Blaming the Victim on the Eve of the Web's Maximum Era

Contrary to the cyber-utopian stupidities championed by market populism-peddling corporate PR hacks, those whose economic function it is to platform the views of such vile specimens, and those people stupid enough to repeat such persons' lies, the playing field was never level, the game never meritocratic where trying to reach an audience online is concerned. Those who had deep pockets, powerful allies and privileged sympathizers were well-positioned to win--with the outrageously hyped possibility of the Little Guys competing against the Big Guys on the basis of the possibility of online "discovery," the "long tail" and perhaps "going viral" never better than slim, the equivalent of hoping to buy a winning Powerball ticket really, and as is generally the case with lotteries, for most a cruel disappointment. And it has all only got worse since. Indeed, these days the game, ever more "winner take all," can seem to be running its course as small bloggers, if never getting what they hoped for from their effort, find their traffic collapsing from quarter to quarter with each new round of "algorithmic" changes. And where many of them had once really been part of the dialogue in some degree they have increasingly wondered if there even is a dialogue anymore, and they are not after all on a "dead Internet," where all the humans have already departed and it is just artificial intelligence-generated sites out there being crawled by bots, or even if this hasn't happened yet this will soon be the case with what I have written of as the Internet's "Maximum Era" upon us.

Of course, this is not the Establishment version of the matter. "The major platforms pushing the small Internet sites to extinction, you say? Heavens, no!" they protest. They are simply trying to give the Internet user the best possible experience by separating the wheat from the chaff all as if anything they are helping the small-timer, who need only create quality "content" to succeed.

Alas, even the dumbest of us should on merely hearing such drivel recognize it as the same obscenely stupid and stupidly obscene claptrap that those complacent about the chase after success have peddled for as long as it has been around--as we can confirm given that the basis for judging what is wheat and what is chaff uses criteria ("brand names," backlinks, etc.) ever more favorable to the better-funded and longer-established players rather than the up-and-comer, and ever more remote from the "quality" of the content they present. Garbage on a too-big-to-fail platform (for indeed even mainstream media's supposedly most reputable newspapers and magazines are drowning the web and its users in garbage) will be moved to the top of the search results--the more in as it lays out the money for "sponsored" results--while gold on a blog by a nobody will likely not be indexed at all. Meanwhile, as they defend the vicious practice they not only hawk that bankrupt aspirationalism but engage in the all too familiar cruelty of telling those cheated in the rigged game that they have no one to blame but themselves for their unhappy lot for they "were just not good enough" as a prelude to telling anyone who would dare question the justice of the game's terms that they are not merely a "loser" and a "failure," but a "taker" if not a "scavenger", or even an "unhuman." For the time being, of course, few but those bloggers and others directly victimized by this process really care, but even those who have little sympathy for these groups should remember that this is part of the bigger enshittification of online life that touches the life of every web user, which is to say, everybody who has not elected to flee modernity for the wilderness and hide from it under a rock--and again, entirely in line with the ways in which those who flatter themselves that they are winners not only demean everyone else, but employ that demeaning of them as a tactic to compel their acquiescence in their victimization by this grift.