The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

cosmic slop posted a thread about why ilx was relatively unbusy now, but it got me thinking that the whole thing seems way bigger than ILX.

like I guess I always thought the Internet would keep growing in interesting ways and reveal new interesting writers and creators and communities etc, but it occurs to me that's what you always think when you're in the middle of something that's expanding and new during the "salad days" of something

but i don't know it feels like there's so many things about the Internet and social media that are just terrible now! People talk about Twitter and Facebook like they talk about smoking cigs, man trying to cut down why am i doing this? but yet can't stop....so many people take "twitter breaks" and stuff like that, feels like there's little joy there....

facebook is basically 70s and 80s network television now, just driven by lame-o squaresville stuff for the most part and ubuquitous enough where it's got no cache...

message board traffic is down, reddit (http://gawker.com/former-reddit-ceo-youre-all-screwed-1717901652) is devolving into some sort of horrid gamer asshole lord of the flies....

ned has been posting a lot of stuff that's pretty grim like this:

https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426

and i saw this carles thing about how viralnova and outbrain and all those garbage content sites are eating the net:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-100-million-content-farm-thats-killing-the-internet

the dissolve shut down....radio.com laid off everyone to do "aggregated content"....blogs are old news...."viral content" is so self aware about trying to be viral now i can't stand it...

i don't know...lots of times i'm just floating around on the web looking for something that's not there...(i still do like ILX for that reason because I usually find something worth reading)...

but yeah i know i'm being a little emo and dramatic about it, but i guess in retrospect there was this brief bubble where the internet happened and all the corporations didn't understand it, but now it's been generational change and they obviously hired whoever they needed to hire and the big data nerds got into crunching the numbers of what drives traffic and that little bubble seems like it's popped and content is going back into a new form of corporatized media that's not even necessarily better than the old one in some ways...

***this isnt' a very articulate post but i feel like there's this sense that something has changed and maybe other people can express it better than i can?***

***also tumblr which i don't even interact with is a newer thing that feels like 'old internet' when i'm on it but i don't know i guess it's small potatoes compared to content farms**

"a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good." - thomas pynchon, inherent vice

it's been generational change and they obviously hired whoever they needed to hire

is there a way we can foment a shame-based movement against them for being sellouts

I can't really speak to the periodizing thesis itt but I do think there's something to the idea that mediums tend to move from a state of potentiality to one that sorta defines your relationship to it in advance--like the internet seems less about developing alternative identities/subjects/whatever now that it has gotten so good at prescribing them ahead of time. there's a kind of "capture" at work. there is always a residual potential for outliers and other unexpected possibilities but it's also fair to say those possibilities are less and less likely to be realized.

(speaking of Pynchon, this is more or less the thesis of Bleeding Edge, no?)

i started this thread iyo did facebook ruin the internet? cuz i felt a lot of the same vague unease and displeasure

blaming facebook is wrong but i think the move from the 'old web' to 'web-based platforms' was the real sea change. i have lots of thoughts about this but thats my main insight

yeah man the internet sucks bruh

time to make a new one, just a little farther out west.

http://intfolder.com/_ph/2/2/244957490.jpg

thx lamp i'll check out that thread

The economic model of the web has gone through a series of upheavals, and will understandably continue to go through yet more upheavals in search of a modus vivendi.

If you're just a reader/viewer/browser hungry for eye candy, I suspect you will always be able to find it. It may take more or less looking, but there's always going to be something out there for you to look at.

If your profession involves content, and your ability to make a living depends on that, it's a different picture. Personally, I am old enough to remember "information wants to be free" being said to me in all earnestness in 1994. (Said, actually, by a fellow professional writer! A guy who would probably not try to pay his rent with buckets of information.)

As a veteran print journalist (aka dinosaur), I can remember many, many attempts by media outlets to micro-monetize clicks. I especially recall WSJ and Salon getting caught in the 90s/00s cycle: get people addicted to your content, then try to charge them, then act surprised when the audiences immediately defect to free stuff.

My wife - a very experienced and very good journalist - recently made some forays into freelancing amid the murky world of ghostwriting, SEO stuff, corporate blogs, and (quite possibly) content mills. Clearly there is something going on but no one is sure what.

It's tempting to call for a full Darwinian shakeout.

Both this thread, the iyo facebook thread and the ilm quiet thread touch on something that rings true to me - good idea to have a thread where thoughts on the topic can be collected. The concept of post memes that was brought up on another thread maybe too?

