Last year, in an appearance on Rick Rubin’s podcast, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor observed that over the course of his career, music has become more ubiquitous — and, simultaneously, less special. “I kind of miss the attention music got … not that I’m that interested in a critic’s opinion, but to send something out into the world and feel like it touched places.”
To platforms, music is just content
A little more than six months after Reznor observed that his medium’s cachet had been diminishing, half of Pitchfork’s editorial staffers, including its editor-in-chief, were laid off and the publication was folded into GQ. Pitchfork, for a time, was a kingmaker in the music industry — pushing bands on indie labels into prime discourse while older music magazines struggled to modernize.
Pitchfork came of age in the early aughts as music began to transition from analog to digital, rising to prominence as the way people listened changed from buying CDs and turning on the radio to pirating albums and downloading MP3s. It championed new artists, especially in the then-burgeoning genre of indie rock; there was even a period when Pitchfork could put bands on the charts. It also occasionally killed careers.
Now, in the streaming era, music is more available than ever — but it’s harder for bands to break through. A new artist is competing with a library of all the songs the streamer has licensed. Worse, those services — for instance, Spotify and Apple Music — plainly do not view music as art to be appreciated and savored. TikTok, the new force in music discovery, relegates music to background noise for videos; songs there aren’t treated as entities in and of themselves. To platforms, music is just content.
In theory, this should make music journalism more important than ever for new artists. Pitchfork didn’t stop doing good work. But another wave of changing tech — in music and on the broader internet — has seriously reduced its power as a tastemaker. As a result, the internet-native publication was acquired and then bungled by an old-school magazine publisher. Speaking with former Pitchfork staffers and music writers, I wanted to know: What is the purpose of a music magazine now? And more critically, without journalism, what happens to music? After conversations with eight people, I have come to believe that Condé Nast certainly doesn’t know. Does anyone else?
Ryan Schreiber founded Pitchfork in 1996, from his parents’ home, while working at a record store in Minnesota. At the time, US music writing was dominated by monthly magazines like Rolling Stone, Vibe, and Spin. Most album reviews at those magazines were “capsule” length, perhaps just a few paragraphs.
Schrieber started — as most writers do — by writing stuff to amuse his friends: funny, rambly, and above all, highly critical of what he felt was bad or boring. The idea was to center independent music. “I really wanted to create something that was very outspoken that was very tough from a critical standpoint on what sort of deserves to be part of this culture, who’s making music that’s innovative and progressive,” he said during an interview on the podcast Popcast in January. He felt that most music journalists were basically just cheerleaders.
“If you live in a major market, chances are there isn’t an independent commercial radio station on your radio dial.”
When Pitchfork began, most music was purchased on CDs, and so the putative focus of magazine reviews in that era was usually advising consumers on how to spend their money, either at local stores or through mail-order publishers like Columbia House. CDs cost an average of $16.98 in 1995 — about $34.84 in today’s dollars. Buying one album meant not listening to another.
Besides magazines, radio was another way to discover music in the early ‘90s. Once upon a time, it was possible for the music director of a single radio station to launch a career; Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” charted at number six on Billboard because one obsessive David Lynch fan in Atlanta happened to really like it. But the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated radio ownership, and by 1999, consolidation meant about 1,000 radio station owners had left the business. “If you live in a major market, chances are there isn’t an independent commercial radio station on your radio dial,” Lydia Polgreen wrote that year.
At the same time, the rise of file-sharing services such as Napster meant there was more music to listen to than ever, and the launch of the iPod in 2001 made it easier to take a large catalog with you, in your pocket. But the iTunes store didn’t come into existence until 2003, which made blogs an important source of not only curation but discovery. That created a spectacular opportunity for a source that could pull it all together.
It was clear the brick-and-mortar businesses weren’t keeping up with the deluge of new music. “I first heard about Explosions in the Sky off Pitchfork,” Craig Jenkins, a critic at Vulture (who requested I note his indie rock cred: he saw The Dismemberment Plan pre-breakup). “And I go to the record store, which should know about this stuff. And I’m like, ‘Do you have Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die,’ the second record. And the guy hadn’t heard of it. He was like, ‘We can order that for you.’ You were at the whim of the record store.”
There was no way a monthly publication could match the speed of file-sharing MP3s
Even before internet distribution, monthly magazines were struggling to keep up with the pace of new releases. There was no way a monthly publication could match the speed of file-sharing MP3s; in fact, many of them barely had an internet presence at all. Pitchfork moved faster, posting daily. And it embraced new formats of distribution, introducing products like a monthly MP3 sampler “to spotlight the latest music offered by our top sponsors.”
Pitchfork had one advantage over the traditional magazines: it was native to the internet. Its reviews were brash, sometimes bizarre, often typo-ridden. That’s part of what made them fun to read; a Pitchfork review could say and do things that magazines would not. The site’s tone — unpolished and, at times, unprofessional — made sense online. As a publication, it embodied the messy, speedy transition of the music industry to the internet. Much like the now middle-aged members of its audience, it was raised with music piracy, became definitively cool in the era of college indie rock, and then found, with the rise of streaming, that it was losing its edge.
Image: Erik Carter
Pitchfork’s first advertiser was an online record store that paid $500. But the business didn’t really become viable until the site ran its first viral review.
Radiohead’s Kid A was a particularly online album. Its label, Capitol Records, let 1,000 websites stream it. Many of the songs had already leaked as concert bootlegs on Napster, and fans were anticipating the final product. Pitchfork’s review was posted the day of the release — unusual at the time — and was passed around Radiohead’s enormous fan base at least in part because Kid A had been awarded a rare perfect 10 on Pitchfork’s famously stringent rating system.
