This is part two of a little series of posts about the internet, and where I see it going. You can find part one here, if you’ve not read it already.

I’ve been an Arsenal fan for half my life. No, wait, come back, I promise it’s relevant.

You may have seen that this season has been something extraordinary for us gunners. (Not gooners, anymore. Thanks, Internet.) We, and by we I do mean WE, won the title for the first time in 22 years, and found ourselves in our first Champions League final since 2006. Pretty bloody special. Enough to bring out over a million people into the streets of London. Lovely stuff.

Having missed the last game of the season standing in a very, very hot field at a festival, desperately trying to find shade and enough signal to find out whether Tottenham were getting relegated, I decided to go down to the pub with my mum to watch the Champions League final. I know, what a crazy pair we are.

Mum is as Arsenal-crazy as I am, and we watch pretty much every game together in her flat because, other than her, nobody in my family gives the remotest shit about football. Given the enormity of the game, we decided we wanted to experience a bit of that communal atmosphere I felt like I'd missed out on at the end of the season. I took my son along too, who showed his very first ever interest in watching a football match, which was quite nice.

We got down there a couple of hours early, knowing we'd need a table. It was a really lovely vibe, loads of Arsenal fans, everyone smiling, saying hello, and a few people who organise the local supporters group came over and introduced themselves. One of them was called Chief, and one was called Pixie, because we live in, essentially, Hobbiton, and even the football fans here are named accordingly. They had a lovely dog, too. I mean, look at him.

The game started, Arsenal scored early, and what had previously felt like a nice topper to the end of the season suddenly became very, very real. And absolutely excruciating. You know, like a normal football game, only more. There were fans of other teams there too, and there was a good-natured bit of witty repartee between the different groups. Still pleasant. Still overwhelmingly Arsenal fans.

Then, sometime in the second half, the local brigade of Clarkson fanboys, the ones who go to the agricultural college nearby, who’ll probably all be Reform councillors within the next five years, turned up en masse. Pissed out of their skulls, wearing dirty rugby tops as their fashion statement for the day. They walked past at first, seeing the pub was full, but then they noticed the game, clocked the pub full of Arsenal fans, and came back.

Actually, it's more accurate to say that they descended.

For the next hour, they proceeded to try their absolute hardest to ruin the experience for every single person there. By their own loud admission, they didn't know or care anything about football. They just wanted to ruin it for everyone else. They were chanting for PSG, digging up Spurs songs from somewhere, maybe Google Gemini, if any of them had opposable thumbs capable of searching for such things. They were being openly homophobic, racist, slagging off anyone that moved, and basically being as obnoxious as humanly possible. Making absolute tits of themselves, like the mangy little goblins they are.

There’s a word for these people, but I shan’t utter it here.

By the time the game ended, everyone was pissed off, apart from the goblins. It didn't help that PSG equalised just after they turned up. It was made worse when the game went to extra time and then penalties, which Arsenal duly lost. Every minute of that torture made worse by the braying, yawping Farages-in-training.

At one point, as things started to boil over into spilled pints and confrontations, my son asked why the pub didn't just kick them out. And I had to explain: because they're regulars. We're not. The manageress was there, laughing along, telling the Arsenal fans that ‘this is not an Arsenal pub,’ and basically doing nothing. And listen, to some extent, I get it. Why intervene to protect maybe a hundred people who might show up once or twice a month, over the people who are there every week? Why show even the barest shred of compassion, if you don't need to?

We all know why: It comes down to money. It always comes down to money.

And that's an awful lot like the internet we now have.

Now, we could have left the pub, tried to find somewhere a bit more hospitable. But unless we’d gone on masse, we’d have been left on our own; one balding middle-aged horror writer, his fourteen-year-old son (who otherwise really enjoyed the game and remarked afterwards that he might 'watch a few games next season' - sorry, son, you're now cursed to spend the rest of your life letting your mental health be dictated by the actions of some millionaires), and his seventy-year-old mother who can’t move all that quickly. And if we had left en masse, we all know exactly who would have followed.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Compaction

I should say, before I get too far into this, that I am not an author who commands much in the way of attention from the major corporations of the world. I have published, at the last count, over half a million words of fiction, sold north of five thousand books, and occupy what you might generously describe as a cult corner of the publishing world. A very cosy corner. Okay, so there’s only me there, in the spotlight, losing my religion.

The algorithmic weight of the industry does not, in short, rest upon my shoulders.

None of which prevented Meta from deciding that my books were worth stealing anyway. When it emerged that Meta trained its AI models on the work of essentially every writer who had ever put a book on the internet, I experienced the particular flavour of anger reserved for things that confirm exactly what you already believed about the people doing them. Not surprise. Not even shock. Something more like opening your email inbox on a Monday morning and finding two weeks’ work with a one-day deadline.

