modern life | The Glorious Outsiders

I’ve Had Enough – But Where Do We Go From Here?

I learnt a new word this week: enshittification.

I came across it in an article and it struck such a chord I looked it up. Wikipedia describes it as: “Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.”

And wow, doesn’t that just sum up the late stage of capitalism we are in right now? Late stage capitalism = end of the world, if you’re feeling really gloomy.

But in all seriousness, it kind of adds up to that, doesn’t it? As the above quote explains, huge companies, the elite, the ultra rich, the CEOs and shareholders, the governments, the rulers and the polluters are paying no heed whatsoever to the plight of the world, the natural environment or human suffering. It’s as if they can see the burning end coming and are trying to hoard as much wealth and security as possible in preparation for when end days really arrive. They’ll be fine in their bunkers while everything collapses around the rest of us.

But let’s go back to my new favourite word. I’d been feeling this way about social media for some time. I even wrote a poem on Medium about it and I’ve posted it at the end just for fun. I recently read a book called The Way Home by Mark Boyle, which is about one man shunning the modern world and technology to live in a self-made cabin in the woods and survive by himself. By the time I’d devoured it I wanted to do the exact same thing myself. I soon realised I couldn’t, of course. You need money to buy land and be left alone. Plus, how could I sell my books or get paid for my writing if I gave up technology? I am trapped. We are all trapped.

That depressed me but I decided to fight back by cutting down my use of tech. I’ve started leaving my phone behind, for example. No, I don’t mean when I leave the house, I don’t have the guts for that yet, but I mean when I move from room to room. Yes, like a lot of us, that’s how glued to my phone I normally am. It’s always in my back pocket. It’s an addiction, let’s be honest.

But it’s an addiction that we all seem to hate and grumble about constantly. Twitter, now known as X, has seen a huge exodus to rival Bluesky in response to Elon Musk’s support for Trump. That includes me, by the way. Facebook has just announced they’re getting rid of the fact-checking facility. So, in the name of free speech, we’ll now be subjected to a tidal wave of lies and misinformation, not to mention hate speech and more political interference from certain wealthy quarters.

Facebook has been declining for some time too and I can see it soon going the same way as X. It is my intention to start building my content up on other platforms from now on.

Medium was a lifeline for a while. In a few months I’ll have been on there for two years and for the majority of that time it has surpassed my expectations. It’s paid me for my writing, rewarded me for my words, made me feel appreciated and valued. But then AI came along and ruined it all. These days Medium is fast becoming another platform I need but actively loathe going on.

All right, it’s not that bad yet. I’m getting good at spotting, blocking and reporting the huge amount of spammers, scammers and bots that now stalk it, but it’s still depressing, not to mention time consuming to have to do this. Reads, views and earnings are down for everyone. People are leaving in droves. It’s becoming impossible to determine what is human written and what is AI generated and Medium didn’t seem to be doing anything to discourage the barrage of AI slop, until today that is. I’ve just edited this blog post and luckily before I published it, because Medium have just emailed its subscribers updating them on their approach to AI slop, spammers and scammers.

I felt a huge sense of relief reading the email. They do seem to be very much aware of the frustrations we’ve been having, even down to the generic ‘nice’ or ‘good’ or ‘follow me’ comments we get on our articles from people who have not read them. The rules for Medium are clearly presented as follows, and anyone who breaks them is being suspended and/or removed. Yay!

creating multiple accounts to engage with yourself and generate earnings
using responses solely to drive attention to your stories with the intention of creating reciprocal earnings
writing responses, clapping, following, or highlighting solely to generate earnings
using AI-generated content to earn money for stories and responses in the Partner Program

I don’t know where writers go from here. I sometimes feel like our time is running short. Why will anyone hire a real human writer if they can get AI to do the job for them? Stories, poems, essays, articles, copy, ghost-writing, you name it, AI can do it.

And it was already hard enough for writers, both trad published and indie. Hard and getting harder. So, what do we do? Where do we go?

