The Emperor's New Suit
The Sermon on the Feed
To cross this street is to gamble with physics, and the house odds are lethal. Up in the hills, Serbian snipers are waiting. They are looking for movement, for silhouettes. They do not care if you are a soldier, a grandmother, or a child fetching water. You are merely a target, a brief interruption in the crosshairs, a decision that takes less time than it takes to exhale.
Down on the pavement, a group of civilians crawls across a bridge. They do not run—running attracts the eye. They press their bodies against cold, filthy concrete, scraping knees raw, praying the wall shields the tops of their heads. They are starving. They are terrified. They are playing Russian Roulette where the gun is held by a man peering through a telescopic sight two miles away, probably eating a sandwich.
The air smells of cordite, unwashed bodies, and the metallic tang of fear. Every muscle is tense. Every sound—a car backfiring, a bird taking flight—sounds like rifle crack. They crawl for their lives, inch by inch, knowing that a single mistake means a bullet in the spine. A photographer, risking his own life, snaps a picture. It captures the raw, terrifying indignity of war. It captures the moment a human being is reduced to an animal trying not to be hunted.
The photograph will travel. It will be published. It will win awards. It will bear witness to one of the bloodiest sieges in modern history.
And thirty-three years later, it will become a meme about Chelsea losing 3-0 to Liverpool.
*****
CUT TO: London, Monday morning, January 2026.
Bryn is sitting on the toilet. He is catastrophically hungover. It is the morning after the FA Cup 4th Round, and his beloved Chelsea have been comprehensively destroyed 3-0 by Liverpool. The season is effectively over. There will be no silverware this year, unless silverware includes participation trophies and the lingering smell of disappointment.
Bryn spent Saturday afternoon in the pub, laughing at Arsenal fans, confident in his tribe’s superiority. He spent Sunday on the Tube, surrounded by blue shirts, singing songs about history and glory. And then he spent ninety minutes watching his dreams disintegrate like a biscuit dunked too long in tea—structurally unsound, morally devastating, and leaving a residue of sadness.
He is angry. He feels hollow. He pulls out his phone to seek solace in the digital tribe. He opens X—or Twitter, or whatever Musk is calling it this week after changing the brand seventeen times like a divorced man getting terrible haircuts and pretending each one is “the real me now.”
He scrolls. His thumb moves automatically, a reflex honed by ten thousand hours of practice. It is the only exercise he gets. And then he sees it.
A meme. Caption: “Chelsea fans arriving at work today.”
Below the caption is the photo. The photo of the civilians crawling across the bridge in Sarajevo. The civilians who were minutes from death. The civilians who were not making a joke. They were trying not to die.
Bryn snorts. He exhales air through his nose—the internet’s most minimal gesture of amusement, the emotional equivalent of a car exhaust cough. He hits “Repost.” He scrolls past.
Within thirty seconds, he has forgotten what he saw. Within thirty minutes, the Sarajevo survivors crawling for their lives have been replaced in his feed by: a crypto scam featuring a cartoon ape in a suit, an AI-generated image of Jesus constructed entirely from prawns with anatomically impossible hands, an advertisement for erectile dysfunction pills (the algorithm knows, it always knows), and Elon Musk replying to himself about how he definitely isn’t owned and everyone criticising him is a bot or poor or both.
This is Context Collapse. It is the defining pathology of social media. We have built a system that takes the bloodiest, most profound moments of human history, strips them of their tragedy, and repurposes them as content to scroll past whilst defecating. We have created a machine that can place genocide next to cat videos and call it a feed, as if tragedy and breakfast were courses in the same meal.
Worse, the algorithm does not care. The code does not know what a sniper is. It does not know what war is. It does not know that the people in that photo were minutes from death, that their children might still be alive, that somewhere someone is crying about that bridge thirty years later. It only knows that this image has high contrast, clear outlines, and generates engagement. It knows that people stop scrolling, tap the screen, type words, express emotions. And emotions—any emotions, all emotions, especially negative emotions—translate to time on site. Time on site translates to advertisements viewed. Advertisements viewed translate to money. Money translates to executive bonuses. Executive bonuses translate to more of this.
The algorithm would show you footage of your grandmother’s funeral if it kept you scrolling. And it would place an advertisement for discount coffins immediately after, targeted based on your recent search history for “how to cope with grief,” and then serve you a sponsored post about holidays in the Maldives because “you deserve to treat yourself.”
