#13 CTRL + ALT + SHIFTY: The Slow Erosion of Trust Online
Rewarding fiction, broken para-social contracts, and discourse burnout.
AC4EVA
Like any self-respecting cultural strategy enthusiast, I take the work of Adam Curtis as that of a righteous text. In the scriptures and sculptures of his latest body of work, SHIFTY, he edges us against the idea of cultural collapse – a slow burn not quickly defined by era defining moments like 9/11, and not even necessarily with the bombs and riots that pepper this period of supposed peacetime. Rather, it’s a gradual erosion of meaning and value placed upon institutions. When we look at the trust we place in governing bodies, media, national services – across the board we see dips. It’s not a case of an explosion that blows trust up, but rather a dissolution fuelled by disillusion. Not being able to understand who or what to trust, or to be able to accurately communicate who’s in charge anymore, means that the institutions who once held power are having to grapple desperately for attention.
Yes, SHIFTY is about the bigger erosion society has faced since the late 20th century – going deep + surface on socio/geopolitical factors. But this erosion has seeped into everything we do, and we’ve reached the end of the authenticity tunnel. Each year, I get the honour of going to SXSW to fact find for my agency, and the big theme I brought back this year was this idea of post-authenticity. It’s the natural next step in a world bored of forced vulnerability and a desperate for something a little weirder and out there. And since, this idea has followed me into every nook and cranny of the internet. In fact, the OG power holders of traditional influencer marketing have had quite the reckoning, something easily predicted with the rise of creator comms, but now finally cemented (more on that later).
We’ve all sat in a meeting and been asked how to make *insert brand/product* more authentic. Because, for so long, authenticity = trust. But now trust has been eroded across the board. Attempts to rebuild it under the guise of authenticity wears paper thin with consumers who watched the whole thing slowly erode from start to finish (yours sincerely, someone whose been working with influencers for over a decade xxx).
This makes our jobs particularly tough. Communicating truth without the over earnest platitudes that make the general public run a mile IS tough. But that’s not a valid excuse for some of the bad behaviours we’re fuelling out our industry – from botched Cannes case studies to the use of “leveraging AI” as a euphemism for “human-efficiencies”. The mask of our industry is slipping, and the question remains: if we don’t trust the work being done from inside the machine, what do we expect consumers to do?
Much like the world stage, our industry is undergoing its own system restart – a CTRL + ALT + DELETE forced upon us after the churning and burning of our old modes, the bugs in the system, the glitches and the shifts. But the acceleration is on, pedal to the metal. I’ve been pontificating about the shift in dynamics in our industry since I started this Substack in January. At the beginning of the year, I spoke of the idea of our “Villain Era’”, a period of darkness, alter-egos, shenanigans, and – let’s face it – authoritarianism. I then spoke about the Long Squeeze, how the YOLO Economy is the next generations middle finger to recession and late-stage capitalism (or an embrace of it, depending on what side of the reckless spending chasm you stand on). And last month, I spoke of a new “offline internet”, in which the rules have changed, and brands have even more to prove, in the most chill of ways, to get any sort of meaningful cut through with their online community. In a way, this was an unintentional trilogy of the drift and shift we’re feeling at pace after years of slow erosion – dunking us straight on in. The fog of the world, in all its rich and riotous chaos, was of course going to come for us and the work we do. Because the two are so intensely linked, and the focus and push for AI has accelerated productivity, whilst simultaneously accelerating a breakdown of everything we knew and loved about navigating an online world. In episode 1 of SHIFTY, we see and hear from Stephen Hawking and how he figured out Black Holes. To fall into one, you could come out into another universe.
Blackhole or tectonic shift, there are three major fault lines to symbolise our new era, and they’re as follows:
SHIFT ONE: THE SIMULATION OF CREATIVITY
“Creativity is not decoration. It is a business tool” were the shots fired from Sir John Hegarty this week as he had a searing take on the problem with effectiveness, citing the research Mark Ritson had undergone to prove the problem with Cannes. You could argue this til the cows come home, but there is a rotten apple in the heart of the work coming out of the industry that claims to permeate culture. We have become so obsessed with roleplaying creativity, that we’re happy to reward fiction over effectiveness.
I’m obviously not saying that everyone who won a Cannes Lion were subjects of simulated creativity. That would be cuckoo but also, sour grapes, as someone who has never made it to the South of France, even on her holidays L. But, at the time of writing DM9, a Sao Paolo agency, are under investigation due to a whistleblower claim that they manipulated the case study video to prove effectiveness. Doctored footage and digitally altered customer testimonials are among the accusations. Damning stuff, but almost unsurprising. I’ve been fortunate enough to sit through enough Jury’s for far less prestigious awards to know that guff and a well-placed sizzle reel is enough to distort and distract from fact.