“Like, can you believe people are writing like this?”
The review was also shared widely because it was deeply fucking weird. Here’s a sample sentence: “The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax.”
“Obviously, Pitchfork did not break Radiohead,” says Tom Ewing, who started blogging about music in 2000. “But it became viral — like, can you believe people are writing like this?”
By 2004, Pitchfork’s business got big enough that Schreiber hired Chris Kaskie, formerly of The Onion, as the publication’s first full-time employee. Kaskie’s job was to run the business, and he turned Pitchfork into a real media company with an actual payroll. The business began to scale quickly; the more money it made, the more resources it had for reviews and articles. Though there were other influential music blogs — Stereogum, as well as the smaller constellation of MP3 blogs — Pitchfork was the center of gravity.
That’s also when Pitchfork anointed its first band. A glowing review of Arcade Fire’s first album, Funeral, made it “the fastest-selling title in the history of Merge Records,” according to The Washington Post. After a while, there were a bunch of Pitchfork bands: Broken Social Scene, for instance. Modest Mouse. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Arguably, The National. Pitchfork celebrated indie rock as it exploded in popularity, and the publication, as the genre’s loudest advocate, suddenly became an authority.
For some writers — and many readers — reviews are a blood sport
“A Pitchfork bump could result in some artists as high as top 20 on the [Billboard] chart,” says Maura Johnston, a music critic who also teaches journalism classes at Boston College. But it was a strange moment. Actual album sales were depressed, even though music was spreading more widely than ever before. (Obviously, piracy wasn’t factored into sales calculations.) And streaming was still nascent — in 2007, Billboard began counting streams from AOL and Yahoo, but only on the Hot 100, which tracks singles rather than albums.
Pitchfork’s dominance in reviews came from something it had that magazines like Spin didn’t: unlimited space. There was no maximum word count. Johnston told me she’d pulled Spin’s original review of Nevermind — the seminal Nirvana record — for some archival work she’d been doing. “It’s so short,” she says. “It’s like 300 words, tops.”
Not that all of Pitchfork’s reviews were serious. Famously, one was simply two pugs captioned “sorry :-/.” Reviews can be art criticism, contextualizing work within a genre (or an artist’s own oeuvre), or they can be service oriented, telling a reader whether an album is worth their money. But they are also entertainment. For some writers — and many readers — reviews are a blood sport, and Pitchfork was not afraid of this. Its willingness to give a 0.0 was part of what made it buzzy and viral.
In 2004, Pitchfork gave Travis Morrison, the lead singer of The Dismemberment Plan, a 0.0 review on his first solo album. “Up until the day of the review, I’d play a solo show, and people would be like, ‘That’s our boy, our eccentric boy,’” Morrison told The Washington Post in 2006. “Literally, the view changed overnight.”
So while some people mourned the diminishment of Pitchfork, Morrison wasn’t among them. “If Pitchfork being absorbed into GQ means an end to a frightening and humiliating time in my life, it will be an enormous relief,” Morrison wrote on Instagram.
Pitchfork didn’t reign for long; the changes in technology that brought it to prominence quickly undercut it. Revenue from music sales and licensing plummeted to $6.3 billion in 2009, less than half of what the industry made a decade earlier, before Napster and the iPod. That meant a superlative Pitchfork review could make or break an artist’s career, propping up the site’s importance. But waning label revenues also meant that record labels had less money to spend on advertising — a problem for music journalism writ large.
The tech industry’s introduction of MP3 slowly felled major retailers. Behemoth music stores went belly-up in the 2000s: Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, and Sam Goody. FYE bought up the rest. Ads from those retailers vanished, too.
Meanwhile, Ticketmaster, a ticketing company, had been slowly cornering the market on event tickets since 1982. It merged with Live Nation, a concert promoter, in 2009. The resulting entity, Live Nation Entertainment, calls itself “the largest producer of live music concerts in the world.” It owns, operates, leases, has exclusive booking rights for, or has an equity interest in 373 venues around the world, according to its most recent annual report. Ticketmaster “serves approximately 10,000 clients worldwide,” including for events that aren’t music.
As some traditional sources of ad money dried up, there was also new competition for those dollars
If you want to see Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster gets paid, since Ticketmaster has relationships with most stadiums in the US. And if venues try to switch ticketing to a competitor, Live Nation withholds artists, according to a 2019 Department of Justice report. That doesn’t sound like a company that needs to do a lot of advertising.
As some traditional sources of ad money dried up, there was also new competition for those dollars: Silicon Valley giants. Music publications had audiences that were generally interested in music. But Facebook let promotion departments target people who were specifically interested in their artist, or artists who sounded similar.
That wasn’t the only way social media changed things. Music magazines, including Pitchfork, don’t just publish reviews. They are also a major way for fans to get access to their favorite artists through features or Q&As. Before social media, this was the main way artists could speak to their fans and promote their work. But the internet — first message boards, then MySpace, then Instagram and Discord — meant that artists could make announcements directly to their fan bases. Now this kind of control is the norm. Artists can get the same reach while avoiding the questions a rigorous journalist might ask. (There were rarer risks associated with interviews, too: a Pitchfork video of Chief Keef at a gun range resulted in the artist receiving a two-month sentence for parole violation.)
Stereogum got bought out in 2007; Idolator in 2008; Spin packed in its print magazine in 2012; Vibe did the same in 2013. All four had been bought by something called BuzzNet, which later renamed itself SpinMedia.
“We made a decision that we had to make at a time that was a difficult time in media.”
