Working for Robots

Life in the Digital Salt Mines

If you are in the social media business or use it critically for your business, you work for a robot.

This is a complete inversion of all other things robotic, where machines work for people.

Dishwashers wash dishes when you tell them to. Cars drive where you point them. Your AI voice assistant responds to your commands, and the AI image generator draws what you tell it to draw.

But you? You do what a robot tells you to do.

Only it doesn’t really tell you to do anything. It dishes out rewards and punishments according to its own programming, which might be totally out of the control of any human at this point. You, as the servant, have to figure out, through trial and error, the ever-shifting whims of your overlord.

I’m talking about the great cargo-cult deity known as the algorithm, the architect of internet connection, and also the god-emperor of content creators.

You make a thing, the algorithm likes it, and then it shows it to lots of people. You get attention and money and the opportunity to sell your goods to people who want to buy them.

This offering must be what the mighty Algorithm desires. Let us make more.

Suddenly, one day, the god is angered. What happened? What did you do? Why is there no more cargo?

Fellow science fiction and fantasy author Brian Niemeier recently wrote about the realities of Twitter engagement since the Musk takeover. In brief, despite focusing more on the platform, having a blue check, and gaining more followers than ever, his engagement and impressions dropped.

His story is far from the only one, and I can confirm that I’ve had a drop in engagement overall during the same period. However, this is a shake-up that I’ve personally experienced before and am always expecting.

Back in the summer of 2019, I had my YouTube views drop by 90% from one week to the next and never really recovered. In fact, I was able to pinpoint it to a single day when the cargo god just turned off my traffic. YouTube was a major part of my revenue at that point, so I busted my ass and quadrupled my output to make up the difference, releasing around 30 videos per month for a few months.

The problem was that amount of work just wasn’t sustainable, and I didn’t want to spiral into the cheap outrage farming that so many of my contemporaries have fallen into. I wanted to educate and have discussions and use the platform for the fun and profitable enterprise I had for the years prior to that (contrary to popular belief, I mostly talk about things I like).

Luckily, I had diversified for years at that point and was an author as well as a YouTuber, so I focused on book sales to make up the shortfall, and they did, but only for a while.

The problem is that I had been fired by one robot boss (YouTube) and went to work for another (Amazon) with the same eventual conclusion. The mighty algorithm was changed and broken. People would no longer see my books, which they would love, and instead see pages of unrelated ads. So I had to pick up working for yet another robot boss: not the Amazon algorithm itself this time but Amazon “marketing services,” where I had to spend vast amounts of time trying out dozens or even hundreds of keywords, A/B testing ad copy, and dropping money into a black hole to try to earn some royalties.

The end result, of course, was just less royalty money on more book sales. It was a wash. Now, I don’t really see a point in dealing with Amazon ads at all. Who has the time to do a million tasks for a silent robot to see which ones he is pleased by and which ones he will punish you for?

The old “gaming the robot” model was to drop money into ads, push your book to a high rank, then ease off the gas and get Amazon to recommend it based on its ranking. With the amount of ads on the site and how broken categories are, that simply doesn’t work anymore. You have to be running ads all the time, and which ads work and which ones waste money (or get no clicks) changes constantly. I realized it was much more efficient to push more customers into the Amazon listing from outside sources like YouTube or Twitter, but then, why use Amazon at all?

This is why neo-patronage is so attractive. You are working for people, not robots. You aren’t guessing what a robot wants to see. You have real human beings telling you directly what they want from you, and maybe even what they would pay for. The only problem with things like Patreon is that you are still reliant on the robots to find the patrons in the first place.

Patreon is a “win more” strategy, not a starting-out strategy (I’ll talk more about “win more,”
in an upcoming article). I simply don’t know how a new author is to begin gaining traction now, with how fickle the robots are these days. The computer gods clearly have no love for me (The position of God is already occupied in my life), so how can I tell a new author what to do? Even if I knew, the performative actions that will be rewarded will change ten times over the next year. The internet itself is so much more noisy now that it was even three years ago.