They took my work. They took everyone's work. And they did it because they could, and because the systems that were supposed to prevent them turned out to be, in practice, largely theoretical. And did that theft make any of those systems better?

Did it fuck.

Every single walled garden social media company is, by any metric, making the world a worse place, while degrading the experience for its users, safe in the knowledge that most of them are the proverbial frog-in-the-pot, not noticing that their brains are boiling in their own fluid.

Root Rot

I left Twitter when Musk came in and flooded the zone with shit, and watched from the outside as Musk’s billions ushered in a new golden, orange age of fascism. Christ, only this week he’s employing the very same playbook on my own septic isle.

I deleted both my Facebook and Instagram accounts because of the continued enshittification of those platforms and, you know, the whole stealing my own life’s work to serve up endless slop. Of course, that didn’t last long because last year I set up new accounts, because there are some FB groups I missed being part of, and I like following bands on The Gram.

I know. I know.

Like most X-iles, I joined Bluesky, which felt a lot like Twitter used to feel, and because I’m old enough to be nostalgic for pretty much anything that happened more than a few months ago. And I remain in a few Discord servers. Like so many others, I wondered how long it might be before I was fleeing those, too.

I love Discord. Actually, that's not right. I'm in two Discord servers that I love, both connected to communities that I cannot imagine dropping out of my life, and neither of which I have any control over beyond my presence and interactions. One’s a writing group, and one’s, unsurprisingly, an Arsenal group.

As for Discord as a platform? I’m ambivalent. I’m not paying for Nitro, because I could give a shit about stickers. The same goes for Bluesky; I’ve made a nice little feed based on my interests, and there are no ads, and, most importantly, when the Nazis have peered through the windows and decided to come in and ruin everyone’s fun, they’ve been kicked out.

For now.

But that could change, at any time.

If this is where all of my meaningful social media interactions now exist, those two servers and Bluesky, then what does it mean that I can be evicted from them at any time, for any reason, by people whose financial, ethical, or political motivations are not aligned with mine?

Well, that's enshittification, folks.

The pattern is consistent across every platform, every tool, every space we've tried to build something in. They build a platform, and it looks nice. It has features. Look at the shiny features. They invite us in, talk about how they’re going to be a nice platform, not like those other, nasty platforms. They get us to build our communities, our social libraries, our social graphs. And then they monetise the FUCK out of the asset we've created for them. Because a platform is nothing. It’s the audience that has value.

Or, you know, they get acquired. Or they change their terms. Or a billionaire buys them and drives them into a wall at full speed just to see what happens. And we, the users, are left trying to work out whether to move to the next pub over to see if they’re showing the game, or whether to just go home.

This is not a technology problem. It's a power problem. The technology is just the current mechanism.

But what I’ve learned, what I think we’ve all learned, one way or another, is that we don’t really give a shit about the platforms. We care about the communities we build inside them. Do you have loyalty to a particular platform? Can you rank your top 5 algorithms? Of course you fucking can't.

So, how do we climb out of this mess? Well, says the man with no technical savvy, coding knowledge, or, indeed, any major platform of my own. We need to stop thinking about platforms and start thinking about protocols.

Fallow Ground

Fortunately, since you’ve already had to read quite a lot of words, most of them inexplicably about a football match that happened nearly a week ago at this point, I’ve already done a lot of the work of explaining what that might mean in practice, because I wrote about it at some length in my first post in this series, which you can find here:

The short version is this: there is a protocol, it's called ATProto, it's the thing Bluesky is built on, and it might just be the most interesting thing happening on the internet right now. It’s the foundation of a whole new social media that is interoperable, where your data belongs to you, and where communities don’t have to die just because very rich people really want to engineer a world without tax (even though they already don’t pay any).

But rather than go back over that ground, what I want to do in the next post is show you something a bit more concrete. Because over the last few months, I've been building my own little corner of the internet on top of it. My own garden, if you like. (See, there is a point to the whole horticultural angle.) It is, at this point, a garden in roughly the same sense that a freshly dug patch of mud is a garden. But it's mine, and I'm tending it, and I'd like to show you around. Then we can put up some chairs, and maybe share a beer or two.

I promise not to talk about the match anymore.

But, dear Christ, that bloody Ref!

About the author

Paul Stephenson writes pulp fiction for the digital age. His first novel series – the indie-published apocalyptic Blood on the Motorway trilogy – has been an Amazon bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. A former journalist, he holds a diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford University.

His stories have been featured on the chart-topping horror podcasts, The Other Stories and The Night’s End. His newest project, the eBook serial The Sunset Chronicles, is a dystopian sci-fi thriller that will delight and terrify fans of science fiction and horror alike. He is also the creator of the podcasts, Bleakwood, tales of terror from a mysterious English town, and Darkness Come Alive, a modern vampire tale set in York.

He lives in England with his wife, two children, and one hellhound.