I've discussed it some with my brother, and we're thinking that a specific site where it really seems like we experienced a now past golden age is Youtube. I don'tmean to sound weirdly nostalgic, but Youtube is pretty central to the net and web 2.0 and it's underwent a lot of restructuring during the past ten years that reflect some of the other "content / web 3.0 / mobile platforms / social media" developments. From being fairly simple, "free", non-commercial 2.0 etc it's underwent a professionalization and social media integration - related to the sell to Google, Vevo partnership... Anyway bit of a clumsy post here too, but me and my brother miss the old youtube with proper comment fields, no robot generated playlists, no millions of clickbait/copycat/remix-meme videos, no ads...

content is going back into a new form of corporatized media that's not even necessarily better than the old one in some ways...

it's not better it's the same, there's just more of it

Iranian blogger spends six years in prison for blogging. Gets out to discover that blogs don't exist anymore:
https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426

my sense is that something has been lost and that things are generally stagnant and bad. but it's tough for me to generalize because my view of the internet is so intertwined with my own life and interests, which, lately, have been generally stagnant and bad. the internet today reminds me of the technology in A Scanner Darkly which anonymizes Arctor - everything is flashing so quickly and endlessly that it ends up appearing abstract and indistinguishable. the most amazing footage of an elephant is reduced to something that i hover over in facebook for just long enough to catch the main highlight of the video. which feeds into the sense that even if not quite everything has been done before, and better, by someone else, it still doesn't make much of a difference to contribute something new to the endless scroll because even the most astounding things on earth seem so banal, at least to me. there was a time where it didn't feel like that on the internet, i think, but i can't make an objective comparison because the time that the internet consistently blew my socks off (roughly 1994-2006 for me) magically aligns with the time that i was growing up and figured i'd be doing really cool stuff soon. now i'm older and i make the grumpy face when i walk to work and everything sucks, and not so coincidentally the internet seems to suck now, too.
/depresso

i suppose i should defer to people who had already done the whole mid-life crisis thing before netscape navigator came out for a more reliable and less subjective opinion

yeah i agree w/a lot of that though and i'm not particularly bummed out (hope things get better soon btw, best to you)

i'm thinking we're about the same age based on the years you mentioned

god maybe it is facebook? at the end of the day is it just facebook ruined everything?

though sometimes i wonder if it's almost like conversations and thoughts were a more finite resource than we thought, everyone has their theories abt ilx but i think in some form there's so many viewpionts and things that were already posted it's hard to find new things, and then with facebook and twitter and etc etc etc eating up thoughts and opinons maybe we're just running out of thoughts?

i felt very viscerally that the quality of 'content' took a nosedive, even on non-corpo blogs, back when syndicated/modular commenting services became widespread so that every single new piece of content also came with the leetle comment boxes underneath it. really shifted people's modes of interaction i think. i used to find all the leetle boxes so aggravating.

god maybe it is facebook? at the end of the day is it just facebook ruined everything?

It's more responsible for making me feel isolated from the rest of the world than killing the internet, by my reckoning.

beware of rambling post ahead --

one thing that is strange for me is that instead of approaching online communities through a web browser, i am instead approaching them THROUGH FACEBOOK. I don't think I particularly like that, but it's the way it is! There is a facebook community for posting pictures of records that is fun and a lot of current/former ILXors make appearances there. Likewise, the most vibrant communities of "young" (20s/30s) 78 collectors are on facebook -- some old guys too, but a lot of guys approximately in my own age range. SO.. if i want to interact with those communities, i need to have a facebook account to do it, I can't just do it with netscape.

in the OLD DAZE... well, ya had to go to ILX via your browser. nothing else required. in some way facebook groups remind me of a horribly designed and bloated evolution of usenet. but... not as cool, at all. i play scrabble on facebook. i used to play scrabble (literati!) on yahoo.com...

as i get older my relationship to internetting has changed. i am not very active on ILE and almost never active on ILM. A lot of ILM-type conversation takes place on facebook now, or in gmail chat windows. I search for threads on ILE sometimes when there are people or things I want to talk about, like movies or books and TV. that's sort of what i want from the internet now and find lacking, is intelligent discussion of the books i like to read and movies i watch. but i'm not about to start an account on goodreads or rarteyourmusic or whatever the film equivalent is. shmm.. i dunno what my point is.. i guess, also, since i am in a relationship and not alone by myself all day, i probably spend less time online overall. i also only work a job where i can be online a few days during the week, so i'm not just killing worktime like i used to be able to..

the web portal companies are just following the microsoft business model. once you become the gatekeepers you can start gouging everyone.

j., if you had been asked beforehand (say in 1994), wouldn't you have been inclined to say that leetle boxes were more democratic (that is, less corporate) than a paid editor-type person deciding what the best stuff was? If not, why not?