The other problem I have is diversification itself. The more you diversify, the less focused you are; you are more robust but have less capacity for success in any one area. I can’t put out 20 or 30 videos a month and write books and put out albums and write articles at that same capacity. I just don’t have the time with my primary job, which is being a father to my children and educating them. So that means for those only interested in, say, my books, they may forget I exist between releases.

I get very sad when I see other creators whom I like begin to lose favor with the robots. When you build a career out of YouTube, you are signing onto a very unfortunate and unavoidable cycle. Every channel follows the same arc: Birth, growth, peak, decay. It’s like a living thing. Sooner or later, the robot will turn his face from you, and your offerings will be hated, not loved. The audience will get bored with you, and the robot will show them other things they haven’t seen, and they will forget to check in and see what new videos you have out.

I can always tell the phase because I notice it with my own viewing habits. Other than watching the occasional classic anime, I only watch YouTube. I realize sometimes that I haven’t seen a video from a guy I like in a while. Turns out, the robot just decided I shouldn’t know about his videos. My own viewers tell me this about me!

And often, I see a video from a creator, an impassioned plea to the audience about how bad things at YouTube have gotten and how worried he is. What is going on?! I’ve seen the same video from at least ten creators in ten different niches over the last eight years, all saying more or less the same thing. They were so excited for YouTube to be their career, but now, it’s breaking.

The thing is, nobody told them that every channel has a life. It peaks, then it declines, like all things. They thought because they made enough doing YouTube one year that it could be their career forever. They build their life around serving the robot, doing his commands, and getting his rewards, then panic when the angry god disowns him.

This isn’t even political, by the way. It’s just the nature of begging for cargo.

The robot is so much crueler than any TV producer or unstable boss. If you work for NBC, and your show gets canceled, even for a bad reason, it’s canceled. You go from working to unemployed. Find the next thing to do! See what other job you can get, who else you can work for, etc. Negotiate pay and find the best offer. It’s extremely easy to understand where you stand and what is going on.

The robots, however, never just fire you. They do what they did to the poor guy in Office Space. They shove you in the basement, cut your pay by 80%, and hope you quit so they can avoid the annoyance and risk of firing you. By the way, the people who program the robots, I believe, know this, which is why removal from the algorithm always precedes demonetization which always precedes deplatforming.

So you can never just take a breath and say, “Okay, let me go find another job.” You think somehow you can get back to that building phase, grow more, peak higher, but it never really happens. The best you can do is prostrate yourself before the robot, do what little things you know it will give you table scraps for, and eat them in the corner, always hoping to make it a well-paying job again.

A big problem with working for robots is that you cannot find another robot job with a similar salary. That is, if you start a new channel or handle, you start at zero, with zero earnings, and have to build up the growth phase for a long time again before you can “make it a job.”

This is by no means limited to mid-size or small channels. This happens with the big boys. Pewdiepie is a perfect example, but he is both wise and clever and knew not to live large and think growth was infinite. Eventually, Mr. Beast will begin to decline and, if he too is wise (I think he is), he will transition away and use his fortune for his and others’ prosperity.

I am by no means the exception here, either, which is why I try to diversify. I started a brand-new music-only YouTube channel. No talking! I relaunched my Patreon to sell my books and other services, as well as my YouTube membership, to do the same. I also define prosperity outside of money. I can happily work a day job if I have to and keep my integrity, spiting the robots, even if it means nobody reads or listens to the art I think ought to exist in this world. I’d rather drive a truck and love my writing than write romance because the robot likes it more.

The robot, ultimately, is just another, more complex skinner box, but one where the predictability of the actions required to get rewards and punishments is always in flux—a kind of torture if you take it too seriously.

Viewers ask why I don’t do record reviews anymore despite the viewers having great discussions in the comment sections and the bands getting a lot of great exposure out of them. The reason is that the robot hates them. I get severely punished every time I upload one so that all my views for the next week will be reduced significantly, even in older, unrelated content. So I stopped. The Skinner box robot told me to stop pulling that lever.

And I like getting cargo.

I am an independent artist. You can find my latest book information at dvspress.com, patreon.com/davidvstewart, and hear my music at zulonline.com or browse my extended improv catalog at youtube.com/@zulonline. My main YouTube channel is of course youtube.com/@dvspress