Farmers only

Michelle Santiago Cortés on what’s rising to the top of the algorithm these days.

It is easier to imagine the end of social media than the end of the personality quiz.

Earlier this year, author and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the erosion of digital platforms: “First [platforms] are good to their users, then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value themselves.”

It’s a useful term to encapsulate what users have long intuited: Social media is not the vibrant place it once was. For most of us, it’s where we work. It’s where political discourse goes to die. It’s where memes are stolen and trends are reinvented ad nauseam. It’s a series of feeds that have been abandoned to rickety algorithms while power struggles between egos, executives, governments, and communities rage on in the background.

The squeeze towards profitability reoriented major platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and even Reddit. If these were fields of crops we would say they have been overharvested. Let them lie fallow for a bit, rotate the crops, restore them to fertility. Instead, enshittification produces the opposite incentive: engagement farming. Lots of it. Engagement farming is what surfaces to the top of the over-boiled heap of our algorithmic feeds. It’s engagement for its own sake.

In Virginia Heffernan’s review of Ben Smith’s Traffic, she recites the history of the infamous Buzzfeed quiz which burst on the scene in February 2014, destined to be passed around “like joints or sparklers.” Enabled by changes in Facebook’s algorithm, Buzzfeed–under Jonah Peretti–went all in on the format: “Lazy, bemused clicks were yesterday’s metrics; the platform wanted garrulous comment sections. A cortisol-spiking post…”

Many of these quizzes were navel-gazing personality tests. Which character are you from the thing about the thing? Which actress are you from the movie about the book? And so on, and so forth. But Facebook wasn’t alone in surfacing this type of content.

Enter the AITA: AITA means “Am I the Asshole?” It’s an ostensibly genuine question redditors shared to its namesake subreddit hoping to better understand their role in a conflict. A potential asshole would tell the story of whatever interaction prompted them to wonder if they are at fault. Redditors would respond with their takes and verdicts: asshole or not asshole. The r/AmITheAsshole subreddit was started in 2013, but it really took off in 2018. It hit one million members in 2019 and then two million shortly after that. The AITA premise has since expanded into other subreddits.

In the age of the enshittified internet, the good ol’ AITA is more ubiquitous than ever: You can now find it floating over Roblox gameplay or cake decorating videos on TikTok. Small businesses love feeding it into voice generators and using the audio to soundtrack footage of the products they want to promote on Reels. Podcasters love reacting to them and Twitter circulates them on a daily basis. It doesn’t even matter if the confessional AITA’s are real. In fact, it’s widely assumed they are not, but they are very adept at breeding engagement.

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Such hypothetical exercises are what made one of the most generative corners of the internet, Black Twitter, light up. The Black Twitter hypothetical has yielded enduringly viral memes like: “Fellas, is it gay…?” And proposed what is now the perennial question, would you rather have a gay son or a thot daughter? Like a Reddit AITA, the Black Twitter Hypothetical invites self-insertion and creates space to discuss moral quandaries for sport.

Because they’re self-insert prompts, anyone can project themselves into the hypothetical at hand–celebrities, everyday nobodies, and internet sort-of-somebodies in between. These prompts encourage lofty pronouncements on what kind of person you are: One that values money ($500,000) over knowledge (or dinner with Jay Z). And what you believe in: If Gabrielle Union and Dwayne Wade going 50/50 on the bills is fair or not. It’s a perfect occasion to make grandiose edicts on what, according to you, is or isn’t morally acceptable. It’s a chance to both formulate yourself against and project yourself onto the billboard of a viral Twitter prompt. And it seems to prove conventional online wisdom by relying on outrage and indignation as motors for engagement.

Like the AITA threads and the Black Twitter hypotheticals, the ever-growing number of "personality types" circulating on social media ask you to project yourself into a given scenario to tell the comment section or your group chat or maybe just your journal who you are. They prompt you to measure yourself—your body, face, hair, style, personality, brain, and even your essence—against every knowable metric and every new metric our emerging technologies claim to measure.

