The inevitable return of the Payperclick Maximiser

Being British, one has to learn to live with constant disappointment. The weather. The potholes in our roads and the turds in our rivers. Our legacy of sporting failures. The millennium dome. Anyone famous in the 1970s not called David Attenborough.

There are few areas I feel this more keenly than in politics.

As a 41-year-old millennial, I’ve had the pleasure of losing every time I’ve gone to the voting booth. Yet, despite an awe-inspiring legacy of incompetence by those I have voted against, the equally incompetent lot I typically vote for have routinely failed to dislodge the incumbents.

Granted, I will admit that the odds were always long on Lord Buckethead.

That losing streak ended though when they bestowed unto us our shining white knight, one Sir Kier Starmer.

Despite being the sort of guy you’d expect as a keynote at the Boring Conference (actually a real thing – they attempted to break the world record for consecutive spins in an office chair once) I fully expected my first political victory when I voted for Starmer.

Yet, as I did so, I was under no illusion that my long-standing political disappointment would come to an end. Consequently, Labour’s landslide felt less like a change for the better, and more as if England won the world cup by default because no one else made it past US border control.

And yet, here I am a day removed from something I had never expected in my political life:

Someone I voted for did something I actually approve of.

FOURTY ONE YEARS, PEOPLE. FOURTY ONE GODDAMN YEARS.

Now ban it for the rest of us

Despite being, on the whole, supportive of AI, I nonetheless empathise with anti-AI folks.

While I’d argue the luddite-and-proud crowd suffer from some antiquated zombie takes, headlines bounced about triumphantly when they haven’t read the report, and a forlorn hope that this whole AI thing will just go away if they tweet angrily about it enough, there’s plenty of concerns raised that I also share.

Chief among them is AI going rogue. However, while many agonise about this as a potential future scenario, I fear it already happened 10 years ago.

Back in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, one of my favourite journalists was the Matt Taibbi – a sort of latter-day Hunter S. Thompson who went as far as to pick up Thompson’s old gig at the Rolling Stone. In a piece which would become legendary in financial circles, he described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

While it is debatable that Goldman has done plenty to hold on to that title, there is now another to which the vampire squid imagery seems more apt.

I talk, of course, about modern AI’s lobotomised cousin, the social media algorithm aka the Payperclick Maximiser.

What makes it all the more jarring is that before the algorithms came to town, social media land was beginning to seem like it might live up to its utopian paradise.

Now look at it.

We all trudge through our daily lives with its hookworms dangling from our every dopamine receptor. It has given rise to politics we all fought a world war over to eradicate and fractured the West. It has distorted the psyche of not one but two generations now, and bred isolation and loneliness wherever it has found another poor soul to consume. The companies behind social media are culpable for civil wars raging right now around the world.

Compared to the harms we have actually observed (and not just endlessly hypothesised over), LLMs and their ilk barely hold a candle to the rot and decay thrust out of Mark Zuckerberg’s unspeakable abyss into society.

Mothers in lockdown targeted with anti-vaxxer propaganda. Young men taught to despise women yet improve their standing with them by hammering their cheek bones. My 84-year-old uncle who has been targeted by endless AI scams – Jeremy Clarkson selling shares in a fictional AI firm, Elon Musk telling him to get into quantum, Nigel Farage selling him gold (to be fair, they didn’t use AI for this last one) - yet the social media giants do nothing about the yawning Hellpit they steward over.

It deserves to be banned.

Life’s better without Meta

The news was greeted by a wave of cynics decrying Starmer’s move as a U-turn on his previous position in a Machiavellian ploy against the incoming King of the North. Others have said banning the users does little to challenge the social media barons corrupting society. Both may be true, but I was too busy sniggering at this to take notice:

Yet, in between my mirth at millions of British teenagers now doomed to get a hobby at the weekend, it’s a feeling I can relate to.

I got booted off Meta a few years back. Never got a reason. Never got a right of reply. Just 20 years of my digital life erased from space and time.

That time away only made social media’s rampant decline more noticeable when I returned to this platform at the start of 2026.

Everything here is geared to suck us in. The LinkedIn of old is long gone, replaced with an endless morass of face-sucking content. I’m not sure what any of my old professional contacts are doing these days as my whole feed is now just people complaining about AI with comments clearly written by AI.

Substack’s more of the same. Quality content doesn’t cut through the noise - shouting loudly in single syllables does.

As a writer, it makes my soul weep. I remember when I used to be able to write a blog and I had a say in how it was published. Now, when I hit publish, I’m at the mercy of some Lovecraftian beast. Have I satisfied some invisible editorial checklist? Did I post at the right time of day? Did people hang on my post for a moment or just flick by, unconsciously influencing its positioning for the next sucker to doomscroll past?

So you know what you get back, kid?

It’s not just nine hours at the weekend.

It’s your life.

Grab it and run like hell because those that remain here are the damned.

Please, Sir, can I have some more?

Having had this rare taste of political vindication though has left me wanting more. While I’m afraid it is something of a monkey paw situation, I do have a request of Starmer:

Social media should be state owned.

I’m indifferent what you call it. I don’t care if we need to work with the EU to do it. I certainly don’t mind if we have to tax the rich to afford it.

But what is clear is that there is a place for social media in today’s society. Done right, it genuinely can be a force for good that connects people with their long-lost tribes, exposes corruption, and empowers people with a platform.

This is what we can achieve if we did away with the profit motive through state ownership. We can dispense of the algorithms, we can remove nefarious actors poisoning the well, and we can have a platform that delivers social media for the societal good.

Instead, we have become dopamine-addled TikTok-addicted brains in a jar to Zuckerberg and Musk, who relentlessly jab their blood funnels in for money.

But it’s more than just the individual toll imposed on us. For as the Payperclick Maximiser shovels shit in our eyeballs and calls it engagement, it breaks down the very fabric of society to do it.

We must put a stop to the Maximiser while there’s still a society left worth saving.

Thanks for reading. The PPC Max doesn’t want people to read this piece. It is therefore on you, dear reader, to help me stick it to the Maximiser by smashing the like button and leaving a comment.