Rip Curl Caught in a Vortex of Fake Profiles
Consumers, too, have become more aware of the mechanics of brand-building. As a result, companies are under pressure to simulate authenticity by leaning into more personalized forms of communication.
Vox • Brands want to be more than your friend. They want community.
As we are fed more content, we are pushed deeper into algorithmic niches. In return, we are encouraged to engage with more extreme and polarizing identifiers because it is more labelable, more indexable by the machine — the creation of the “Island". On this island, the slang, in-jokes, and archetypes which emerge as a community develops in isolatio... See more
Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of “content” and ads, all served on platforms far beyond their maximum-viable scale is ideal for misinformation, disinformation and the decay of trust.