I’ve been feeling ambivalent about social media platforms these past few years, and part of that ambivalence has been the result of truly anti-user behavior by the folks who run the things.

Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification’ to express the general sense of ‘everything is getting worse all the time’ that seems to pervade tech-related platforms right now, the idea being that these businesses follow a pattern of doing well by their users, then abusing their users to favor their business customers, and then abusing their business customers to favor themselves—at which point many of them die (after their cash piles disappear).

There’s also what was recently (and aptly) called a Jevon’s Paradox of cognitive labor.

Jevon’s Paradox says that if you make something more efficient (like using coal) you’ll actually end up with more coal use, not less, because people will tend to use more of a more efficient thing.

This applies to things like highways, as well: increasing the number of lanes seldom reduces traffic, instead leading to more traffic because more lanes equals more use of that highway, which then leads to more of the problem the lane-installers were trying to solve.

The application of this concept to human cognitive labor stems from the author’s recognition that work-related productivity tools seem to result in similar outcomes.

More tools (like generative AI systems and cameras built into our phones) allow us to produce more stuff, more efficiently than ever before. But this hasn’t led to a reduction in the amount of time we spend creating stuff—we spend more time than ever before just churning out whatever we can churn out, producing mounds upon mounds of (largely valueless) content, just because we can.

I don’t want to produce content for content’s sake, but that’s what a lot of these networks are trying to make me do. To understand why they’re optimized in that direction, it’s helpful to know about the concept of “digital sharecropping.”

This term was coined in a blog post in 2006 in which a long-time critic of internet communication and consumption pointed out that most platforms behave like old-school landowners who brought on “tenants” to work their land, those tenants doing all the labor and paying the landowners half or more of everything they grew (alongside payments for equipment, seed, etc), often going into debt in the process.

The sharecroppers weren’t in a great spot, many of them becoming not-quite-serfs. They were tied to this borrowed land, but their options were often limited because they didn’t have land of their own to work.

Through our posts, videos, essays, comments, shares, and likes, we till and plant and harvest for the landowner’s benefit. They yield the vast majority of the profits that result from our attention and activity, but we sweat it into existence.

Some few of us may become relatively prosperous as a result of this relationship, but most of us will slave away in the content fields, nudged to churn out more and more content, but never reaching the engagement numbers we need to make more than we spend.

I used to get a decent amount of value from these platforms, which dramatically increased my reach and allowed me to connect with people and ideas from around the world. It was pretty great, for a while there.

I still getting some small benefit from such networks, today, but I find the relationship has been bending a lot more toward their priorities than mine over the past handful of years, in particular.

More engagement for the sake of engagement, more content so others will engage.

More of my time, energy, and resources expended for their near-exclusive benefit.

All of which has me asking why I should work these fields when I don’t own the land.

There are alternatives, of course, many of which have their own downsides, just as being a landowner comes with a different set of concerns from laboring on someone else’s soil.

But I try to maintain a sense of my options and some non-sharecropping toeholds alongside these platforms to ensure I have somewhere to jump if and when I decide to pull up my roots and replant elsewhere in a more complete and committed manner.

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