Further, devil's advocacy: Would non-corporatized media really be better (and if so, better for whom)?

A totally flat environment, in which all creators put their stuff out there, for people to pick and choose what they like, doesn't seem realistic to me. To start with, consumers of content like to get stuff for free, or almost free. Creators of content like to be paid for their content. How should this conflict be managed?

Patronage is one model. The Medicis (or whoever) pay Leonardo (or whoever) to make a great artwork that will last for centuries. Maybe a few of the angels in the nativity scene look like the patrons. Whatevs. Humanity has a great artwork and the artist can eat for a while.

Then you have a model where the content-wanters subsidize the entire project: creation, creator, chooser, and all their hangers-on. In traditional book publishing, an editor (who worked for a publisher) chose what to put out, based on hiw guess as to what people would want to buy. Readers needed to justify the transaction after the fact.

Then there's the model of content that is free (or almost free) to the end user because it is ad-supported. The New Boston Postglobe (or whatever) sells advertising based on the expectation of eyeballs. Eyeballs are drawn by having content that people want to look at. So if you're H.L. Mencken or Dorothy Parker or Flann O'Brien (or whoever), you create content that pleases the editors, publishers, readers, and advertisers (to varying degrees and in varying proportions).

Then there's a model where creative people are not even remotely expected to earn their keep from their creations, but rather in a sideways fashion: writers teach English, musicians teach music, artists teach art; their creative work is treated as a hobby.

Again, creators of content like to be paid for their content. Further, they tend to want a living wage for it (defined however). It doesn't help that they mostly want to live in New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Boston, San Francisco, Washington - known to be the most expensive places to live. And there are SO many more things out there than anyone can be expected to sort through. This may sound like a dirty business to my lefty heart, but maybe paying a person (even a corporate person) to act as middleperson and selector isn't so bad.

we are all Montgomery Brewster but the money is bandwidth

hey have you guys heard about this one cool trick to get rid of facebook-related depression

scientology?

lol

I've never been/will never be on facebook it can be done

I am on the twitter but I get the impression I don't use twitter the way most of the world does

well you only ever tweet puzzle suggestions to Pat Sajak

it's my calling

but tweeting them in a public forum guarantees that he won't use them!

i relate a lot to what karl malone said about how the internet, by providing immediate access to everything, has a "disenchanting" effect in which nothing seems that special and you always have a nagging suspicion that there is something better you could be looking at somewhere else.

although i guess every modern generation has complained about ennui.

the thing that concerns me most about the internet is that i can't seem to quit it for a day or a week if i want to. i tried to quit for a month last year to focus more on school and my job but i failed and embarrassed myself because i had announced that i was leaving the internet on facebook

should have announced it via wax cylinder

next time i am going to use a skywriter

the creepy thing about facebook mediating so much, is that it is so opaque in terms of what it shows you -- you don't see every post by every friend, notifications are weird, the financial shakedown of "pages," -- it is untrustworthy

yeah sometimes i think of people and i wonder 'Huh did they quit facebook' and i search them and go to their page and lo and behold they are posting all the time but i never see it

Further, devil's advocacy: Would non-corporatized media really be better (and if so, better for whom)?

A totally flat environment, in which all creators put their stuff out there, for people to pick and choose what they like, doesn't seem realistic to me. To start with, consumers of content like to get stuff for free, or almost free. Creators of content like to be paid for their content. How should this conflict be managed?

Non-corporatized media is better for everyone that is not a corporation. Which is most of us.

Consumers like to consume, it does not matter if they have to pay for it or if it is supposedly 'free'.

Creators like to create. They like to be paid the way consumers like to get stuff for free.

That artists require money to create is capitalist propaganda that is less true as the internet grows and technology is democratized.

by providing immediate access to everything, has a "disenchanting" effect in which nothing seems that special and you always have a nagging suspicion that there is something better you could be looking at somewhere else.

I think this is a result of us existing in a time between the internet being there and not. Foundationally we are still relying on the old corporate media model to refer back to. The flood of free and un-promoted information is not as interesting or meaningful as what we have traditionally consumed. This is because we have been shaped to identify branding with authenticity in the commercial marketplace. I think this feeling will go away as more generations grow up in a post-internet world.

oh someone i don't think that nagging feeling ever goes away, for anyone ever

That artists require money to create is capitalist propaganda

? Was unaware that humanity had reached the point where we can create things out of nothing, that's amazing

Hey y'all. I've been on a pretty long hiatus but I happened to pop by today and see this thread. I think about this stuff a lot but I'm not very good at thinking about it, and I especially have a hard time sorting out what's the internet getting worse and what's me just getting numbed to what's good about it, and also what's just me aging.

