The Algorithmic Land of Toys
Om Malik, beautifully writing about Pinocchio not as a story about lying but about ambient deception:
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.[...]
The Land of Toys is the sequence that haunts me most, especially now. Children abandon school and responsibility for a place of permanent amusement. They play. And then, gradually, they begin to change. They grow ears. They grow tails. They become donkeys, beasts of labor and exploitation, stripped of language, used until they break.
[...]
The algorithmic feed is the Land of Toys. It is built to keep you there past the point of nourishment, past the point where you are even enjoying it. Outrage travels faster than understanding. Spectacle beats judgment. The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true. It cares whether it moves. And it keeps you scrolling, reacting, and returning in ways that benefit the platform, not you.
The algorithmic feed as permanent amusement that looks like play but turns into extraction.
Which is not an argument against amusement.
I am bullish on amusements. Personalised, contextualised playthings and playgrounds of all shapes and sizes that spread across media, software, commerce, sport and culture.
Things to do. Things to feel. Things that make you feel.
But the Land of Toys is different.
It is not play. It is play-shaped.
Will Manidis on performative productivity in the AI era:
Consider Farmville.FarmVille is a command-and-control interface. No matter where you click, your farm will expand, your crops will grow, and the number will go up. The only input is your time, the direction of which is largely irrelevant. The screen fills with evidence of your effort: crops, cosmetics, and increasingly large barns.
The number goes up. This is the entire product.
The market for feeling productive is orders of magnitude larger than the market for being productive. Most people, most of the time, want to click and watch the number go up. They do not want to be told the number is fake. They will pay— in time, in attention, in actual money— to keep the number going up.
Farmville is a tool shaped object.
[...]
[tool shaped objects are] a category of object that is shaped like a tool, but distinctly isn't one. You can hold it. You can use it. It fits in the hand the way a tool should. It produces the feeling of work - the friction, the labor, the sense of forward motion - but it doesn't produce work. The object is not broken, it is performing its function. It's function is to feel like a tool.
Processed playthings and Potemkin productivity.
The feeling of play without play.
The feeling of work without work.
The feeling of agency without agency.
The number goes up. The feed refreshes. The outrage travels.
Returning to Om:
Collodi refuses to assign blame only upward. That is what keeps the novel from collapsing into moralism. Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
Credulity as participation. No coercion required.
Life inside a self-service Skinner box.