If, for example, every time you try on a popular makeup trend you end up looking “awkward and terrible,” it might be a sign that you have a Gamine Essence. “My perfect examples of a Gamine Essence are Zoe Kravitz and Emma Chamberlain, hands down.” TikToker Zoe Kim Kenealy explains that someone with a Gamine Essence “would thrive in a spunky, boyish aesthetic.” She can do sexy, but in an edgy way. You want to use Kosas nano brow pop to make your brows a focal point and dab only enough Nars chubby lip pencil to enhance your natural lip color. “There is a difference between looking like you’re wearing eye shadow and looking like the skin on your lids is naturally colored,” she continues.

If you want to feel like it, Zoe Kim Kenealy has a tutorial for it: Do you want to be a Tired Girl? A Cold Girl? An upgraded Clean Girl? Do you feel like a negroni? Do you have red wine energy? She has a fourteen-video “Personality Makeup” playlist, where you can find looks that correspond to each of the seven essences: Dramatic, Gamine, Natural, Classic, Romantic, Ethereal, or Ingenue. And several Meyers-Briggs personality types. In her comments, people are excited to learn which essence they have, and one even requested if Kenealy could do a tutorial for those who are in between essences. If one symptom of the enshittification was how everything became a trend until nothing was a trend, its aftermath is how everything, even the way your nose reddens in the cold, is a personality type.

The engagement farming hypotheticals and personality harvesting both promise unending self-knowledge and relentless optimization that can tether us to the social internet’s more exhaustingly iterative trends. The deeper I scroll into Twitter and TikTok in search of something to connect to or learn from, the more I find myself taking the bait and wondering if I will ever be able to afford to raise both a gay son and a thot daughter and I forward my contemplations to my group chats. (I fool myself into thinking it’s an invisible and uncountable form of engagement, when actually, creators are confident that shares, forwards, and saves outweigh likes and comments.) As if the accumulation of labels and self-diagnoses would yield an ultimate and conclusive form of self-knowledge that can help me pick the perfect haircut, lipstick, dress, color palette, or even job. So that every choice I make, even the hypothetical ones, is data-driven and optimized in order to build a perfect existence.

Looking around at the overharvested fields of digital shit, it’s hard not to ask: is the personality quiz the ouroboros of the algorithm? Is all of social media just a personality test? AITA, the Twitter hypotheticals, the personality type tutorials invite us to project ourselves into a handful of predetermined choices. To pick one of seven essences. To choose between Jay Z or $500,000. It gives the illusion of randomization, customization and personalization, but ultimately all it does is produce a quantization of who we are. It turns the mass of the self into a collective of discrete and finite individual components.

If taken to its logical conclusion, the whole of a given personhood can be quantized down to the most granular yes-or-no question, this-or-that choice, or multiple-choice response. But more likely, it will just produce some hollow engagement that keeps the farm in business for another day.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Alison Roman launches new podcast “Solicited Advice” (Variety)

• Nathan Fielder’s new show, also starring Emma Stone, gets a premiere date (Pitchfork)

• On October 3rd, Paramount released Mean Girls on TikTok, for free, in 23 parts (IGN)

• In case you missed it: The self-published Shadow Work Journal that outsold Oprah (The Atlantic)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Rest of World launched a list of 40 global technology companies “beating the West”

• Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects, a forthcoming book co-published with the Museum of Trans History and Art that gathers “a wide-ranging selection of artworks and artifacts that highlight the under-recognized histories of trans and gender-nonconforming communities.”

• From the new #Design channel on our Discord: Mid-century emojis that went viral

  • Also from our Discord: La Dolce Vita “Didn’t the Italians think we were all the same — greedy Americans in search of our personal paradise?” (Guernica)

• For the drug culture nerds: “Researchers mined an old drug forum and fed the entries to an AI. The result could augur a new class of psychedelic-based antidepressants.” (Pioneer Works)

  • The “old drug forum” in question is Erowid Center, which you can follow on Instagram

Main Image: The Simple Life, Fox