Pitchfork got bought out, too, in 2015, but by one of the most prestigious media companies in the US: Condé Nast. By that time, Pitchfork had an events business, a video portfolio, and a print magazine. The headwinds were clear. “We made a decision that we had to make at a time that was a difficult time in media,” Schreiber said of the sale on Popcast. Banner ads, the way Pitchfork had originally made money, were less valuable with the rise of social media and influencer marketing, he added.
The acquisition almost made sense. Condé Nast is known for tastemakers: Vogue, in fashion; The New Yorker, in literature; Vanity Fair, in celebrity. Plus, Pitchfork would “make it easier to sell beer and soda ads,” Bloomberg wrote of the acquisition. Infamously, and ominously, Condé trumpeted that Pitchfork would bring an audience of “millennial males” into their portfolio.
By 2017, Spotify and YouTube had become the most important distributors of music. The streaming era had arrived, and under the duress of monthly subscriptions and preroll ads, it was getting even harder to make money as an artist or record label.
If a music magazine’s power comes from influence, then Pitchfork was declining, too. While a review could increase Spotify streams, it wasn’t enough to “really, really change things” the way it had 10 years earlier, John Stein, a senior editor at Spotify, told Bloomberg. Odd — since, according to Schreiber, more people were reading Pitchfork than ever before. He cited Comscore data showing 4.1 million visitors in October 2016, which represented 50 percent growth in traffic over the previous October.
The concept of music criticism also did not play well with the growing influence of internet fan culture
What is a music review for? One answer, the one you might get in the 1990s, was music discovery. My former colleague, Casey Newton of Platformer, suggested that Spotify’s curated playlists obviated that role. Stein’s remarks certainly jibe with that.
Reviews are also where serious discussion of art takes place. Critics don’t always get things right — history is rife with examples of what turned out to be classics getting panned upon release, such as Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” They don’t always take artists seriously as people, either, though Pitchfork hardly pioneered that. (There is, for instance, Lester Bangs.) Still, an album review is the beginning of a culture-wide sifting that determines what art is worth preserving and passing down, and what is forgotten.
Here’s how seriously Pitchfork readers take those ratings. Jenkins reviewed a J. Cole album in 2014, which received a 6.9 rating. “I did actually have the power to make that a 7.0,” he says, “but chose a social experiment to see what people would do about a .1 difference.” It upset Cole’s manager. Jenkins’ review of D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, rated 9.4, also left the audience in an uproar. This time, it was because the review was too short — and thus, intellectually lazy.
“I don’t think people even necessarily believe that criticism is really about telling you whether the thing is good or bad anymore,” says Jenkins. Audiences understand that criticism is about how to value art, he tells me.
If you know you love Taylor Swift, and you believe Folklore is perfect, why bother going to Pitchfork?
The concept of music criticism did not play well with the growing influence of internet fan culture — or “stans,” its most intense iteration, named for an Eminem song about a fan who kills himself and his pregnant girlfriend because the rapper won’t return his letters. Now that artists could bypass music publications and speak directly to their fans, anything that got between them — music magazines, record labels, Scooter Braun — was seen as a gatekeeper and, therefore, the enemy. (Stans don’t seem as critical of streaming platforms, despite how little they pay artists, and in fact are likely to actively drive engagement to Spotify and Apple Music as a way of showing their loyalty.)
If you know you love Taylor Swift, and you believe Folklore is perfect, why bother going to Pitchfork? But Swifties did, and they felt so strongly about Jillian Mapes’ review, an 8 (out of a potential 10), that they harassed and doxxed her online for not being glowing enough. Those Swifties want to make certain the entire culture acknowledged her album as perfect.
“It sucks, because I think it does short-circuit honest conversations,” Johnston says. Even bands with relatively small fan bases can deluge critics — and sometimes artists get involved, too. For instance, in 2020, Halsey was upset enough with a 6.5 rating on her album Manic to tweet “can the basement that they run p*tchfork out of just collapse already,” deleting it after she realized she was calling for One World Trade, where Condé’s offices are located, to collapse.
Just because reviews are important doesn’t mean they’re good business. Pitchfork’s traffic has been declining. It had an average of 3 million unique visitors a month in 2023, about the same as the year before, according to data from Comscore. Both years were down from 2021 by about 36 percent.
Condé has long seemed confused about the difference between traffic and a loyal audience
I have seen some discussion about whether Pitchfork lost its focus under Condé. I asked people, in interviews for this story, if they agreed. Some did. The site began writing about mainstream pop artists, the kind of undifferentiated commodity news you might find on any culture website. But to others, the evolution made sense, as indie rock had effectively merged with pop over the past decade. After all, members of The National helped write two Taylor Swift records. The culture had changed, and so naturally Pitchfork changed with it.
Traffic was part of why Condé bought Pitchfork; it was part of a broader play from Fred Santarpia, Condé’s head of digital until 2018, and Robert Sauerberg Jr., CEO of Condé from 2015 to 2019. Their “traffic-at-all-costs machinery” didn’t really work, according to Puck. Worse, in the process, Condé chipped away at Pitchfork’s identity. Its video and award-winning design teams were either absorbed into broader business units or laid off.
Roger Lynch, Condé’s current CEO, joined in 2019. You’d expect, as the former head of radio streamer Pandora, he would prioritize music. Instead, his mandate has been consolidation, and the company turned its first profit in years in 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal. (It’s not clear how long Condé had been unprofitable, since it’s a private company.) Condé’s revenue grew in 2022, but missed targets, The New York Times reported. That may be because of Lynch’s rigid paywall strategy — decreasing traffic at some brands and flattening subscriptions, according to Puck.
So we have a cost-cutting CEO who didn’t acquire Pitchfork, whose focus is now on e-commerce and subscriptions. Pitchfork doesn’t require a subscription, even though staffers proposed a premium product to their Condé bosses, two sources told me. The affiliate revenue model doesn’t work as well for music, which is widely available to stream.
