Your work is worthless
Artists, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s time to pack up your paintbrushes and go home. You see, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think the work of most individual creators is worth anything and therefore, it should be free for him to scrape into his AI compactor so it can continue to flatten the life out of our creative spaces. And since he thinks it should be free, it will be free, because who’s going to stop him?
Literally. Nobody.
All we can do is the same thing we’ve been doing – complain about it and wring our hands. It’s not like we’re going to turn our backs on his social media platforms. Meta (and the other evil empire) have such a stranglehold on our communications that we have few other viable options as individual creators to share our creativity with the world at large. We have outsourced our autonomy to monoliths, and now we are paying the price.
“Look, we’re a big company,” Zuckerberg said. “We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people. I think that you’ll probably see a similar dynamic with AI.”
I don’t know if you’ve spent any time on Facebook lately, but uhhhhh.
Welp.
Let me just show you the sorts of things Facebook deems valuable.
This video of a woman twerking down the hallway while being chased by a serial killer brandishing a vegetable peeler has 53 THOUSAND likes.
(I realized while editing this image that the screenshot was bad so I had to go back and search for it, RIP my algorithm.)
Temu. So Meta.
The idea of Meta scraping Temu assets for free cracks me up, it’s like the pickpockets pickpocketing the pickpocketers. Say that three times fast.
Whatever the heck this is, and there’s a LOT of it.
People eating giant foods.
I feel so cultured now.
Do you see what these things have in common?
Spoiler: it’s YOU.
Meta doesn’t value anything you create because they can’t monetize it. They’re too busy monetizing your eyeballs. These posts are the kind of content that offer ZERO value to society (you could argue that it’s extractive) but provide great value to Meta because they keep your eyeballs glued to their app.
Your creativity doesn’t matter. Your connection to family and friends doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. You are a data point feeding Meta’s bottom line.
I mean, I know this isn’t news anymore but it sometimes gets lost in the masterclass on hide-the-ball Zuckerberg teaches every time he is challenged. Zuckerberg’s genius isn’t that he’s a tech guru. His genius is that he controls the narrative better than most. He is unwavering in the direction he wants things to go, and that direction is to monetize the fuck out of us.
I’m old enough to remember a time before all this and every day I miss it more.
We had our own websites. Even if they were clunky and poorly designed, they were OURS. We owned our content. We formed our connections with others based not on proximity or algorithmic nudges, but on common interests and mutual support. If you liked what someone else was doing, you added them to your webring or blogroll. Those networks were powerful in ways we didn’t understand back then because nobody cared about optimizing SEO or monetizing their every waking moment. We cared about connecting with like-minded people simply because we could. We took the time to form relationships and communities. We hosted events just for fun. We wrote and created what we wanted, when we wanted, and enjoyed the hell out of doing it. We truly danced like no one was watching across the world wide web.
This is one of the things I enjoy about Substack. Even though it’s a larger platform, it still retains the watercooler vibe. Our recommended reads are the webrings we create full of brilliant people we want others to know. Slow and thoughtful is a priority for many writers, all of whom are sharing their brilliant messages in the ways only they can.
When Zuckerberg says your work is worthless, what he’s really saying is that Meta is too weak to stand on its own two feet. Meta can’t profit unless it’s standing on your head. AI enables Meta to scoop up your valuable creativity at bargain basement wholesale prices.
Your work is worth too much for Meta to afford, because it comes from an untouchable place deep within in your squishy soul. The core of your humanity that seeks connection with other humans is priceless. Like a spoiled teenager Zuckerberg dismisses and devalues the things he can’t have for free.
This is the same petulant behavior we see happening everywhere, from our politicians, to our “coaches”, to our influencers, to, unfortunately, all of us. The expectation on social media is that we continue to grow, and in doing so, we continue to feed the monster that is consuming us. For what?
We will have a reckoning if, and only if, we reconnect with all of the things that social media platforms have taken from us and remember how truly powerful we were without them.
Are you brave enough to stop feeding the beast?