A farewell to this tech column - Juha Saarinen

Fewer people care about the truly geeky stuff now - but the social media platforms billions of us engage with have often degenerated into dead zones of dis- and misinformation. Photo / Yiu Yu Hoi, Getty Images

OPINION

Looking back over a decade of tech stories and columns, apart from time zooming along disturbingly fast, you really see how everything has changed. Technology is even more integrated in our lives now, perhaps not yet at the Neuralink brain interface level, but with artificial intelligence we’re certainly trying even harder to outsource our already diminishing cognitive abilities to the machines.

Some things haven’t changed much, like the sentiment in an early piece for the Herald about the internet never going to become secure.

It’s just developing too fast, nobody really knows how to fix the issues and, besides, there’s money to be made from both hackers exploiting the vulnerabilities and security vendors protecting against them, with everyone taking your privacy and security seriously, euphemistically speaking.

The discourse has become different though, and moved on from the bits and pieces in devices. Fewer people care about the truly geeky stuff now. That’s due to technology growing ever more powerful and accessible. You don’t need to think about it so much in 2024, and, yeah, there’s the cloud as well.

Now we talk more about what tech can do and what it does to us and society.

That last thing is important, but the discussion tends to hide that the point of technology is to automate as much as possible and, in the process, do away with humans. Technology has no values, morals or ethics and isn’t even able to reason. If you’re bothered by any of that, being in tech will feel lonely and dispiriting.

As a result, tech can seem like a dark beat to cover. Like when amazing engineering and ingenuity are unleashed to create social networks irresistible to billions of people, who gladly offer up their minds for unscrupulous platforms to milk for profit.

It’s like a never-ending episode of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s excellent and close-to-the-bone dystopian TV series.

Social networks that seemed novel and innovative, such as Twitter, which had started to figure out mass-moderation of users and which grew into a real-time news network, have become “enxittified” (apologies to Cory Doctorow). They are now more often than not dead zones of dis- and misinformation.

Suggest on X that caring for others is good, perhaps providing free school lunches to kids who would normally go hungry throughout the day, and a troll army with numbers in their account names start up their two-fisted typing of abuse. Some are real people, others are machine-generated automatons, but there is hardly ever any coherent discussion.

That’s the competition for news media being bled dry of advertising money - publishers that don’t have to plan or pay to generate content, only retroactively take token responsibility for it, or even care what it is. Any content, even if it is what a toddler fills its nappy with, is fine.

Facebook is an example of that. A few days ago Facebook said it would remove the News tab for Australian and United States users, after it did so in the UK, France and Germany last year. Long story short, Facebook won’t enter into any new commercial deals with news organisations; but neither will it stop users from posting news stories on Facebook.

As a journalist, it might be tempting to join the platforms, if you can’t beat them. Like TikTok, which has grown explosively since 2016 to hit a billion monthly users.

The economics do seem challenging, though. One New Zealand TikToker mentioned getting 40 million likes/views for a clip. A very impressive number.

However, that number looks less great when you look at the payment rate, which appears to be US$0.02-0.04 per 1000 views. Ultimately that is neither here nor there, as New Zealanders don’t get paid for their efforts by TikTok.

Reel-y little money

Nothing in tech is forever, though, and estimates suggest TikTok monetises American users at US$0.31 per hour they’re active.

This is interesting because it’s much less than say, the US$200 per hour Instagram reels in for each user. Meta-Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is understandably worried about TikTok - and other wannabe social networks following in the Chinese company’s footsteps, perhaps charging even less.

Similarly, research from German universities suggests Google, the giant devourer of ad spend, is starting to become less good for searching as AI-generated content, which cannot be trusted, is auto-corrupting and crowding out the work of humans.

There’s also the small issue of AI summarising content in browsers, without people having to visit sites and interact with them. It will be difficult for Google to monetise poor search results and an AI-browsed web.

Either way, this is my last column for the Herald but I expect to soon chronicle how the social internet algorithmically turned itself into junk. And, how the news media survived that meltdown thanks to journalists’ hard work and high standards. In that, I remain your most faithful and optimistic servant in times of adversity.