Pitchfork is not gone, but many felt compelled to eulogize it anyway — much to the surprise of Condé’s executives
What’s more, Condé has long seemed confused about the difference between traffic and a loyal audience. Pitchfork’s homepage attracts far more visitors than those of GQ or Vogue, three people familiar with Condé’s traffic told me. As referrals from social media and Google decline, a loyal audience is more important than ever — but only if you’re smart enough to cultivate one. Anna Wintour, global chief content officer of Condé Nast, doesn’t care about music and doesn’t understand the internet, two former Pitchfork staffers told me. She didn’t even take her sunglasses off when she fired Pitchfork’s employees.
Pitchfork is not gone, but many felt compelled to eulogize it anyway — much to the surprise of Condé’s executives. Loyal readers often follow critics whose tastes align with their own; the staff is known to the audience by name. When those people are fired, the audience feels the loss. And the drastic reduction in staff suggested a bleak future: you can cut your way to profitability, but you can’t cut your way to growth.
Though confusing to many when it was announced last January, the decision to place Pitchfork under GQ, a men’s fashion magazine, makes more sense in this context. GQ’s subscription business — Lynch’s focus — is flagging; it lost 65,271 print subscriptions over the last five years, according to Puck. Its online audience is also shrinking to an average of 9.5 million visitors a month in 2023 and 2022, down 16 percent from 2021, according to Comscore.
Pitchfork didn’t fit with Lynch’s business focus, which made it ripe for his efforts at cost-cutting. Pitching GQ and Pitchfork together could potentially be more attractive to advertisers, since GQ’s online audience is 71 percent male, according to Comscore. Pitchfork’s audience? Eighty percent male.
Liquor, tech brands, and shoes are the bread and butter of music publications
“This is not a terrible thing for us — GQ and P4K were getting in each other’s lanes and this makes it easier for us to use them in a complementary fashion,” wrote Melissa Consorte, a Condé Nast vice president, in Slack. (The Associated Press managed to get ahold of a screenshot.) It’s an odd thing to say about a music publication and a fashion publication, unless you are the kind of person who refers to editorial work as “content,” which exists only for one thing: to go next to the ads.
Spending from the recording industry has plummeted. That means Pitchfork is more reliant on lifestyle brands. Arguably, Red Bull subsidized the entire indie rock bubble, along with a few other brands, Johnston says. Liquor, tech brands, and shoes are the bread and butter of music publications.
Condé seems confused about how to sell ads against Pitchfork. Scrolling through reviews for this story, I saw ads for Peloton, Paxlovid, Taltz (a psoriasis medicine), H&R Block, Squarespace, Audible, Volvo, a resort in the Bahamas, and Verizon. I saw two music-related ads: for Soundcloud and a Mitski concert at Stanford. I did not see any ads for high-end stereo systems, headphones, or other gear that might appeal to a music enthusiast, male or otherwise.
As I have been writing about Pitchfork, I have been thinking about how we evaluate art. I enjoy a lot of criticism, even when I disagree with it — sometimes especially when I disagree with it, because I have to think about why. But really listening to music, then seeking out criticism and reading it, then thinking about it… That takes time.
Trent Reznor, in his interview with Rick Rubin, talked about buying albums he didn’t like and listening to them anyway because he’d paid so much money for them. Scarcity meant that taking time with music was the default. And when Reznor was listening, he was only listening. “I wasn’t doing it in the background while I was doing five other things, and I wasn’t treating it kind of like a disposable commodity,” he said. “I don’t go to the cinema and do my taxes while a movie’s playing.”
Reznor sounded at times sheepish, as though he was worried he sounded like an old man yelling at a cloud. (Reznor is 57.) But in order to remember the changes that the music industry has been through in the last 30 years, you do actually need to be older than 30. For young audiences, streaming and ubiquity have been the norm.
The original point of Pitchfork was to tell people about bands they hadn’t already heard of
“With Columbia House, the idea was you would get one album a month,” says Johnston. “And when I say that to my students, they are gobsmacked.”
In the 1990s, there used to be big marketing pushes around promising albums; Nirvana’s Nevermind, for instance. Now musicians have to do more of that work themselves. Bethany Cosentino, who released a debut solo album after pausing her band Best Coast, put it this way: “The industry now — it’s just, like, the amount of fucking selling yourself that you have to do, the amount of videos you have to make, the amount of promotion that you have to do,” she said on TikTok. That time she’s spending on promotion is time she isn’t making music.
The original point of Pitchfork was to tell people about bands they hadn’t already heard of. That function seems even more important for a functioning artistic community than ever. New music appears to be vanishing in the streaming era. About 73 percent of songs played on streaming services in 2023 were catalog music — that is, songs that were released more than 18 months ago, according to Luminate. That number has been steadily creeping up for a while now; catalog music was only 65 percent of streams in 2020.
Twelve full-time staffers remain at Pitchfork, and the publication retains its standalone website. Its music festival has just announced its 2024 lineup. It was even nominated for a National Magazine Award, in the category of General Excellence, for work done before it was gutted. The pleasure of Pitchfork was that it was a place to go where music mattered; its best reviews had real intellectual heft. Whether that tradition will continue under GQ is an open question, especially to anyone who remembers the titties-oriented music magazine Blender.
“I used to steal stuff from the torrent site, because I wanted to hear it … Now I often don’t know it even came out.”
Condé Nast spokesperson Rachel Janc declined to comment on what the future of Pitchfork might be under GQ, why Pitchfork belongs with GQ rather than other cultural arbiters such as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, or what role GQ editor Will Welch sees Pitchfork playing in the current cultural landscape.
