The creator reading Big Tech’s tea leaves

“If I'm talking about social media and what I'm predicting, then I feel way less like a sucker,” Carmen Vicente says.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

If I look into my crystal ball…I see yet another platform introducing an AI tool no one asked for or will use… —Kate

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New on ICYMI: Halloween traditions of yore are now too earnest for social media. Where can we still go to spook ourselves online? Vox’s Jonquilyn Hill joins us!

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Every day I wake up and wait for the latest headline to tell me the next baffling update to our social media future. An entire app for scrolling AI-generated content? Sure. The Twitter feed is being entirely determined by Grok now? Sounds about right. It’s possible Carmen, however, saw this all coming.

I’ve referenced Carmen’s work before, back when I talked about the potential decline of scrolling online. She’s able to tune into signals that hint to what’s coming next in a way my ears just can’t hear, but her latest prediction about “dialogical algorithms” managed to demystify a lot of my confusion about the choices these platforms have been making:

@carmscrollsThe dialogue begins! (Soon…I think). #algorithms #socialmediamanager #socialmediamarketing #instagram #futureoftech

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I thought about writing my own take on this, but figured it was about time I sat down with Carmen myself. In this interview, we chat about how she honed her analysis, the potential social media futures before us, and when, exactly, we all stopped having fun online.

How and why did you start posting your content on social media?

I’m newly a person that puts content onto the internet. I feel like I crossed over from one dimension to another because I’ve worked in social media forever, like since the dawn of Instagram. And then I’ve always managed accounts for companies and brands professionally. And then I think that, whether or not this is a fair thing in life, I do feel like we’re all sort of expected to have a personal brand or a digital resume. And so partially as a way to reconcile my complicated feelings about social media and partially to make myself a guinea pig, I was like, “Okay, if I treat this like an experiment and I am just studying, how does social media work?” Then I feel less taken advantage of. If I just feel like I’m a consumer of social media, I feel like such a sucker. And if I’m talking about social media, what I’m observing and what I’m predicting, then I feel way less like a sucker. I am consenting to being part of this algorithmic swirl, rather than just having the swirl get absorbed through my retinas.

I also had a career shift last year where I used to work in the B2C world with consumer goods. I actually worked in the beer industry forever and then I crossed over into B2B tech, which is a whole other universe. I was thrust into the LinkedIn world and no social media app is crazier than LinkedIn. So I started posting a little bit more about topics that interested me, as opposed to whatever I was contractually obligated to post for the company that I manage, as a way to also have some tie to creative pursuits. And so I have been on a little experiment where now I post content for LinkedIn, I post content on TikTok, and I just re-joined Instagram as a creator, even though I’m not really sure if I think of myself that way.

And was it always social media analysis content?

The first platform that I felt okay with being a person who posts content or is an online figure was LinkedIn, because with LinkedIn, you only have to give a sliver of yourself. You don’t have to be like, here’s what I ate, here’s what I wear. You don’t have to share any of that. You can literally just be like, “I’m gonna talk about work and only work.” So I felt like that was the gateway drug. And then of course all you talk about on LinkedIn is work, so I talked about social media because it’s what I did, but I think I very quickly crossed over from talking about social media for the purposes of my company to being like, let’s talk about social media more broadly. And I think there’s probably also a little bit of behavior on my part that’s compensating where I want people to know that I’m thinking about social media more critically than just like, “Hey, how can we make this go viral?” I’m also thinking about the systems in power that are making us addicted and unsatisfied.

When you took that analysis of social media to TikTok, was the reception different?

I would say every time I post about anything to do with TikTok observations on LinkedIn, it’s my highest performing content. I think there’s probably an element of not quite understanding TikTok and there’s also probably an element of wanting to capitalize on TikTok. But people are genuinely so interested, so engaged. And when I post about LinkedIn on TikTok, people are angry. I try often to portray the things I’m saying less as like, “I hate this or I love this,” and more just as like, “Hey, have we thought about the connection between these things”? So when I have talked about LinkedIn on TikTok, I’ve never been like, “LinkedIn will save all of your careers.” And I’ve also not said terrible things about LinkedIn because truthfully, if you were gonna go minute for minute, it’s probably one of the best places to devote your efforts online.

That’s so funny. The videos I first saw were your broader predictions for the social media environment as a whole. Does that do well on TikTok?

I feel like sometimes the people who post content believe, “Okay, this piece of content did well because of X, Y, and Z” and in reality it’s probably like X, Y, and Z to the power of 17. There’s literally millions of layers that made that one video do well. So I can’t say that I know why some content of mine performs better than others, but I think a theme that tends to get engagement, gets people fired up, is just how exhausted they are with social media, feeling like it’s preying on their everything. Like how it feels like it’s just this force that is meant to destroy their attention span and take up all of their time and usurp their money and sway them into thinking one thing or another. And I was even trying to think to myself the other day, because I often think about the early days of social media, the early days of Instagram, and I’m like, when did we start to get tired? When did we start to realize, “Hey, I think I’m being taken advantage of”? Or, “I don’t really like the way I just spent the last two hours”?

That’s such a good question.

That wasn’t the initial feeling, right? I can remember one of the first posts I ever did on Instagram was like, my husband was sleeping and I did the “caught napping” hashtag. And at that point I was not feeling like I was wasting my time. I was like, this is fun. But when did we all start to say, “Hey, I kind of hate this. Do you hate this?”

