only value, is GROWTH. At any cost. Any whiff of any remainder of any other value is, at very best, an occasional nod to head off a PR disaster.

Did you think you're a writer? Journalist? Author? Musician? Performer? Not any more. You're a "content creator," and the only "content" that matters is anything, and I mean anything, that when fed into the algorithm, will fuel GROWTH.

Let's take YouTube, Google's hellish money-spewing chameleon of an algorithm. Feed it anything, and I mean ANYTHING, that promotes growth, and you're rewarded. Flat earth? Conspiracies? Pedophilia? As long as it gets flat earthers, conspiracists, and pedophiles to watch.

I want you to consider, pre-Google, what it would have meant for, say, the largest book publisher in the US to get caught making some amount of money not just selling pedophilia books, but actively reaching out to pedophiles to dangle the books in their line of vision.

Or take flat earth. I want you to consider, pre-Google, what would have happened if - say - the New York Times or Wall Street Journal had started a daily section called "The Earth Is Flat" - actively encouraging the belief in order to sell more ads.

People joke about the timeline we're in, but we're really in a hellish economy when a company like Google can get pegged for all of the above - and more - and still achieve growth, and yet more growth, swallowing whole sectors - like edtech - with hardly a peep of protest.

But you see, it's the SCALE that they've achieved. The algorithm is a money machine, filtering our media - our music - our news - our thoughts - our very conception of truth - and distorting it in the way that leads to greater profit for Google. Or Facebook. Or Twitter.

In this system, the owners of the algorithm win it all. The musicians, authors, journalists get nothing. And the end-users - the readers, the citizens - get a distorted fun-house mirror on the world, presenting the feudal lords as heroes.

And anyone who asks too many questions - who points out the fraud at the heart of the system - can be turned off with a click. The algorithm - as always, managed by its human programmers working for their feudal lords - will make sure that no one, and no idea, threatens GROWTH.

Some day, perhaps in some future generation, people will understand the corrupting effects of the algorithmic filter, the algorithmic timeline. They'll understand the deadly consequences of worshiping growth at any cost.

We're lucky if the Twitter algorithm has allowed you to see this thread. But who knows what we're missing.

/eot