Pitchfork’s reduced size echoes a hollowing out across music publications. Since being sold to Billboard’s parent company, Spin and Stereogum were resold in 2020 — Stereogum to its founder, and Spin to a private equity group. I have to believe that there are people out there who still care about music and take it seriously as art. But maybe taking art seriously is not a viable business model. At minimum, it requires more time and effort than the current music industry seems willing to allow.
“I find myself in a place now where I don’t have a good place to discover new music,” Reznor said. “I used to know when the release dates of all the things were. I used to steal stuff from the torrent site, because I wanted to hear it … Now I often don’t know it even came out.” I don’t think he’s alone.
As you probably noticed, the House just passed the controversial ban on TikTok, with 352 Representatives in favor, and 65 opposed. The bill is now likely to be slow-walked to the Senate where its chance of passing is murky, but possible. Biden (which has been using the purportedly “dangerous national security threat” to campaign with) has stated he’ll sign the bill should it survive the trip.
The ban (technically a forced divestment, followed by a ban after ByteDance inevitably refuses to sell) passed through the house with more than a little help from Democrats:
Not talked much about in press coverage is the fact that the majority of constituents don’t actually support a ban (you know, the whole representative democracy thing). Support for a ban has been dropping for months, even among Republicans, and especially among the younger voters Democrats have already been struggling to connect with in the wake of the bloody shitshow in Gaza:
As the underlying Pew data makes clear, a lot of Americans aren’t sure what to think about the hysteria surrounding TikTok. And they’re not sure what to think, in part, because the collapsing U.S. tech press has done a largely abysmal job covering the story, either by parroting bad faith politician claims about the proposal and app, or omitting key important context.
Context like the fact the U.S. has been too corrupt to pass an internet privacy law, resulting in years of repeated scandal (with TikTok being arguably among the least of them). Congress has been lobbied into apathy by a massive coalition of cross-industry lobbyists with unlimited budgets. But the U.S. government is also disincentivized to act because it abuses the dysfunction to avoid having to get traditional warrants.
The press has also been generally terrible at explaining to the public that the ban doesn’t actually do what it claims to do.
Banning TikTok, but refusing to pass a useful privacy law or regulate the data broker industry is entirely decorative. The data broker industry routinely collects all manner of sensitive U.S. consumer location, demographic, and behavior data from a massive array of apps, telecom networks, services, vehicles, smart doorbells and devices (many of them *gasp* built in China), then sells access to detailed data profiles to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together, including Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence.
Often without securing or encrypting the data. And routinely under the false pretense that this is all ok because the underlying data has been “anonymized” (a completely meaningless term). The harm of this regulation-optional surveillance free-for-all has been obvious for decades, but has been made even more obvious post-Roe. Congress has chosen, time and time again, to ignore all of this.
Banning TikTok, but doing absolutely nothing about the broader regulatory capture and corruption that fostered TikTok’s (and every other companies’) disdain for privacy or consumer rights, isn’t actually fixing the problem. In fact, as Mike has noted, the ban creates entirely new problems, from potential constitutional free speech violations, to its harmful impact on online academic research.
I’ve mentioned more than a few times that I think the ongoing quest to ban TikTok is mostly a flimsy attempt to transfer TikTok’s fat revenues to Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Oracle, or Facebook under the pretense of national security and privacy, two things our comically corrupt, do-nothing Congress has repeatedly demonstrated in vivid detail they don’t have any genuine interest in.
TikTok creators seem to understand this better than the gerontocracy or the U.S. tech press:
None of this is to say that TikTok doesn’t actually pose some privacy or national security problems.
But if Congress were really serious about privacy, they’d pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers.
If Congress were serious about national security, they’d meaningfully fight corruption, and certainly wouldn’t support a multi-indictment facing authoritarian NYC real estate con man with a fourth-grade reading level for fucking President.
If Congress were serious about combating propaganda (foreign, domestic, corporate, or otherwise) they’d impose more meaningful updated education standards, fight harmful consolidation in local TV broadcast “news,” and protect and finance academic and journalistic institutions under relentless assault by authoritarians, AI-wielding hedge fund bozos, and incompetent brunchlords.
So when Congress pops up to claim it’s taking aim at a single popular app because it’s suddenly super concerned about consumer privacy, propaganda, and national security, skeptics are right to steeply arch an eyebrow. You realize we can see your voting histories and policy priorities, right?
Xenophobia, Protectionism and Information Warfare
The GOP motivation for a TikTok ban has long been obvious: they believe TikTok’s growing ad revenues technically belong, by divine right, to white-owned U.S. companies. But the GOP also sees TikTok as an existential threat to their ever-evolving online propaganda efforts, which have become a strategic cornerstone of an increasingly extremist, authoritarian party whose policies are broadly unpopular.
The GOP is fine with rampant privacy abuses and propaganda — provided they’re the ones violating privacy or slinging political propaganda. You’ll recall Trump’s big original fix for the “TikTok problem” (before a right wing investor in TikTok recently changed his mind, for now) was a cronyistic transfer of ownership of TikTok to his Republican friends at Walmart and Oracle.
Former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his Saudi-funded Liberty Strategic Capital is already hard at work putting investors together to buy the app. If the GOP (or a proxy) manages to buy TikTok, they’ll engage in every last abuse they’ve accused the Chinese government of. TikTok will be converted, like Twitter, into a right wing surveillance and propaganda echoplex, where race-baiting authoritarian propaganda is not only unmoderated, but encouraged.
All under the pretense of “protecting free speech,” “antitrust reform,” or whatever latest flimsy pretense authoritarians are currently using to convince a gullible and lazy U.S. press that they’re operating in good faith.
