I Guess I'm the Asshole Now

I wasn't sure I'd send out a newsletter this week. I'm on a massive deadline that requires every ounce of my cognitive powers, and I'm also sick. You know how, when you get sick, you often become bewilderingly emotional? One of the things I've learned in the past few years, thanks to chronic pain and illness, is why this happens. Your brain, as smart and powerful as it is, can only deal with so much at any one time. For instance, it can only send so many pain signals out at once, which is why one thing can often hurt to the exclusion of everything else. Like say you've got a low-grade headache but then you walk by your bed barefoot and catch your little toe, bending and stubbing it in an awful way. All the pain signals will reroute to your foot (and weirdly your stomach? Does anyone else get nauseated when this happens?) and you'll forget all about your head.

So when you're sick, your brain does the same thing. It prioritizes being sick over everything else. It has to, right? Like if you have an intruder in your house, are you going to keep cooking dinner and be able to stay completely calm? No, you're going to shut it all down so you can try and get that motherfucker out. Same thing happens in your brain. Anything that's not mission critical or high priority gets paused, because there are too many alarms going off. One of the things it immediately deprioritizes is emotional regulation. And that, my friends, is why you're a big baby who cries a lot when you get the flu.

It's also why, after I woke up this morning, I found myself almost irrationally pissed off by this Verge article. Rather than turn immediately to my deadline, I decided that if I have to suffer, the newsletter suffers with me. So here we are! I'm a big pissy baby, and all of you are coming along for the ride.

What's funny is that my acute pissiness isn't due to the subject of the article. Don't get me wrong, I — like nearly everyone with a functioning brain — am always pissed at Meta for a wide range of reasons. (I have the added bonus of lingering personal resentment about the incredible value I delivered for Instagram and how I was treated in return, but I don't enjoy narrative-as-therapy and prefer to write about that experience in more productive ways. Wondering whether this is a subtweet? It is.)

No, I'm mad about the literal article. For an article with an incredible amount of information, it feels, at least to me, shockingly uninformative. I don't want to say lazy, because that's mean and not true, and these writers obviously did a lot of work. But it is oddly superficial, in a way that plagues so much writing these days, particularly about tech. I've been frustrated by this for months (ok, years), but I guess this morning was my big baby breaking point.

Writing about tech is an oddly difficult thing. It's something nearly everyone uses, but also something many people don't know a lot about. More importantly, it's something many people don't care about. Like, they care about using it, how it affects them, whether it works well, all that sort of stuff. But they don't really give a shit about the rest. They don't want to spend their time reading 14,000 words on Adobe or whatever. It's kind of like politics, I guess — it's important, it's everywhere, it affects all of us, but please don't subject me to anymore Bluesky threads about shitty decisions and the assholes who make them. Just tell me what it means and what to do.

Look. Since today's newsletter is unwittingly an exercise in uncomfortable vulnerability and confessions, I'll just fucking go for it. I'm also fed up with reading articles that get so, so close to the big picture by gathering a bunch of pretty good insights, only to then entirely miss the point and still get loads of visibility and positive feedback from people who should frankly know better. It's not incorrect, but it is incomplete. And yes, I'm personally annoyed that a lot of the insights are things I've been quietly yelling about for years, but have mostly been ignored.

I remember once, 13 years ago, I told a manager that during team meetings men would often repeat something I'd said minutes before, only when they said it, everyone would respond and say "great idea, wow, yes" rather than look at me blankly. His response? "You're great at teeing up ideas but other people are better at knocking them out of the park." One thing you definitely want to hear when you point out sexism at the workplace is a bad sports metaphor. Those aren't even the same two sports, moron!

Here's an example from this article.

The bigger problem is the people it shows those ads to, and the content it puts those ads in between. The average social media user is less interested than they once were in posting, and Meta’s access to a new generation of users is under threat.

“There is sort of a tension brewing where we’re seeing this double-digit growth in their ad spend, but we are not seeing double-digit growth when it comes to overall usage [in the US],” Minda Smiley, senior analyst at eMarketer, says of advertisers’ spending patterns. “I think that just really speaks to the fact that social media is saturated in many ways. The hyper growth days for Meta are over.”

