Rob Horning continues to blaze a trail of theoretically-informed examinations of social media, to the extent that I a) wish someone would ask him to write a book on this stuff, and b) wish someone would check to see if he’s getting outside the house much.

Lots of chewy stuff in this latest missive, which smashes Doctorow’s recent (and justly popular )”enshittification” screed into McLuhan’s gnomic and inconsistent hold/cold media dichotomy, and produces digital-boot-on-a-human-face-forever punch-outs like this:

… there is no such thing as organic reach; there is no way to deduce from the content alone what amount of audience it should have. The audience is always structured by broader mechanisms of circulation, with various interested parties exercising whatever leverage they can establish within a given context. What a specific individual wants to see is a very small piece of the equation.

Horning’s our Adorno, I think. It’s a shame that we should have need of such a thing, but it’s a fine thing that we have it.

[ Note to regular readers: blogging will continue to be sporadic while I plow through an unholy backlog of stuff that got derailed by a difficult December. Should be out of the woods in a month or so. Thanks for your patience. ]