I feel like the first platform I realized I had a bad relationship with was Snapchat. I moved to New York after college, I was feeling very lonely and feeling very insecure. I wanted to prove that I was doing well after college. And I found that I was posting on my Snapchat story constantly to just show off anything I could that would make it appear like I had friends and was living a life. And that was how I started to see my life through a social media lens, and that became what dictated what I did or how I felt about what I did.

We’re also now in this age where anyone could be an influencer. Anyone could be a creator. Whereas back then there was a clear division between people who were the early Alix Earles of the world and then us peasants. So I think that it felt more like an aspirational platform. Whereas now it’s like, I was talking to somebody the other day who was like, “Should I be posting content?” We’re all just like, is this what we do now?

Now it’s just like, let me toss my hat into today’s algorithmic ring, clocking in for my shift.

This is such a hypothetical, but say I was watching TV and there was no doubt in my mind that I’m supposed to make a TV show. I’m not gonna make a TV show, but if I was sitting watching TV and I was like, “Oh, should I write a TV show? Should I be writing right now? Should I be writing instead of watching this show?” I would have way more complicated feelings. I feel like social media in 2015 or something, it was like watching a show knowing that it was just Hollywood.

That’s such a good comparison.

Now it’s not Hollywood. It’s like, do I have to show what I’m eating this morning? And so it’s a constant pressure to be present. I know that smart people have talked about how being offline now is such a status symbol.

I remember feeling like that when Twitter was what it used to be. That was the platform where journalists were and you had to be on there and engaging so that you could promote your work, but also be seen. And I remember saying I want to be successful enough that I don’t have to be on Twitter anymore.

Sometimes I do think that is the end boss. The end boss is accepting some job offer or suddenly realizing you’re in a kind of flow with work and being like, “Nope, I can leave now. I can shut all this down and I can leave now.” Like, I’m gonna say an obvious thing here, but nobody dreams of quitting social media more than people who work in social media.

I’ve been so interested in your content because I have no idea what’s gonna happen next online. Are there specific things that you look out for or pay attention to to come to these conclusions?

I think I’m naturally a curious person. I recognize that I do better thinking when I’m not totally plugged in all the time. I heard Nat Eliason talk about this relationship between ingesting and digesting content. And it hit me so hard because of course we ingest a ton, we’re constantly shoving content in our brains. We rarely take the time to digest it or process it free of a screen. And so I really, really try to create this time and space for digestion where I’m like, “Okay, no screens, I have to think about what I’ve seen. I have to come up with some theories.” And I would say I am just naturally curious about, where’s all this gonna go? Whenever people give me the theories that the bubble’s gonna burst and we’re all just gonna leave social media, I’m like, yeah right. It’s just gonna morph. It’s gonna morph and it’ll keep on morphing. And so I try to navigate it like a scientist or like an anthropologist or something where I’m like, “If this has happened before, what’s this gonna forecast about the future?”

Another thing that I’ll say is, as much as I’m hypercritical of social media, I don’t think it’s totally a force for bad. What’s interesting about social media is that it’s such an addictive drug, and so it’s so hard to use it responsibly. But there’s all sorts of incredible, wonderful things that I’ve discovered because of social. So there’s a part of me that’s rooting for it to become better. I have a folder in my TikTok where I always save videos where I think it’s an example of social media that has led to some sort of positive outcome in someone’s real life.

This idea that we’re all gonna give up and log off—it’s not going to happen. One, because if we ever could agree on anything en masse like that, we would’ve done it already. But also, and I don’t even mean this in a sinister way, but the companies who profit from us being on social media won’t let us. Not that they’re gonna hold us hostage, but they are always watching our behavior and figuring out how to adapt to it. And so it’s gonna morph, but the big thing that I’ve been thinking about where I’m like, I don’t know if this is gonna work, but I’m curious how you feel, is something like Sora, and AI-dominated social media.

I think one thing that I think people are kind of misconstruing about AI right now is that they think that AI is either ChatGPT or Claude, and they’re like, “Whoa, what is AI doing?” And I’m like, okay, AI is actually a thousand things. And so there’s gonna be all sorts of AI features that pop up on social media. And I do think this dialogical algorithm will be one of them. It’s not gonna be mandatory because that would mess up the hypnotic flow of scrolling. But I do think there’s gonna be these questions where it’ll be like, “Hey, I noticed that you haven’t been watching as much get-ready-with-me-content. Would you like less of that?” Or like, “A lot of your peers have been tuning into this video about cats wearing capes. Would you also like to see it?”

But the Sora thing, transparently, it’s one of the first times that I’ve sort of felt a real sense of despair. Part of me is like, these teams have so much research behind them that every time they adopt or launch a new app or something, they must know that it’s gonna work. But then I saw Sora 2 and I thought, huh, there might be misses. Or it might be that you just cannot understand it or wrap your mind around it if you have had access to the other internet. Gen Alpha, it might just be the fabric of their online life that then they believe and feel that that is just the internet. Whereas like us who have weathered many eras of the internet, I cannot make it fit into the other parts of the internet. If I sit with my thoughts for a while, I can imagine ways that they could captivate your attention for a while. I’m very open to the idea that they will find ways to make GenAI compelling, but I think similar to you, I am having so much trouble with how that will fit into my media diet. At this point, I don’t think there’s room.