I think there are still a lot of amazing things about the internet, I mean if you showed 1998 me internet 2015 and just skipped that whole earlier romanticized "vibrant" part of it, I still think I'd be pretty psyched about it, at least for a while.

I don't quite have the right way to articulate this yet, but I have been trying to conceptualize a phenomenon that I have noticed in a number of industries that the internet is either killing or completely remaking -- publishing, journalism, music, etc., which is that the presentation and even marketing of certain kinds of content had certain rituals to them that in some ways were very important to our relationship to the content, and when you change the rituals you change the significance of the content.

What I mean is, for example, take the idea of a "great writer" in the literary fiction category -- there was this whole series of rituals and events that built up to the making of a great writer, not just great writing being put in print, but the publishing cycle, certain kinds of marketing, book reviews, panel discussions, academic criticism, awards, interview appearances, etc., not to mention the existence of a certain kind of audience that would stand around at dinner parties and chat about literary books.

By reshaping all of those things, the internet is not just delivering us "great writer" in a different format, it's actually (I think, probably) killing the old paradigm of "great writer." I just don't think a Nabokov or a Saul Bellow or a figure like that could emerge now as a result, the structures that create and support such a figure have been eaten away, and I don't just mean "it's harder to make a living off novels now."

In a similar way, I think Internet 2015 is structurally different in ways that prevent the kinds of "vibrancy" people found in certain aspects of Internet 2000 or 2005 or 2010. It's not that you can't get the same content, or that the content isn't as good, it's that the structure of the internet, the "content delivery mechanisms" are different, so that there isn't the same kind of potential, e.g., for everyone you know to get really really excited about an absurd singer/songwriter video. It's not that the videos aren't there -- they've multiplied 100-fold, and that's in fact part of the problem.

acapella groups are the only pure creators
specifically the dudes that sang the carmen sandiego song

"capitalist propaganda" is a funny way to spell "hunger"

? Was unaware that humanity had reached the point where we can create things out of nothing, that's amazing

Welcome to the internet.

Hunger I thought this was about internet media not food.

the thing that concerns me most about the internet is that i can't seem to quit it for a day or a week if i want to. i tried to quit for a month last year to focus more on school and my job but i failed and embarrassed myself because i had announced that i was leaving the internet on facebook

― Treeship, Wednesday, July 15, 2015 3:30 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And this is the other thing -- I think there's something about the way that this once seemingly awesome thing has become our master that makes us feel miserable amidst plenty. Hence I took an ILX hiatus for a while, only I just started using facebook more, and OMG facebook is so much shittier than ILX!

i wonder if this ("this" the Great Late Internet Malaise or w/e) wouldn't be solved by much stricter internet access rules for people who work in offices. if eyeballs are the prize now, the attention economy, etc, well, that would artificially constrict the aperture through which all this bullshit has to flow

a pointless suggestion i know. but norms of work for people not doing physical or attentive labor seems like a big part of what's going on.

think about this: you know those pictures showing an old tv, phone, clock, calendar, etc and saying "this fits in your pocket now!" well imagine a picture of a stack of every single newspaper and magazine printed out daily, vhs's of funny animals and pratfalls, a few vaguely dirty jokebooks -- "it's totally ok to just flip through all this shit at your desk!"

i certainly don't see better discussion happening in Facebook comments or anywhere else really, compared to ILX.

as I get older the trade off the internet seems to propose--"here's access to and knowledge of *so much stuff* that will both potentially and actually enrich your life but sorry you're gonna be perpetually distracted and mentally foggy and it will start to make less and less of an impact"--is a Faustian bargain I am thinking I may want to back out of. then again maybe that's just life in generally, only accelerated.

ILX is the best place I've ever found on the Internet, as horrifying as that might be.

Not only is it all this knowledge and *so much stuff* but the very nature of instant communications is a Gutenberg-level paradigm shit.

Humanity has never really had an opportunity to communicate on this level before, instantly and at any location. There are all these things that have been publicly unsaid for possibly thousands of years and the floodgates are now open. Perhaps it is the noisey adjustment period before a more civilized age.

definitely.

i fantasize about deleting my Facebook account, but feel i need to keep using it for my musician stuff, even though that's getting more frustrating and less useful every day due to white noise and the above-mentioned creepy, opaque algorithms. and every now and then, it's the only way to contact someone whose email you don't have.

xp

I've got such a kneejerk reaction against anyone who says broadly that things used to be better. In my experience there's always amazing stuff and shitty stuff going on at the same time, whether it's on the Internet or in pop culture or in world history. The "things used to be better" mentality always seems to be based on selective memory.

