Electron Microscopy and an Experience with Meta AI and the Enshittification of The Internet

I’m not a biologist, I’m just a computer engineer, but I recognize frustration when I see it…

I had a simple question: what does a virus actually look like?

Let’s start with the basics. I’m a nerd, and in the mid 2020’s if I were to say to you,“draw a virus” you’re probably going to think of a wacky suction-cup ball thing like this. This, more or less, is what a Corona Virus with it’s outer crown of spike proteins looks like, and the PR department for this kind of virus has been going hog-wild since lockdown. If there’s a graphic depiction of “kills viruses” on a bottle of lysol, it’ll look like this.

If I search google for this, I’ll get a bunch of images:

but every single one of these images is art, that’s been drawn. In mid 2020, producing art of Corona Viruses got popular for some reason. Nothing from an electron microscope is visible here. Now, that’s fair. Electron microscopes, even at their best, are…not great, but they still give you a *fair* idea of what you’re looking at, but not in a “any lay-person will be concerned about this” sort of way.

Cool. We can see the spike proteins, and by guessing that these things are round, we can kind-of-sort-of visualize that this, spherically, looks like what we’re looking at a cross-section of here. (Things need to be sliced and put on a slide to put in an electron microscope).

That’s not the only kind of virus, though.

Earlier, if you asked someone to draw a virus, they might have given you this weird thing:

This treacherous, alien-looking organism just looks hostile. It looks like something out of a Ridley Scott movie, or even out of The Matrix. It conjures up all the dread you have about Insects, Xenophobia, Spiders, and needles all at once.

And given that we’ve seen so many both artistic and microscopy photos of coronaviruses, there *must* be some good ones out there of these cool things, right?

Nope. Certainly, there are images, but they’re not fantastic. They’re kind of Kronenborged up.

I googled for an hour or two, trying to find decent pictures that matched even half the art I had seen. After all, I was led to believe this was the future. Hell, two decades ago, someone made “the world’s tiniest logo” out of individual atoms of Xenon.

If that was possible in 1990, it should be possible now to take some good pictures of phages, no? Why can’t we get the same resolution for our virus photos?

Turns out, I’m not the only person frustrated by this.

Hans-Wolfgang Ackermann wrote a short academic paper on this, appropriately titled “Sad State of Phage Electron Microscopy. Please Shoot the Messenger”. It’s a short read and you should go do so.

In this paper, Hans decries the number of techniques, dizzying variety of microscopes, lack of cooperation, and general shit-show that is this field.

In what is the best line of the paper, Hans says:

“What can be done? Remedies are numerous but not always applicable. Only a few of general nature can be discussed. Courses in electron microscopy will have little impact because of the great diversity of instruments in use, the small number (5–9) of attendants, and the absence of comprehensive manuals. Setting up a network of reference laboratories is likewise impractical. I tried precisely this and got nowhere. The main reasons were legal problems, fees, and modes of payment.”

He’s extremely frustrated, and as a layperson but fellow engineer, I get it. It’s a solvable problem but there are people saying “who will pay for this” and “how can we possibly cooperate without our legal departments agreeing”.

A year ago, I posted about this to Facebook, citing the ultimate sadness. Hans had died with this problem unsolved, and unlikely to be solved, even in a world where, you would think, there’s be a resurgence of funded virology research. I linked to his obituary.

Just another ranty post on the internet. Or so I thought.

But the internet wasn’t done being shittified.

Yesterday afternoon, (May 18 2024), I was alerted by Facebook that they had removed my content.

Because my post goes against their community standards about cybersecurity.

Their billion-dollar learning model only thinks the only talk about a virus is a computer virus.

Clearly, they are letting their own AI run the gamut of learning over everyone’s post, and also letting it have a chance to flag any questionable content. Skynet Ho!

Okay, I don’t really care, but…maybe if I’m being hurt by the machine learning algorithm, other people are too. I should appeal this! There must be some option where you can flag this to be reviewed by a human. Given Facebook’s massive Redwood City corporate campus where I was outpriced from being able to live, there must be humans there, right? Right?

Nope.

There are two boxes you can fill out. No matter what you put in the first one, the second one is the same.

Even if you click “Something Else”, there’s no place to clarify what that means. No place to flag it to the AI that says “you got this so horrifically wrong that you need to throw this into the bit-bucket and start over”.

I’m using the platform less and less, and it’s getting more and more enshittified. I would at some point delete all my content, but at this point, they already have a copy of my content, and the only *new* things I’m posting are responses to the hangers-on. I am involved with organizations who use it for their own social media purposes, so not-having an account is not an option.

This is the worst timeline.