If you want to understand why the world feels like it is going mad, do not look at the politicians. Look at the News Feed. We are not citizens of a global village; we are inmates in a global asylum where the walls are covered in advertisements and the loudspeakers play a twenty-four-hour remix of genocide, gossip, and advertisements for protein powder.
*****
Social media did not invent the Attention Economy. The Attention Economy gave birth to social media.
This is crucial. We tell the story backwards. We say, “Social media was created to connect people, but then it became corrupted by advertising.” Wrong. Advertising came first. The ads business model came first. Connection was the bait. Attention was always the product. Your attention. Quantified, monitored, and sold to the highest bidder like pork belly futures.
Television perfected this formula decades earlier. You are not the customer of television. Advertisers are the customers. You are the product being sold. The shows—the content, the entertainment, the news—exist only to keep your eyes on the screen long enough to show you advertisements for cars you cannot afford, soft drinks that will give you diabetes, and medications for diseases you did not know existed until the advertisement invented them and then offered to cure them for £47.99 per month, billed quarterly, auto-renewing, cancellation requires written notice thirty days in advance.
The only difference is that social media is better at it. Television could only watch you through Nielsen ratings and focus groups. Social media watches you through your phone. It knows what you click, what you read, how long you hesitate over a post about your ex-girlfriend’s wedding, what makes you angry, what makes you aroused, what makes you afraid. It measures your pupil dilation. It tracks your scrolling speed. It knows when you are sad because you scroll slower. It knows when you are manic because you share more. It knows you better than you know yourself, and it uses this knowledge exclusively to make you watch more advertisements.
And it remembers. Forever. In data centres that consume more electricity than entire nations, your every click is stored, indexed, and monetised. You are not using social media. Social media is using you as an oil well, extracting data crude and refining it into behavioural predictions that are sold to advertisers who want to manipulate you into buying things you do not need with money you do not have to impress people you do not like.
*****
The first social networks did not understand this. They died because they tried to monetise too early, before users were locked in. Basically they enshittified too early.
Friendster launched in 2002. By 2003, it had 3 million users. Investors smelled money the way sharks smell blood. They demanded, “Monetise now!” Friendster complied. They plastered advertisements everywhere. The site became slow, cluttered, unusable. Loading times stretched to geological epochs. Users fled to MySpace. Friendster was dead by 2006, a cautionary tale taught in business schools as “What Not to Do: Move Too Fast and Break Your Own Things.”
MySpace repeated the exact same mistake, which suggests that business school is perhaps not as effective as we have been led to believe. From 2003 to 2005, MySpace dominated. Everyone was on MySpace. You could customise your profile, choose your Top 8 friends (a feature that destroyed more teenage friendships than any other invention in history, including the invention of teenagers), and auto-play music that assaulted visitors’ ears like aural warfare.
In 2005, News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million. Rupert Murdoch looked at 100 million users and saw pound signs, the way a Victorian industrialist looked at children and saw factory workers. He demanded monetisation. Immediately. Advertisements flooded the site. Auto-playing video ads with sound. Banner ads obscuring content. The site became unusable. Loading times required prayer. Users fled to Facebook.
Both platforms made the same fatal error: they enshittified too early. They skipped the first phase of platform development—being good to users—and jumped directly to the final phase: extracting all value until the platform is a hollowed-out husk. Users were not yet locked in. They could still leave. And they did.
Facebook learnt from this. Mark Zuckerberg watched Friendster and MySpace die and thought, “What if we delay the betrayal?”
*****
From 2004 to 2010, Facebook was good. Not morally good—there is no such thing as a morally good corporation, only corporations that have not yet revealed their business model—but functionally good. It was clean. It was fast. It had no ads. It solved real problems: finding old friends, organising events, sharing photos. It was genuinely useful, which is always suspicious for any new tech company.
Mark Zuckerberg turned down advertising deals worth millions. Investors were confused. “When will you monetise?” they asked, the way a vampire asks when dinner will be served. “Not yet,” Zuckerberg said. “Growth first. Trust first. Dependency first. Then, like a thief in the night, we strike.”
This was not idealism. This was strategy. Zuckerberg understood that you must make the platform indispensable before you can extract value from it. You must become infrastructure. You must become the place where people store their memories, their friendships, their identities. You must make leaving psychologically impossible.