Why Democrats would support any of this remains an open question. The ban would likely aid GOP propaganda efforts, piss off young voters, and advertise the party (which had actually been faster to embrace TikTok than the GOP) as woefully out of touch. All while not actually protecting consumer privacy or national security in any meaningful way. And creating entirely new problems.
Democratic support for a ban seems largely motivated by lobbying pressure from Facebook/Meta, which has been using the same knobs the GOP and telecom industry used to destroy net neutrality to seed little moral panics around DC for several years. Facebook/Meta is, if it’s not clear, exclusively interested in having the government destroy a competitor it hasn’t been able to out-innovate.
National security, consumer privacy, or good faith worries about propaganda don’t enter into it.
Some Democratic Reps, like Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sara Jacobs seem to understand the trap, keeping the focus on a need for a federal privacy law that reins in the privacy and surveillance abuses of all companies that do business in the U.S., foreign or domestic. Some senators, like Ron Wyden, have worked hard to ensure equal attention is paid toward rampant data broker abuses.
But 155 House Democrats voted for the ban, either because they’re corrupt, or they have absolutely no idea how any of this actually works. Pissing off your constituents by ruining an app used by 150+ million (mostly young) Americans during an election season is certainly a choice, especially given negligible constituent support–and growing evidence it likely creates more problems than it professes to solve.
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price, I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit shares quickly fall below the IPO price, based on the fact that Reddit is an absolute dog of a company, losing $90.8 million on $804 million of revenue in 2023 and never having turned a profit. Reddit's S1 (the initial registration form for taking a company public) laughably claims that advertising on the site is "rapidly evolving" and that it is "still in the early phases of growing this business," with "this business" referring to one that Reddit launched 15 years ago.
The Reddit IPO is one of the biggest swindles in corporate history, where millions of unpaid contributors made billions of posts so that CEO Steve Huffman could make $193 million in 2023 while laying off 90 people and effectively pushing third party apps off of the platform by charging exorbitant rates for API access, which in turn prompted several prolonged “strikes” by users, with some of the most popular subreddits going silent for a short period of time. Reddit, in turn, effectively “couped” these subreddits, replacing their longstanding moderators with ones of its own choosing — people who would happily toe the party line and reopen them to the public.
None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing, but Sam Altman will make hundreds of millions of dollars for his $50 million investment from 2014. Reddit also announced that it had cut a $60 million deal to allow Google to train its models on Reddit's posts, once again offering users nothing in return for their hard work.
Huffman's letter to investors waxes poetic about Redditors' "deep sense of ownership over the communities they create," and justifies taking the company public by claiming that he wants "this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership" as he offers them a chance to buy non-voting stock in a company that they helped enrich. Huffman ends his letter by saying that Reddit is "one of the internet's largest corpuses of authentic and constantly updated human-generated experience" before referring to it as the company's "data advantage and intellectual property," describing Redditors' posts as "data [that] constantly grows and regenerates as users converse."
We're at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it's become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.
This is, of course, the crux of Cory Doctorow's Enshittification theory, where Reddit has moved from pleasing users to pleasing its business customers to, now, pleasing shareholders at what will inevitably be the cost of the platform's quality.
Yet what's happening to the web is far more sinister than simple greed, but the destruction of the user-generated internet, where executives think they've found a way to replace human beings making cool things with generative monstrosities trained on datasets controlled and monetized by trillion-dollar firms.
Their ideal situation isn't one where you visit distinct websites with content created by human beings, but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies, with results generated based on datasets that are increasingly poisoned by generative content built to fill space rather than be consumed by a customer.
The algorithms are easily-tricked, and the tools used to trick them are becoming easier to use and scale.
And it's slowly killing the internet.
After the world's governments began their above-ground nuclear weapons tests in the mid-1940s, radioactive particles made their way into the atmosphere, permanently tainting all modern steel production, making it challenging (or impossible) to build certain machines (such as those that measure radioactivity). As a result, we've a limited supply of something called "low-background steel," pre-war metal that oftentimes has to be harvested from ships sunk before the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, including those dating back to the Roman Empire.
Generative AI models are trained by using massive amounts of text scraped from the internet, meaning that the consumer adoption of generative AI has brought a degree of radioactivity to its own dataset. As more internet content is created, either partially or entirely through generative AI, the models themselves will find themselves increasingly inbred, training themselves on content written by their own models which are, on some level, permanently locked in 2023, before the advent of a tool that is specifically intended to replace content created by human beings.
This is a phenomenon that Jathan Sadowski calls "Habsburg AI," where "a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features." In reality, a Habsburg AI will be one that is increasingly more generic and empty, normalized into a slop of anodyne business-speak as its models are trained on increasingly-identical content.
LinkedIn, already a repository of empty-headed corpo-nonsense, already lets users write generate messages, profiles and job descriptions using AI, and anything you create using these generative features is immediately fed back into Azure's OpenAI models owned by its parent company Microsoft, which invested $10 billion in OpenAI in early 2023. While LinkedIn is yet to introduce fully-automated replies, Chrome extensions already exist to flood the platform with generic responses, feeding more genericisms into the mouth of Microsoft and OpenAI's models.
Generative AI also naturally aligns with the toxic incentives created by the largest platforms. Google's algorithmic catering to the Search Engine Optimization industry naturally benefits those who can spin up large amounts of "relevant" content rather than content created by humans. While Google has claimed that their upcoming "core" update will help promote "content for people and not to rank in search engines," it’s made this promise before, and I severely doubt anything meaningfully changes. After all, Google makes up more than 85% of all search traffic and pays Apple billions a year to make Google search the default on Apple devices.