People in general are now using social media to consume content rather than share it; a Morning Consult poll found that a third of respondents say they post less on social media compared to last year. What’s more, entire generations of young people are logging off or forcibly being logged off.

On the surface, fine! All true, mostly. Young people are not logging off, they're just logging on differently. We've talked about this here what feels like 100 times. Also the part about people being less interested in posting. That's actually been going on for years, guys. Any discussion of why that's happening? What it means? Whether that's important to the whole premise of the article, which is "can you keep using Meta products and forget how you feel about the company?" No, just some facts.

When kids can get online, Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t want to express themselves fully on the social media sites their parents or relatives are on, and what’s more, they want in-person experiences, Haberman says. They want to touch grass.

This is only kind of true? It's a very Millennial way of looking at things, frankly. One thing that ended with Gen Z and Gen Alpha is the idea that offline and online aren't connected, that one is real and the other isn't. Yes, they want in-person experiences, but how do you think they find or organize them? How do you think their lives are mediated? What is the infrastructure of all our existence? They know they can't successfully exist as a person connected to their friends without access to all these platforms, but they also know they don't want to use them in ways that previous generations have done. These aren't either/or situations. They are way, way more nuanced than 99% of tech writers seem to understand. RIP nuance.

Four years ago, Instagram teased what would become perhaps its most reviled change to date: an “immersive” experience where photos and videos took up a user’s full screen and filled it with content from accounts a user didn’t follow. The feature was blatantly ripped from TikTok, its newer, more ruthless competitor, and to many users, the update represented a betrayal of Instagram’s core social elements.

Tati Bruening saw something worth saving in Instagram’s earlier, actually social, peer-to-peer communication platform. The photographer and creative tapped into widespread resentment and frustration, posting a graphic that was simple and to the point: “MAKE INSTAGRAM INSTAGRAM AGAIN,” it read. “Stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends. Sincerely, everyone.” Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, titans of attention-based online economy, reposted Bruening’s graphic. An online petition racked up hundreds of thousands of signatures. Eventually, the heat became too much to bear, and Instagram rolled back the changes. But it was only kicking the can down the road; this was the beginning of the end of an era.

Sorry, but this is just dumb. A petition and a graphic caused the rollback of this massive undertaking? What about the work of countless people at Instagram, conducting hundreds of hours of research in order to relentlessly show leadership how terrible this entire approach was? What about the fact that metrics tanked so badly they still had not recovered a year later? What about the fact that, despite all of this, leadership still wanted to try it again? Also, the beginning of the end of what era?

I don't know. Sometimes I want to throw my hands in the air and go get another dumb job, but then I remember there aren't any jobs, dumb or otherwise. There has to be a better way to help people understand what exactly is going on at these companies and with these products, a way that helps them also understand what choices they actually have to change any of this. Right? Please?

Earlier in the article, way before anything about Instagram, the authors quote someone from a tech advisory and research firm. I don't want to make that person mad, because maybe he'll have a job for me, but also because he says this, which is mostly true and worth diving into more — something the authors don't do.

“Meta’s done a very poor job of talking about privacy and setting the right tone,” acknowledges Sag. “But it’s funny because if you go [politically] far left or far right, people care more about privacy. In the middle, people care less and just want to have a good experience.”

I say mostly because I don't think it's simply a political spectrum thing. Yes, I do think this is a politicized issue and there are people who care more about privacy than about good experiences. But I've also done research about this, most recently at Mozilla. I can tell you that even people who have a far better understanding of tech privacy than I ever will make compromises when it comes to a good user experience. And that!! That's at the heart of the whole issue! We're almost all like that. And we need to figure out if there is a point at which all or at least enough of us will finally say, "Ok you know what, maybe I'll put up with a less good experience if it means eroding the power and control people like Mark Zuckerberg have."

Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel a little better now. Until next Wednesday.

Lx