By 2010, Facebook had 500 million users. Everyone’s photos were on Facebook. Everyone’s messages were on Facebook. Everyone’s entire social history was on Facebook—that embarrassing phase in 2008, that relationship you pretended never happened, that political opinion you no longer hold but which is permanently archived and searchable. The switching cost—the effort required to leave—was now enormous. Where would you go? How would you take your photos? How would you contact your friends? How would you prove you went to that party in 2007?
You were trapped. Not physically. Psychologically. Which is far more effective.
Only then did Facebook turn on the advertisements. And by then, it was too late to leave. Your entire social life was held hostage. Leaving Facebook would mean losing access to your own memories. This is the perfected formula for digital feudalism: make yourself indispensable, then charge rent on existence.
This is the perfected formula for Enshittification, a three-act tragedy:
Phase 1 (2004-2007): Be good to users. Grow user base. Make platform indispensable. Gain trust. Encourage people to upload their entire lives.
Phase 2 (2007-2012): Be good to businesses. Encourage them to build audiences on your platform. Make them dependent. Let them think they own their audience.
Phase 3 (2012-present): Screw everyone. Extract maximum value. Users are trapped. Businesses are trapped. You own the audience. You own the platform. You own everything. Nowhere to run. Start charging rent.
The Attention Economy did not corrupt social media. Social media was designed, from day one, to extract attention. The friendly interface was just the anaesthetic before the surgery, the spoonful of sugar that helps the surveillance go down.
*****
Bryn scrolls past the Sarajevo meme. The algorithm watches. It takes notes. It has more notes on Bryn than Bryn’s GP, his therapist, or his mother.
User #847,392,044 engaged with: [Football + Outrage + War Crime Imagery + Dark Humour]
Searching database for similar content…
Algorithmic conclusion: User has high tolerance for inappropriate juxtapositions. User values tribal identity over human suffering. User scrolls faster when angry.
Serving: More outrage. More tribalism. More rage. Less humanity.
Bryn does not notice that his feed is changing. Over the next hour, he will see seventeen more posts designed to make him angry, three designed to make him feel inadequate, and one designed to make him paranoid about the government tracking him (whilst Meta tracks him far more comprehensively than the government ever could, but that is beside the point).
The algorithm has learnt that anger scrolls. Happiness logs off. Contentment clicks away. Rage is engagement. Engagement is money. Money is truth. This is the new trinity.
*****
META LEADERSHIP SUMMIT 2025
LOCATION: Conference Room 7, Meta Campus, Menlo Park
ATTENDEES: Senior Leadership
AGENDA: Q4 Performance Review
The room is all glass and white surfaces, designed by someone who thinks the future looks like an Apple Store having an anxiety attack. Grindah, VP of Growth and Engagement, stands at the front wearing a hoodie that cost £400 and looks like it was stolen from a skip. Beside him, Beats, Chief Algorithm Officer, adjusts his designer glasses and pretends to read charts he has not understood since university.
GRINDAH: Right, team. Q4 numbers are in, and they are peng. Absolutely peng.
BEATS: Can we not say peng in a board meeting?
GRINDAH: I’ll say what I want, mate. I’m VP of Growth. Do you know what growth means? It means I make the numbers go up. And the numbers are…
Checks notes …going up. Average daily time on platform: two hours thirty-seven minutes. Up fourteen per cent.
BEATS: Outstanding. And user satisfaction?
GRINDAH: Down eighteen per cent. But who cares? They are still here. That is the beauty of addiction, innit? They hate it, but they cannot leave. It is like being married but profitable.
BEATS: Typing on laptop What about the mental health concerns? There was that internal study suggesting prolonged exposure to the feed correlates with increased depression, anxiety, and—
GRINDAH: Yeah, we buried that study. Filed under Inconvenient Findings, subcategory Stuff We Pretend Not To Know.
BEATS: Is that… legal?
GRINDAH: Laughing It is not illegal if no one finds out. And if they do find out, we just apologise and promise to do better. Works every time. We have apologised seventeen times this decade. No one remembers the first sixteen.
BEATS: Fair point. Now, let us discuss the Context Collapse problem. Users are reporting that seeing war crimes next to birthday cakes is… emotionally destabilising.
GRINDAH: That is the point, though. Emotional destabilisation increases engagement. If people are comfortable, they log off. If they are confused, horrified, and vaguely aroused, they keep scrolling.