And because these platforms were built to reward scale and volume far more often than quality, AI naturally rewards those who can find the spammiest ways to manipulate the algorithm. 404 Media reports that spammers are making thousands of dollars from TikTok's creator program by making "faceless reels" where AI-generated voices talk over spliced-together videos ripped from YouTube, and a cottage industry of automation gurus are cashing in by helping others flood Facebook, TikTok and Instagram with low-effort videos that are irresistible to algorithms.
Amazon's Kindle eBook platform has been flooded with AI-generated content that briefly dominated bestseller lists, forcing Amazon to limit authors to publishing three books a day. This hasn't stopped spammers from publishing awkward rewrites and summaries of other people's books, and because Amazon's policies don't outright ban AI-generated content, ChatGPT has become an inoperable cancer on the body of the publishing industry.
"Handmade" goods store Etsy has its own AI problem, with The Atlantic reporting last year that the platform was now pumped full of AI-generated art, t-shirts and mugs that, in turn, use ChatGPT to optimize listings to rank highly in Google search. As a profitable public company, Etsy has little incentive to change things, even if the artisanal products on the platform are being crowded out by generative art pasted on drop-shipped shirts. eBay, on the other hand, is leaning into the spam, offering tools to generate entire listings based on a single image using generative AI.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that magazines are now inundated with AI-generated pitches for articles, and renowned sci-fi publisher Clarkesworld was forced to close submissions after receiving an overwhelming amount of AI-generated stories. Help A Reporter Out used to be a way for journalists to find potential sources and quotes, except requests are now met with a deluge of AI-generated spam.
These stories are, of course, all manifestations of a singular problem: that generative artificial intelligence is poison for an internet dependent on algorithms.
There are simply too many users, too many websites and too many content providers to manually organize and curate the contents of the internet, making algorithms necessary for platforms to provide a service. Generative AI is a perfect tool for soullessly churning out content to match a particular set of instructions — such as those that an algorithm follows — and while an algorithm can theoretically be tuned to evaluate content as "human," so can scaled content be tweaked to make it seem more human.
Things get worse when you realize that the sheer volume of internet content makes algorithmic recommendations a necessity to sift through an ever-growing pile of crap. Generative AI allows creators to weaponize the algorithms' weaknesses to monetize and popularize low-effort crap, and ultimately, what is a platform to do? Ban anything that uses AI-generated content? Adjust the algorithm to penalize videos without people's faces? How does a platform judge the difference between a popular video and a video that the platform made popular? And if these videos are made by humans and enjoyed by humans, why should it stop them?
Google might pretend it cares about the quality of search results, but nothing about search's decade-long decline has suggested it’s actually going to do anything. Google's spam policies have claimed for years that scraped content (outright ripping the contents of another website) was grounds for removal from Google, but even the most cursory glance at any news search shows how often sites thinly rewrite or outright steal others' content. And I can't express enough how bad (yet inevitable) the existence of the $40 billion Search Engine Optimization industry is, and how much of a boon being able to semi-automate the creation and optimization of content to the standards of an algorithm that Google has explained in exhaustive detail. While it's plausible that Google might genuinely try and fight the influx of SEO-generated articles, one has to wonder why it’d bother to try now after spending decades catering to the industry.
As we speak, the battle that platforms are fighting is against generative spam, a cartoonish and obvious threat of outright nonsense, meaningless chum that can and should (and likely will) be stopped. In the process, they're failing to see that this isn't a war against spam, but a war against crap, and the overall normalization and intellectual numbing that comes when content is created to please algorithms and provide a minimum viable product for consumers. Google's "useless" results problem isn't one borne of content that has no meaning, but of content that only sort of helps, that is the "right" result but doesn't actually provide any real thought behind it, like the endless "how to fix error code X" results full of well-meaning and plausibly helpful content that doesn't really help at all.
The same goes for Etsy and Amazon. While Etsy's "spam" is an existential threat to actual artisans building something with their hands, it's not actual spam — it's cheaply-made crap that nevertheless fulfills a need and sort of fits Etsy's remit. Amazon doesn't have any incentive to get rid of low-quality books that sell for the same reason that it doesn't get rid of its other low-quality items. People aren't looking for the best, they're looking to fulfill a need, even if that need is fulfilled with poorly-constructed crap.
Platforms likely conflate positioning with popularity, failing to see the self-fulfilling prophecy of an algorithm making stuff popular because said stuff is built to please the algorithm creating more demand for content to please the algorithm. "Viral" content is no longer a result of lots of people deciding that they find something interesting — it's a condition created by algorithms manipulated by forces that are getting stronger and more nuanced thanks to generative AI.
We're watching the joint hyper-scaling and hyper-normalization of the internet, where all popular content begins to look the same to appeal to algorithms run by companies obsessed with growth. Quality control in AI models only exists to stop people from nakedly exploiting the network through unquestionably iniquitous intent, rather than people making shitty stuff that kind of sucks but gets popular because an algorithm says so.
This isn't a situation where these automated tools are giving life to new forms of art or interesting new concepts, but regurgitations of an increasingly less unique internet, because these models are trained on data drawn from the internet. Like a plant turning to capture sunlight, parts of the internet have already twisted toward the satisfaction of algorithms, and as others become dependent on generative AI (like Quora, which now promotes ChatGPT-generated answers at the top of results), so will the web become more dependent and dictated by automated systems.
The ultimate problem is that this morass of uselessness will lead companies like Google to force their generative AIs to "fix" the problem by generating answers to sift through the crap. Amazon now summarizes reviews using generative AI, legitimizing the thousands of faked and paid-for reviews on the platform and presenting them as verified and trusted information from Amazon itself. Google has already been experimenting with its "Search Generative Experience" that summarizes entire articles on iOS and Chrome, and Microsoft's Bing search has already integrated summaries from Copilot, with both basing their answers off of a combination of search and training data.
