Have capitalists killed the internet?

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Wow, I can’t believe ‘Kamala is brat’ didn’t work. It’s almost as if a 107-day meme campaign directly pandering to a niche of terminally online Charli xcx stans wasn’t enough to win the presidency. The loss doesn’t rest squarely on Kamala Harris, mind you, but on the Democrats for insisting that Joe Biden, incoherent man of many gaffes, was fit to run again for so long. As a result, Donald Trump will become the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in the 1800s (which sounds like a long time ago written down, but you don’t really deep just how long ago until you know that he was referred to colloquially by the public as “Uncle Jumbo”).

The most annoying thing, though, is that heavyweight champion of attention economy billionaires, Elon Musk, will be joining the incoming administration as an “efficiency tsar,” heading up a new government department whose acronym spells the name of a spoof cryptocurrency Musk posted about so frequently it almost got him done for insider trading (Department of Government Efficiency… Doge). By all accounts he’s already getting on everyone’s tits, demanding a say in everything and hanging around Mar-a-Lago like a weed dealer who just wants to “blaze one” with you and then has to be physically peeled off the couch at 1AM. Trump loves to fire people, so it’s entirely possible that Musk’s tenure will end before the inauguration in January, which would be extremely funny. In the meantime, we can enjoy the fact that X is kinda dying.

There has been widespread dissatisfaction with Twitter since Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion in April 2022. Usership has plummeted since he laid off 80 per cent of the workforce, changed its name to X, and made it so that the top replies to every post are: the most flagrantly racist series of words you have ever read in your life, an impact font meme from the early 2010s, and an OnlyFans girl advertising free hole in bio. In that order. It’s unsurprising that people would abandon a website that simply doesn’t work, but since the election, X has been haemorrhaging users like it’s stuck in one of Jigsaw’s traps. When The Guardian published an editorial on November 14 announcing that it would no longer be posting on X, it prompted a much larger migration over to Bluesky.

Conceived in 2019 and made available to the general public in February 2023, Bluesky seems to trow stronger with every fuck up at X. When X was (temporarily) suspended in Brazil in a standoff over disinformation related to the 2022 election campaign, Bluesky picked up 3 million users. When X announced changes that would allow users to view posts from people who had blocked them, it picked up another 1.2 million. The day after the US election, more than 115,000 users deactivated their X accounts – the largest-ever mass exit from the platform – and traffic to Bluesky went up 500 per cent. At the time of writing, Bluesky has over 24 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September.

A part of Bluesky’s popularity is that it resembles how Twitter used to feel, which is probably by design. The platform was initially developed by Jack Dorsey while he was still the CEO of Twitter (Bluesky is now primarily owned by chief executive Jay Graber), and it functionally has everything that made it popular in the first place. Music journalists debating the cultural significance of an artist with two EPs on Bandcamp. Late night “just made a big soup x” posts into the void. Deranged hot takes about how enjoying sports is a Trojan horse for the far right. And, most importantly, the ability for users to see posts from people they have chosen to follow or share links to other websites without them being deliberately buried by an algorithm. Amazing. A marked difference from the current state of X, which greets you every day with a recycled buffet of AI slop and bodycam videos of people being murdered.

Some are joining Bluesky with a vengeful “that’ll teach ya” attitude towards Musk, posting about him constantly and referring to X as “the other place” (Musk, for his part, has started referring to it as “Bluecry”), but at the end of the day most people just want a social media platform that actually works – and Bluesky, currently, works. Who knows how long it’ll last, but for now it’s adding a glimmer of simplicity and personal curation back to a social media landscape that has become overly chaotic; a reminder that social media should be a tool to be used, not a spoon to feed.

Meanwhile, the live music industry has reached its own maddening point of collapse. A recent survey found that 72% of musicians made no profit from recent tours, despite the fact that ticket prices have shot up. There are a bunch of reasons for this, ranging from rising overheads for venues relating to the energy crisis, hidden fees and dynamic pricing from companies like Ticketmaster and Live Nation that have a monopoly on the market, and, in the UK, a hefty 20% VAT on ticket sales. Then there’s the tax of simply existing. While an artist takes home £93.60 for every £150 ticket for an arena show, for instance, most of that is eaten up by higher travel, accommodation and production costs, rather than going directly back to the artist. In what is being called a “cost of touring” crisis, many grassroots and independent artists can no longer afford to tour at all.

Kate Nash drew attention to the issue this month by launching an OnlyFans account where she’ll post photos of her arse to fund her upcoming tour. Citing the rising costs of travel, accommodation, food, promotion and crew, the decision was a financial one as well as a deliberate stunt to highlight how “completely broken” the music industry is. It comes weeks after Lily Allen launched an OnlyFans for her feet, whose 1,000 subscribers cut her a fatter monthly wage than 8 million listeners on Spotify (if you’re interested in why this is, which has to do with another huge but less sexy industry issue of label contracts, there’s an excellent breakdown on Drowned In Sound). “Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” Allen told detractors.

We’re all aware at this point that the game is rigged. No one who should be making money from what they do is making money from what they do. No one who logs on is having a good time. There are no “baddies” and “goodies,” the world doesn’t work like that, but it does feel like anyone currently profiting in the area of arts or technology – which, together, make up an incredibly large chunk of our lives – is an active dick. Whether you’re playing a show, trying to get tickets to a show, or simply wanting to post about the artist to your friends online, there is a distinct feeling that all of these things have become difficult and also you are having the piss taken out of you along the way.

At the start of the century, the internet was an escape from reality. Now, reality is an escape from the internet. Only now it costs a mystery amount between £53 and £400 (plus VAT) and a £9 Becks to go see Smashing Pumpkins. Hell.

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