To put it another way, the Silicon Valley robber-barons are getting rich off the uncompensated labor of yeoman cranks, who till the posting fields in the sweltering heat of the discourse until their brains give out. When we use our finite capacity for wonder to publicly opine about fictional teens using drugs on a television show, or people reading in bars, or one American girl leaving her fake-sounding college to attend a different fake-sounding college, a company is making bank off it. When the cranks of yore would write a tirade spanning several faxes to their local member of parliament about a hedge that was bothering them, they did this for no-one but themselves. Of course, Twitter and Facebook don't crankify their users out of malice, they do it to turn a profit, which may actually be worse. What do we reckon of this? Okay, how about this? And this? What's your view here? Were you to design a machine to turn otherwise normal, healthy people into cranks - a kind of crankification engine, if you like - you would probably arrive at something like these platforms. So, to be on Twitter or Facebook is to sit in a room while someone holds up random pieces of stimulus and demands your appraisal of each. The ideal poster for social media companies is one who posts often, who posts stridently, and who responds to as much stuff as possible. This isn't just because whenever you post you get a thrilling little tally of all the people who agree with you, it's because of how these platforms are designed to maximize engagement. People who never set out to be cranks in the first place are actively incentivized to do so. And if the internet in general has lowered these barriers, social media has gone a step further. Owadays, saying something deeply unwell about an article you don't like to thousands of people is as trivial as ordering a coffee. "I have not, since my father brought home a Compaq Presario in 1995 and plugged it into our phone line, encountered one pocket of space in all of the World Wide Web that does not, to some degree or another, crankify all who inhabit it." That is, we're all just like yester-year's "obsessive writers of letters to the editor, the meticulous hoarders of correspondence, the avid collectors of fine and rare grudges." "We are all cranks now." argues a new article on Gawker (relaunched last July).
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