Well, we don’t give up, that’s for sure. We seek out better places. For me, that means returning humbly to the safety of my blog. I am now adding my blog link to every piece I publish on Medium and since joining Bluesky, I am also cross-posting my blog pieces to there. My blog is mine and I control it. That’s something to value these days and I predict the humble blog will see a rise in popularity and usage in the next few years as writers turn away from the enshittification of social media platforms.

I’m on Substack but need to up my game. I’m still working out how best to use it, because although it is tempting to repost Medium and blog pieces there, this seems a bit dull. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll use it to serialise my next book? I’m not sure. At the moment I’m just using it for my newsletter and I’ve only posted two so far, so there is work to be done.

Bluesky so far is mostly a breath of fresh air. We’ll see though. I’ll definitely be posting there more often and if it takes off along with Substack, then I predict I’ll use Instagram and Facebook far less.

That’s my way of handling it anyway. We can’t give up, that’s for sure. Though I truly felt like it when I was told by one of the kids in my writing clubs this week that their teacher had been showing them how to use AI to write stories. They all thought this was wonderful while I was horrified. They couldn’t understand my horror so I changed the subject. They’re too young for me to rant at but I wanted to ask them what they thought would happen to me teaching them writing, if they could use AI to do the same thing? I’d be out of a job, surely?

I also wanted to ask them if they didn’t see it as cheating, because I do. We’ve got this far without AI churning out stories and poems for us. Why are we so quick to hand our imagination over to huge nameless companies? And yes I know that tools such as Grammarly and even the spell check function on Word are technically AI, but, and you can fight me on this, using a tool to check your spelling and grammar, is not the same as using a tool to form a sentence or a paragraph for you.

It frustrates me. Writing should be hard! It should take your blood sweat and tears! It should enrage and frustrate you because once you get through that and figure it out for yourself, it will excite and thrill you. Can you say the same thing about AI? I doubt it. When you are praised for a piece of writing, can you really take the credit? Can you really feel proud?

Pride. Imagination. Working through those humps and blocks. Thrashing out ideas. Rearranging sentences. Cutting out repetitive words. Are we really going to let AI do the hard work for us?

Well, I’m not.

I’m a writer and I write and I will continue to do so even if things continue to get harder.

What are your thoughts on all this? I’d love to know so feel free to drop a comment…

Sick Of Social Media

I’m sick of social media
it makes me feel sick
dehydrated, disconnected
draining my empathy
til all that I can see
is how I don’t want to be
so please don’t message me
don’t chase me up
don’t hound me down
don’t send me a reel
or assume my time is yours to steal
don’t leave me a voice-note
don’t tell me how to vote
don’t message me a random link
and expect me to click it
don’t pretend to know anyone
don’t pretend you are having fun
don’t say things to strangers online
that would get you battered in real life
don’t send thoughts and prayers
don’t pretend that you care
or that your sympathy isn’t reserved
for some countries more than others
don’t ask me to follow you
don’t assume I want to know you
don’t offer me a service
or expect me to want this
don’t assume I am interested
or that your life has me invested
I’m sick of social media
it is making me sick
dehydrated, disconnected
blunting my sympathy
til all that I can see
is who I don’t want to be

I’ve got a confession to make. Just lately I’ve been suffering from a strange, and as far as I know, nameless, affliction. The only way I can describe it to you is by asking you to recall the feeling you get in your stomach just before you sit an important exam. You know, that lurch, that turnover, that horrible tightness that takes your breath away for a moment? Yeah, that.

I first noticed it happening whenever I thought about my writing. The things I had planned to do once my littlest child was in bed. I put it down to a sort of nervous excitement, and a borderline panic about how little time there is to write all the things I have in my head.

Then I noticed it happened at other times too. Just randomly. My stomach dropping, lurching and rolling over.

So, then I blamed it on something else. I’ve always been interested and engaged in political thought and debate, but even more so in recent years. This is not a bad thing, but then it gets to the point where you are feeling angry and helpless all of the time. Post Brexit was pretty bad. It’s all pretty bad. Climate change. Inequality. Housing crisis. A rise in racism and hate crime. Endless war. The fact we’re being organised and dictated to by massive corporations hellbent on destroying the world. The fact you cannot trust the media to tell you the truth.