But it’s a recurring theme, at the biggest awards for creativity that exist. In a searing fact-check of a Cannes-winning sustainability campaign, Polina Zabrodskaya exposed how a really glossy case study can smooth straight over some pretty terrible green-washing. The campaign from Britannia claimed a bold environmental win – with some pretty gorgeous creative I might add – but when Polina dug into the details it was pretty clear that the campaign was completely at odds with the reality of the company. They’d in fact increased water usage, had higher emissions, and more plastic waste year on year. Zabrodskaya stated this isn’t her first rodeo – she’s an established juror for Cannes in the sustainability sector – and her feeling was that we go for narrative over evidence, especially in crucial categories we can pat ourselves on the back on and there is less technical literacy amongst the jurors. At Cannes, “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story” is more than a cheeky wink to creative liberties. Its obfuscating the entire process.
This brings back Hegarty’s point around great creative being a tool to get noticed, to move people to act, and to create empathy. Failure to deliver on those three areas, and what is your campaign doing other than creating noise?
I know to bring this back to AI is getting boring now, and that creativity is subjective, and that we’re accelerating what’s possible (yada, yada, yada). But the hollowing out of campaigns, devoid of human insight and creativity, and the ability to then doctor how flat they’ve fallen with the very same tool, is going to make this already pretty hermetically sealed industry and even larger echo chamber. I can hear our increasingly panicked heartbeat loud in my ears.
SHIFT TWO: THE COLLAPSE OF ANONYMITY
The closed-door internet has been such a fascinating cultural shift to me, because it sits adjacent to an anonymous internet, but lives in its next iteration. There are so many parallels with our current social behaviours and that of Web 1.0, but the acceptance of mask on culture is crucially different. Yes, there are so many corners of the internet where we still live under a pseudonym or alt. But, more and more so, the corners of the internet culture are breeding in will be private, not necessarily masked. People are more willing to admit there is multiple versions of themselves knocking around the web, or to link usernames to all their social handles so there is a chain-link of online personas, or to disclose the avatar version of themselves. In this week’s episode of Shameless, host Michelle Andrews surprised me when she mentioned the role the Metaverse plays here. As someone who spent a lot of time trying to figure out the structure behind the Metaverse post a very new tech / crypto funded SXSW in 2022, I still hold belief that it’s coming down the tracks, we just weren’t ready. Michelle echoed this belief, stating that the mishmash between alt and reality, digital and IRL personas intertwining, is only becoming more and more common. In short, this means we can exist privately, or even in an alternate reality, but there is a clear link to the source.
Perhaps this behaviour is why we’re starting to see the ultimate collapse of anonymity (a word I always hope to not have to say out loud). We’re in a mask-off era when it comes to the original authenticators, Influencers. Not fun, zippy, content creators with equity and brand partnerships. We’re talking in the trenches, OOTD, follow my blog Influencers, and the site that upended them all. Tattle Life.
If you don’t know what Tattle life is I envy the purity of your mind, body, and soul. It is effectively a forum-based site that proclaims to hold influencers who monetise their lifestyle to account for bad brand deals and misleading creators. And whilst I’m sure they were very helpful that time Lauren Goodger tried to get her followers to take diet pills with cyanide (or something like that?), for the most part, the site acts as one man’s gossip forum, another man’s toxic bullying hell hole. In 2021, The Guardian ran an exposé on the site that rapidly gained popularity during the pandemic, but it wasn’t until just this month the previously anonymous and untouchable site owner was unveiled.
Due to a defamation case levied by Irish couple Donna and Neil Sands, the identity of “Helen McDougal” was finally exposed, later revealed to be influencer (I KNOW!) Sebastian Bond. This was a landmark moment in the lives of creators globally, but no more so than here in the UK where 12 million users lurk and post daily. The Sands warning to those listening in was a chilling reminder that “the Internet is not anonymous place”. This came in the same fortnight after Australian influencer Indy Clinton revealed that she’d hired a private investigator to unmask the many individuals who felt it was totally acceptable to troll her day in and day out. Indy posted a video of dancing around her house under the hashtag #urnotanonymous.
If you want to hear more about how this all interconnects, I link here a great episode from the Shameless gang on it, that I listened to this morning after I had already written up a half-baked piece on what the Tattle exposure would do the old constraints of influencer marketing. The tl;dr of that piece was that it marks a nail in the coffin for the forced authenticity and toxic culture of influencer behaviour marred by the late 2010’s. But it doesn’t answer what we’ll do with trolls, as they’ve fled to Reddit increasingly concerned that they will be exposed at any given minute.
There are always to double down, to become more secure, to find a way to hide yourself if you really want to. We live in a world that has an entire dark web, for Christ’s sake. But the interesting shift here is that those who troll, who are paid to astroturf, or who simply think a username is right to an all bets off rampage of the internet, are having to drastically rethink. And what does that do to behaviours on the internet? It shifts them back firmed into lurk categories or considers them burying deeper into their caves to shit talk in private. It changes the landscape.
