My earliest online activity sans usenet was posting on gamedev.net around the year 2000. Back then, surfing the internet was about exploration; humans made lists and shared links with each other as blogrolls, bookmarks, and posts on their personal homepages. Using a search engine felt like browsing content at a digital library—probably because that's what the early internet was modeled around. Humans, coming together in digital spaces, and sharing information with each other.
Digital spaces back then weren't like digital spaces we have now. They were fragmented, but interlinked; discursive, but compiled together by humans and shared as collections of resources. It's hard to articulate how different using something like a search engine felt back in 2004 versus 2024 without bringing up the word enshittification.
Over the last twenty years, we've witnessed a transformation in attitudes toward computers (including our mobile phones) that should trouble anyone who is even remotely interested in the relationship between computing and human potential. My fellow Millennials can attest that we as a species have moved away from exploring and creating novel computational abstractions that help us think about our world and instead have embraced the inevitability of closed abstraction consumption patterns that limit our ability to leverage the innovative and educational potential of modern computer systems and the networks in which they operate.
The obvious culprit is social media. Has there been any other phenomenon in our relatively small history of being computational creatures that has had such a massive impact on our concept of human community and social life? We have many wonderful ways of connecting with many wonderful people—and yet we are quite literally contextually suffocated by shitheads hawking products and propaganda. Constantly. We are no longer exploring and discovering; we are drudging and sifting.
But "social media" is just a concept. The things we don't like about social media—the lack of algorithmic accountability, and moderation decisions that put growth and revenue ahead of community health and safety, to name a few—are implementation details rather than attributes of the concept. There can be good social media, even if good social media is just itself a concept. The fact that we can conceptualize the idea of a better way to connect and share information online means that we can envision a system with attributes that we want.
This implies that modern social media has attributes that we don't want—but if we don't want them, who the hell does?
The answer is masochapitalists.
You see, the tech industry has perfected many things: surveillance capitalism, planned obsolescence, the weaponization of network effects. But its greatest accomplishment yet might just be the self-replicating, self-perpetuating, and self-mutilating incestuous relationship between masochism and capitalism: the art of getting workers to not just accept their own exploitation, but to evangelize it to the point that subconsciously projected exploitation anxieties underlie their very own product development principles.
At a content level, masochapitalism has transformed social media from a tool for human connection into a showcase for competitive self-destruction. The LinkedIn posts celebrating 100-hour workweeks. The threads about sleeping under your desk so that you can get your roadmap shipped. Manifestos from "founders" bragging about missing their kid's birth to pitch VCs. Even the podcast circuit has become a competition where "startup CEOs" showcase their most extreme sacrifices, like medieval saints racing to outdo each other in demonstrations of piety.
At the product level, masochapitalism has pushed engineers and product managers beyond the workaholism that ritualistic capitulation to traditional capitalism demands. Today's technology teams are culturally whipped by different mores and norms that combine into a uniquely modern fusion of late-stage capitalism and psychological manipulation—one where devotees of infinite growth transform patterns of self-destruction into social currency.
There's almost a sick elegance to its mechanistic perversity: despite sitting on unprecedented hoards of capital, VCs convince founders that there's never enough runway, never enough growth, never enough hustle. The funding is there, but it's always just out of reach unless you demonstrate sufficient dedication through acts of profound self-abnegation and sacrifice. (There's always so much sacrifice involved, because without "skin in the game", how can we be sure you're willing to be exploited for commercial purposes?)
The real social genius of masochapitalism lies in how it turns exploitation into aspiration through manufactured scarcity. That founder sleeping in their car isn't a victim of a broken system–they're a hero on a journey. That engineer working 80-hour weeks isn't burning out–they're proving their passion. That product manager working on their kid's birthday isn't neglecting their family–they're building their future.
This mindset infects tech workers to the point that it affects their ability to conceptualize computing affordances as tools that should solve human problems. Teams are led toward buzzwords and catchphrases-of-the-day to slap on top of their revenue growth experiments. Venture Capital is their religion, and change for the sake of novelty their currency. After all, how will we get our quarterly revenues to increase if we aren't participating in the latest capital markets trend?
Our very means of connectedness has become so thoroughly infected with this mindset that it's now nearly impossible to separate the human connections we seek from the performative masochapitalism we're forced to witness. Our digital town squares are competitive suffering arenas, where subscription fees promise to offset participation exhaustion with a little badge that proves you're a real human who suffers. Congratulations. Now hurry up and die before you cost your health insurance company any more money than their poor shareholders already have to sacrifice.
The challenge ahead isn't just technical—it's social and cultural. The question isn't whether we've made programming more accessible, or if hosting your own website is more intuitive, or if more people are empowered to use their computers as the tools they are. The evidence suggests we've moved backward on all these fronts. Corporate interests have led much of the general population toward a world where computing is something that one no longer participates in. Instead, we've traded a desire to encourage mastery of these complicated tools among as many people as possible for a self-replicating culture of consumption experience, one where users interact with predefined interfaces and closed systems rather than having the means, opportunity, and ability to understand, modify, and create their own computing solutions.
No, the question is more around rebuilding and reclaiming our digital spaces. We need a way to cultivate communities that value creation over consumption, collaboration over competition, and genuine human connection over performative suffering.
The first step is naming the beast that's taken over our social media landscape—the same beast that has perverted our relationship with computers themselves. Masochapitalism. And it's time we started really talking about how to break free from its grip—not just on our bodies, but on our imaginations. Because if we don't, we risk losing not just the promise of social information technology, but also the very essence of what made the early internet such a powerful tool for human connection and creativity.