So, I made the decision to delete Facebook from my phone. Something I never thought I would do! I was getting seriously addicted. Picking it up to check my newsfeed first thing in the morning, and pretty much every chance I got throughout the day after that.

I did feel an immediate sense of relief. That first morning stomach lurch dissipated. I picked up a book instead. I no longer check my phone throughout the day because there is nothing to check. I have a quick scroll through Facebook in the evening, once I have done enough work to deserve a little break, and I’m sad to say it’s still the same. The violence rages on, the world gets hotter and there seem to be angry and ignorant people everywhere.

I did feel a sense of relief and freedom for a while. But that feeling in my stomach has not gone away. In fact, I am getting it more often. Maybe it is because I’ve become aware of it, nervous of it even? Confused by it, and as a consequence, fixated on it? I don’t know, but it is strange, and very annoying. Sometimes it takes my breath away. I have to stop, hold onto something and take a very deep and deliberate breath. And then I am okay again.

I can’t blame anything in my personal life. Everything is as it should be. Everyone is in perfect health. Money is tight, but it’s never been any different at any time in my life. We have a lovely home and a huge garden. We grow our own fruit and vegetables and raise chickens and ducks. We’re outside, a lot! I’ve got my four beautiful, intelligent children, and yes they come with their own issues, and yes being a parent is sometimes stressful and exhausting. But I’m a placid, easy going sort of person. I roll with the punches. I look back on the past fondly, I focus on the now, and I don’t look too far ahead,(unless it’s my saving up for a VW Campervan.)

So why the bad feeling? What does it mean? What is it trying to tell me? I just can’t work it out. It takes me by surprise at random times of the day, creeping up and sucking the air out of me, crunching up my guts and making me think I have forgotten something important. Am I about to sit an exam? Am I about to confront some scary, aggressive person? What is it??

I don’t know, and maybe I will never know. Maybe it built up over time and my stomach got so used to being tied up in knots, it just doesn’t know how not to be. All I can do right now is try to make use of it. I wrote a short story you can find in Bird People And Other Stories called She Is… I wrote this story to keep a novel at bay, and I’ve started writing a second short story with the same characters. Basically the story is about teenage girls, bullying and revenge, but the narrator describes this constant heavy feeling in her belly. She wakes up with it, and it comes and goes throughout the day. Of course, this came from me and my own experience, and I’ve carried it on into the next story. In her mind, it’s because something bad is going to happen, she just doesn’t know what or when. It’s a sense of foreboding for her, a warning from her body.

My fears for the way the world is heading, my fight to find hope, my questions about human nature, have all been rolled out and examined in Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature. (On the third draft now) I didn’t even realise I was doing it at first, but I’ve poured so much of my current state of mind into this story-line. Elliot is the child in me, the hopeful innocent looking for the good in people. His mother Laura is the cynic in me, (exaggerated a fair bit! )Through her I get to rant and rave, I get to swear and scream at the cruelty and injustice in the world. I get to indulge myself in misery and cynicism, fearing the worst and totally giving in to it. I get to hide under a duvet and pretend it’s not happening.

In The Mess Of Me Lou is the voice for my own teenage angst and body issues. She is louder and brasher than me, able to say things I was not.

In recent short stories I have released endless frustrations and anxieties. From my utter dismay that people think it’s okay to dump rubbish in the river where I live, to my constant paranoia that one day soon the Earth is just going to snap, just going to cull us all in one bloody swoop, freeing itself at last. I honestly don’t know how I would cope with this world if I were not a writer!

I think this is the best and sometimes the only thing we can do with something that tortures us. Use it, write about it, pass it on to a fictional character. Maybe this is one way to eventually rid yourself of it! Or at least gain a better understanding of it. I think writers do this all the time, often without even realising it. We project our fears and anxieties onto made up people, into made up worlds. So it’s not us with the problem, it’s someone else.

And then, we feel like we have some control. We can direct the proceedings, we can work out what the problem is, we can send the character on a journey and we can even create a happy ending 🙂 I truly think this ability is one of the greatest things about being a writer.

What about you? Please feel free to leave a comment!

I’ve Had Enough – But Where Do We Go From Here?

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