The Internet is Broken and Will Never Be Fixed

the incentives for attention will never be corrected

A while back I wrote about a particularly putrid kind of “content,” internet video which exists only to spark confusion that then drives phony “engagement” in the form of people commenting and sharing to figure out what they’re not getting. As I said then, that sort of thing is just an extreme expression of what the internet is: a parasitic digital organism that feeds on human time and emotion, extracting money or attention through the most useless and shameless means possible. In the images above you have a similar behavior, in tweet form.

The author of the tweets, who I am leaving anonymous, appears to be a “researcher and journalist” who has published things in actual professional publications. And yet the notion that Americans literally cannot pay for things electronically seems to be a plausible idea to her. Or, more likely, she expressed initial skepticism in her first tweet and then quickly found out two things from Twitter. One, she likely learned that her assumption was wrong, and that America has bank transfers, bank apps, peer-to-peer payments, Apple Pay, and sundry other electronic payment options; but two, and more importantly, that pretending to believe that we don’t have those things got her the attention she was clearly craving. And so she just kept tweeting based on a completely absurd premise. First she was being stupid, then she found that being stupid was profitable in the marketplace of attention, so she switched to being dishonest. And she was rewarded for it all along the way.

Yes, America’s true “instant payment” system, FedNow, is very new. You could ding us for not getting that work done earlier, although given that we have the largest economy in the world and a simply immense number of banks and financial institutions, we can be forgiven. Many other peer countries have had instant payments in that sense for the past five or six years, although Japan had something like that as far back as the 1970s. But while there’s some very positive developments associated with FedNow, the basic ability to pay for things electronically has been with us for decades, with Venmo having been around for ten years and PayPal a lot longer than that. The pretense of this tweet thread was not that Americans had lacked a true federal instant payment system until recently, but rather that we couldn’t do things like send money from one person to another via our phones. Which, of course, we’ve been able to do for a long time, information that she could have found out (and, again, I’m guessing did find out) via a 10-second Google search. The Apple Pay tweets here feel like a tell to me - of course it’s not possible that Apple developed the Apple Pay system with no ability to deploy it in Apple’s biggest and richest market! That would be incredible, as in, not credible.