BEATS: Are we… are we the baddies?
GRINDAH: We are the platform, mate. Morality is for users. We are infrastructure.
BEATS: What about the genocide stuff? Myanmar? Ethiopia? The UN says we facilitated—
GRINDAH: The UN also says we should pay taxes. The UN can go to the Metaverse!
BEATS: Mark wants us to address it in the next shareholder meeting.
GRINDAH: Easy. We say we are investing in safety. We hire five hundred moderators. We put them in a developing country where labour is cheap. We pay them nine dollars an hour to watch beheading videos eight hours a day until they develop PTSD. Then we call it progress.
BEATS: That seems… monstrous.
GRINDAH: That seems scalable. Monstrous does not scale. Profitable monsters scale.
BEATS: Let us move on. The Prawn Jesus problem.
GRINDAH: Sighing Prawn Jesus. Right. Explain this to me again, because I still do not understand how it happened.
BEATS: Our AI content moderation system cannot distinguish between religious iconography and seafood. So when users started generating AI images of Jesus made entirely from prawns, the algorithm classified it as inspirational content and amplified it.
GRINDAH: And?
BEATS: And now half of Facebook is Prawn Jesus, Shrimp Virgin Mary, and Lobster Buddha. The comments are all bots saying Amen. The bots are talking to other bots. Actual humans have stopped posting.
GRINDAH: What is the engagement rate?
BEATS: Off the charts. Prawn Jesus gets four times more engagement than real human content.
GRINDAH: Then what is the problem?
BEATS: The problem is it is not real. It is bots amplifying AI slop in an infinite feedback loop. The Dead Internet Theory is becoming real, and we are making it happen.
GRINDAH: But is it profitable?
BEATS: Checking spreadsheet Yes. Extremely. Advertisers do not care if the audience is human. They care about impressions. Prawn Jesus delivers impressions.
GRINDAH: Then Prawn Jesus stays. Get into it. Lean into it. Make Prawn Jesus the new normal.
BEATS: The new normal is bots talking to bots whilst humans watch in horror.
GRINDAH: That has always been the new normal. We just stopped pretending otherwise.
Long pause. Both men stare at graphs showing engagement going up and humanity going down.
BEATS: Do you ever think about what we are doing? Like, the long-term societal impact of—
GRINDAH: No. Next slide.
*****
In 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled “Content is King.” He was right, but only for about fifteen minutes. On the internet, content is everything—until the platforms steal the crown, melt it down, and turn it into a subscription service.
In the early internet (1995-2010), content creators were independent. Bloggers owned their websites. They had direct relationships with readers. If you liked a blog, you subscribed via RSS feed or email. The blogger owned the audience. If they moved to a new platform, the audience followed. It was a functional relationship based on mutual value rather than hostage-taking.
Then came the Platform Era, also known as The Great Enshittening.
Facebook said, “Why maintain your own website? Why deal with hosting, domains, and technical difficulties? Post your content here! Build your community on our platform! It is free! Everyone is here! It is free!” They said free three times, which should have been a warning sign.
Nothing that requires server farms the size of small nations is free. Someone is paying. And if you cannot figure out who is paying, it is you. You are paying with your content, your audience, and eventually, your dignity.
Businesses and creators complied. They had to. That is where the people were. Network effects are not a feature; they are a trap.
*****
Picture Pam. She is a food blogger. In 2010, she has a website with 50,000 email subscribers. She posts recipes, restaurant reviews, cooking tips. It is modest but sustainable. She earns money through adverts on her site and the occasional sponsored post. She is not rich, but she is autonomous. She owns her platform. She owns her audience. She owns her means of production, which makes her more Marxist than most Marxists.
Then Facebook launches Facebook Pages for businesses. “Grow your audience!” they promise. “Reach millions! It’s free! Algorithms love authentic content! Your grandmother will finally understand what you do for a living!”
Pam creates a Facebook Page. She cross-promotes it on her blog. Within two years, her Facebook following grows to 100,000. This is amazing! When she posts a recipe, it reaches 60,000 people immediately. No need to wait for them to visit her website. No need for email. Just post to Facebook, and boom—instant reach. It is like having a megaphone that works by magic.
Pam stops focusing on her email list. Why bother? Facebook reach is better. Facebook is the future. Email is what your nan uses to forward you hoaxes about dying children and conspiracy theories about the government putting microchips in flu vaccines.