And with that, perhaps the expectation on creators shifts too. Jaz Smith’s 24-part documentation of her wedding was looked down upon as creator excess gone too far but was explained by her as a payment to her community who built her up. Who holds the power in this situation, the lurkers who circle prey, or the avid engagers who are looking for lunch? This is why the idea of co-creation and creator/fan led strategies are rising to the top above traditional pay to push partnerships. It continues to pave a new way for fans and creators to share the same emotional space, to level out the expectation without fear of exposure, and build up genuine trust out of the ashes of what came before.
SHIFT THREE: THE COLLAPSE OF DISCOURSE
I can’t believe it, here I am, adding to the already ridiculous levels of discourse levied around Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend album artwork. Will the person in the suit be revealed to be a woman? This question has been asked by so many people I’ve spoken to or listened to over the last couple of weeks I hope to God it’s just something even more perverse and weird. In brilliant pop culture podcast Polyester, hosts Gina and Ione laugh about how the internet responded to this late-stage discourse divider, lamenting the collective sigh we all took when we realised what this was going to do. As they read through the supporting tweets, I was struck by the notion that all knowing internet engagers could see straight through the PR plan at play here. And yet, we played straight into it.
As Eugene Healey pointed out in his latest video, this was simply a case of manufactured discourse, where at each stage of the controversy her team were ready to “nudge it along”. News outlets are stuck with scraps, trying to make something from nothing, and so when something like this drops, we can’t help but clamber for it shall we never eat again. Social media users aren’t a lot better. Sure, we could be shouting into the void to have a public diary to look back on, but so many of us are searching for that hook, the tempting take that gains a like. We all want to have our say on a matter, and the machines behind this know that drumming up pointless controversies are a sure-fire way to get people going. Especially people blindly avoiding a huge global crisis and need to find safety and security in pop culture tropes and feminism 101. The next stage of discourse is disassociation.
It harks back to last summer, where you couldn’t move for opinion over the logistics, legalities, and long-term impact of the celebrification of Sex Work and the Only Fans debate that held Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue at the heart of it. Whether those women did half the things they purported to do on camera was beside the point, the conversation and outrage generated serviced them in getting the subscribers and fame they needed. In writing this, I realise I haven’t heard a piece of discourse around these two in quite some time, and so I’m sorry for bringing us back there, but it shows that bubble will burst if there’s nothing but air in it.
This form of rage baiting isn’t exclusive to moral panic - though the last 5 years have shown us a master class in the use of culture wars as a distraction mechanism. There is no end to the role outrage porn has within marketing strategies, from political personification down to puppets and dolls. Think the Labubu cultural obsession. Their central stick in mainstream culture is that people can’t wrap their head around who’d want those hideous dolls, and so the dolls become a symbolism of counterculture and alternative behaviours, which then make them more statements to commodify rather than something anyone wants attached to their bag. Or that’s my theory, anyway.
We learnt a masterclass from the political stage. In 2016, “Fake News” as a concept had enough vitriol and debate surrounding it – the very idea that the news would lie seemingly a brand-new fact – that it compounded distrust in mainstream media and shepherded in the age of fragmented media and social influence. It’s rare I would thank Donald Trump for anything, but we can certainly thank him for ushering in peak discourse, that in turns ushers in the collapse.
This ultimate saturation of narrative and the meaning we associate to it, and the constant push for outrage, is ultimately causing opinion to become something we take as a malleable, unserious factor. And when that happens, everyone will just blindly do what they like, as the conversation means literally nothing. If we continue this way, our capacity for simple joy in little things will be lost. Opinion on everything, meaning in nothing.
The Aftershock
So here we are, at the intersection of these 3 fault lines (and let’s face it thousands more) that show the SHIFT. Cannes helps hold a mirror to the wider issue with creative theatre, with work cynically reverse engineering to impress judges as opposed to build meaning. Meanwhile, creators and their audience sit across the table from one another, unsure of the mutual expectation now there’s been a fall out of anonymity. And enshrouding it all, the era where nothing can be enjoyed or disliked at face value without it becoming layered with discourse, outrage and subtext. Meaning has become as unstable, shaking with the rest of the foundations.
It's not necessarily just a cultural observation, but an operational one for any of us who work in the world of conversation driving and meaning making. Because they’re not isolated shifts, they’re compounding and interconnected. Simulated creativity will only further feed the breakdown of trust. Like false promises have broken down trust in civic engagement, we risk burning the bridge between creativity and consumer with bad faith campaigns. The collapse of anonymity changes the relationship between creator and “fan” and also might risk performativity – the idea of having to cater for a reality in which you may be torn apart. And the outrage economy is open for business, warping our understanding of impact until we mistake engagement for belief or attention for influence.
We’ve become experts in the optics and vernacular of meaning, performance, simulation, but terrible at doing the practice anymore. As we enter the big shift, the new creative order, we need to ask ourselves whether we continue to feed this ghost in the machine, or we smash it up and start again. Pass the sledgehammer.
SIM CITY: Tales from the Algorithm is a Substack all about the internet, social media, and the cultural anthropology of the digital world. Subscribe for more 😇