Yet in doing so, these platforms gain a dangerous hold on the world's information. Google's deal with Reddit also gave it real time access to Reddit's content, allowing it to show Reddit posts natively in search (and directly access Reddit posts data for training purposes). Yet at some point these portals will generate an answer based off of the data they have (or have access to, in the case of Tumblr and Wordpress) rather than linking you to a place where you can find an answer by reading something created by another person. There could be a future where the majority of web users experience the web through a series of portals, like Arc Search's "browse for me" feature, which visits websites for you and summarizes their information using AI.
Right now, the internet is controlled by a few distinct platforms, each one intent on interrupting the exploratory and creative forces that made the web great. I believe that their goal is to intrude on our ability to browse the internet, to further obfuscate the source of information while paying the platforms for content that their users make for free. Their eventual goal, in my mind, is to remove as much interaction with the larger internet as possible, summarizing and regurgitating as much as they can so that they can control and monetize the results as much as possible.
On some level, I fear that the current platforms intend to use AI to become something akin to an Internet Service Provider, offering "clean" access to a web that has become too messy and unreliable as a direct result of the platforms' actions, eventually finding ways to monetize your information's prominence in their portals, models and chatbots. As that happens, it will begin to rot out the rest of the internet, depriving media entities and social networks of traffic as executives like Steve Huffman cut further deals to monetize free labor with platforms that will do everything they can to centralize all internet traffic to two or three websites.
And as the internet becomes dominated by these centralized platforms and the sites they trawl for content, so begins the vicious cycle of the Habsburg AI. OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude are dependent on a constant flow of training data to improve their models, to the point that it's effectively impossible for them to operate without violating copyright. As a result, they can't be too picky when it comes to the information they choose, meaning that they're more than likely going to depend on openly-available content from the internet, which as I've suggested earlier will become increasingly normalized by the demands of algorithms and the ease of automating the generic content that satisfies them.
I am not saying that user-generated content will disappear, but that human beings cannot create content at the scale that automation can, and when a large chunk of the internet is content for robots, that is the content that will inform tomorrow's models. The only thing that can truly make them better is more stuff, but when the majority of stuff being created isn't good, or interesting, or even written for a human being, ChatGPT or Claude's models will learn the rotten habits of rotten content. This is why so many models' responses sound so similar — they're heavily dependent on the stuff they're fed for their outputs, and so much of their "intelligence" comes from the same training data.
It's a different flavor of the same problem — these models don't really "know" anything. They're copying other people's homework.
As an aside, I also fear for the software code that's created by generative AI products like GitHub Co-pilot. A study by security firm Snyk found that GitHub Copilot and other AI-powered coding platforms, which were trained on publicly-available code (and based on the user's own codebase), can replicate existing security issues, proliferating problems rather than fixing them. NYU's Center for Cybersecurity also found in 2023 study that CoPilot generated code with security vulnerabilities 40% of the time.
These are also the hard limits that you're going to see with generative images and video. While the internet is a giant hole of content you can easily and cheaply consume for training, visual media requires a great deal of significantly more complex data — and that’s on top of the significant and obvious copyright issues. ChatGPT's DALL-E (images) and Sora (video) products are, as I've noted, limited by the availability of ways to teach them as well as the limits of generative AI itself, meaning that video may continue to dominate the internet as text-based content finds itself crowded out by AI-generated content. This may be why Sam Altman is trying to claim that giant AI models are not the future — because there may not be enough fuel to grow them much further. After all, Altman claims that any one data source "doesn't move the needle" for OpenAI.
There's also no way to escape the fact that these hungry robots require legal plagiarism, and any number of copyright assaults could massively slow their progress. It's incredibly difficult to make a model forget information, meaning that there may, at some point, be steps back in the development of models if datasets have to be reverted to previous versions with copyrighted materials removed.
The numerous lawsuits against OpenAI could break the back of the company, and while Altman and other AI fantasists may pretend that these models are an intractable path to the future of society, any force that controls (or makes them pay for) the data that they use will kneecap the company and force them to come up with a way to make these models ethically.
Yet the world I fear is one where these people are allowed to run rampant, turning unique content into food for an ugly, inbred monster of an internet, one that turns everybody's information sources into semi-personalized versions of the same content. These people have names — Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (which has its own model called LLaMA), Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft — and they are responsible for trying to standardize the internet and turn it into a series of toll roads that all lead to the same place.
And they will gladly misinform and disadvantage billions of people to do so. Their future is one that is less colorful, less exciting, one that caters to the entitled and suppresses the creative. Those who rely on generative AI to create are not creators any more than a person that commissions a portrait is an artist. Altman and his ilk believe they're the new Leonardo Da Vincis, but they're little more than petty kings and rent-seekers trying to steal the world's magic.
They can, however, be fought. Don't buy their lies. Generative AI might be steeped in the language of high fantasy, but it’s a tool, one that they will not admit is a terribly-flawed and unprofitable way to feed the growth-at-all-costs tech engine. Question everything they say. Don't accept that AI "might one day" be great. Demand that it is today, and reject anything less than perfection from men that make billions of dollars shipping you half-finished shit. Reject their marketing speak and empty fantasizing and interrogate the tools put in front of you, and be a thorn in their side when they try to tell you that mediocrity is the future.
You are not stupid. You are not "missing anything.” These tools are not magic — they're fantastical versions of autocomplete that can't help but make the same mistakes it's learned from the petabytes of information it's stolen from others.
AI can provide design inspiration—and give you an idea of how much it'll all cost.
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