This is the trap being set. Pam does not notice. No one notices. The cheese is delicious.
*****
In 2014, Facebook changes the algorithm. Again.
Overnight, Pam’s organic reach collapses. A post that used to reach 60,000 people now reaches about 600. That is less than 1 per cent. One. Single. Per cent. She checks her analytics, certain there is a mistake. There is not. The algorithm is working exactly as designed. The design is simply hostile.
She calls Facebook. There is no number to call. She emails Facebook. She receives an automated response that reads like it was written by an algorithm having a nervous breakdown:
“Thank you for contacting Facebook! We value your Page! Want to reach your audience? Boost your post for £200! Your content deserves to be seen! Exclamation marks make this seem friendly!”
Pam stares at her screen. She reads the email again. Then again. She experiences the five stages of grief in seventeen seconds. She spent three years building an audience of 100,000 followers on Facebook. People who explicitly chose to follow her. People who clicked a button that said “I want to see this person’s content.” And now Facebook is telling her that if she wants to reach them—the people who asked to see her posts—she has to pay.
This is not a glitch. This is the business model. This is Phase 3 of Enshittification: Extract.
She checks her email list. She has not focused on it in years. It has decayed from 50,000 to 35,000. She has been so busy building on rented land that she neglected the land she owned. She is a digital sharecropper, and the landlord just raised the rent to “everything you have, forever.”
She has two choices:
- Pay Facebook forever to reach her own audience
- Lose everything
She pays.
Next quarter, Facebook raises prices. She pays again.
The quarter after that, Facebook raises prices again and reduces reach further. She is now paying three times as much to reach half as many people. This is technically legal but morally equivalent to extortion, which is why Facebook employs 47,000 lawyers and you do not.
This is what happened to millions of businesses and creators. They built audiences on platforms that promised reach, then the platforms turned off the reach and charged rent. Bait and switch. Classic con. Completely legal. Completely immoral. Completely normal.
Content is still king. But kings now pay tribute to platform emperors. And if the king refuses to pay, the platform just finds another king. There is always another creator desperate for attention, willing to dance for the algorithm, willing to sell their dignity for reach.
The Middle Ages never ended. We just replaced feudal lords with algorithm lords. Same system. Better graphics.
*****
Bryn has been scrolling for forty-five minutes. He came to the toilet to defecate. He defecated twenty minutes ago. He is still sitting here, pants around ankles, legs numb from restricted blood flow, scrolling through content he will not remember in five minutes.
He sees: political argument (makes him angry), attractive woman he will never meet (makes him feel inadequate), friend’s holiday photos (makes him envious), advertisement for thing he mentioned once in a private conversation (makes him paranoid), Elon Musk replying to himself about how he is definitely not owned and everyone is a bot (makes him confused about the nature of reality).
He finally stands. His legs have fallen asleep. Blood rushes back into his feet like television static. He nearly collapses. He grabs the towel rail. He staggers to the sink. He looks at himself in the mirror.
His eyes are red. His face is pale. He looks like he has been doing something unhealthy, which he has. He has been scrolling. He has been feeding the algorithm. He has been doing unpaid labour for a trillion-dollar company.
He walks to the kitchen, still scrolling. He is supposed to be working in twenty minutes. He has not showered. He has not eaten breakfast. He has not spoken to his wife. But he has scrolled. He has fulfilled his daily obligation to Meta’s shareholders. He has tithed data to the attention economy. He is a good citizen of the digital feudalism.
The algorithm is satisfied. Engagement metrics updated. User #847,392,044 classified as High Addiction Risk / Low Self-Control / Excellent Target for Impulse Purchase Advertising.
Bryn does not know this. Bryn is thinking about Chelsea. Bryn is still thinking about that meme. Was it funny? He cannot remember. He feels vaguely guilty but cannot articulate why. Something about war. Something about real people. Something about how everything is content now, even suffering.
He opens the app again. He has been off it for forty seconds. Withdrawal symptoms have begun.
The feed refreshes. The algorithm welcomes him back like a casino welcomes a gambling addict who said they were quitting but returned seventeen minutes later.
More content. More outrage. More engagement. More money for Meta. Less humanity for Bryn.
This will continue until he dies or the servers shut down, whichever comes first. Current betting odds favour the servers.