I think the "golden age" here applies less in fact to the actual past than what it seemed to promise at the time and what we actually have now.

"paradigm shit" is an all-time typo btw

i like this book -

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/regional-and-world-history-general-interest/history-communications-media-and-society-evolution-speech-internet

- which tries to give a historical explanation of each of the major media in terms of the communicative needs it met at the time, and the ones its technological development fostered afterward

he likes to repeat that reading is hard and, even to the majority of people who have learned to do it and rely on literacy to get along in the world, BORING. when they can get out of doing it, they generally do.

iirc he backs up that little bit of provocation with some sensible-sounding numbers about percentages of readers, time, effort, etc.

so many great posts itt

i remember my friend talking once about how sometimes the titles of theory texts were kinda almost sufficient in themselves to think about, to zone into, like how against interpretation is this pleasing sort of mantra-sized proposition you can bend around for a while in your head, & i catch myself having such a similar reflex whenever something gets posted about the end of the internet, like one of these threads being bumped, that you can go to this trance state, half sci-fi imagery & half awkward news graphic of anti-aliased close-up browser text. & some of it's just standard pedantic objection to sweeping generalisations: i'll remember my internet routines & think that, even if enormous, paradigmatic changes are sweeping The Internet - even if institutions are crumbling, & power is centralised, & nobody reads the new york times but just kind of absorbs its echo through facebook - there is still unspoiled internet for me to consult, internet on the scale of internet-presence as person-proxy, personal internet, immersive cultural enthusiasm distraction internet, & that i have this scrap of it in my hand so it can't be dying. like every day i am reading my friends' blogs, & their tweets, & both of these things are at once Classically Internet & then just kind of Thinly-Veneered Human, the internet only the delivery protocol. & i know that the vibrancy thing endemic in inchoate artforms can ebb & that then the air is just different, the sense of possibility limited, BUT, i also think that there is always also a really essential liveliness to things moving out of the mainstream. like if the sort of creative, ascendant trajectory of the internet is lagging then it maybe only puts us at the kind of bloat-phase which every other medium or discipline inevitably hits & only freshly at the stage of having to more deliberately control your intake, cf facebook-is-tv. like maybe in arguing for personal internet i am arguing for private press pamphlet or zine. & all of this feels sort of vaguely twinned with the broader context in which internet activism happens, this big social face of what the internet means, that, unlike pretty much everything else controlled by weird random-senatorial decree, the grassroots lobbying around shitty bandwidth-throttling or copyright infringement bills was effective, & that there's still kind of utopian spirit informing advocacy of the internet as a platform, like it's still democratic & that the democratic potential of it is still vital.

i feel like i worry more about classic kinda ... i look at my cellphone too much & it is depriving me of a feeling of presence & now like henry david bon iver i must retreat to the woods Stuff - device tractor beam issues - more than the quality of content

i wonder if this ("this" the Great Late Internet Malaise or w/e) wouldn't be solved by much stricter internet access rules for people who work in offices.

Hell yes, there is absolutely no reason for Internet access at office jobs and it's so weird that it's normal now. I wish my job would kill my internet.

well, aside from every office function in the world being embedded in a web page now

another rambling post.

i just reread the bbc article in the first post and it does sound eerily like what we have now, except you can 'virtually touch the surface' of those fragmented parts of the web. but to access them, you need to pay. or you need to find some hacky way to get inside. at one point, it seems corporations realised they couldn't get enough people to pay to make the Fragmented Web a reality, so they started pushing garbage content to make up for the little monetary incentive they do get. so now the web looks like one big money machine. if someone's not making money off you browsing the web, you're a waste of ip in a post-ipv4 world or something. they got data nerds to help them realise that one user may only be worth half a penny, but get somehow 1 million users, and we've got something going.

so, this kind of brings me to another, somewhat related topic.

i was rewatching david foster wallace's zdf interview done in 2003. he talks about how if entertainment companies want to get 20 or 30 million views/users, they need to appeal to our most base desires, which end up not being interesting. but these desires end up being things like sex, "vivid spectacle" and "easy humour" and things that look pretty and sexy. anyway. he goes on to suggest that people don't want this and in order for entertainment companies to survive, they will have to focus on a specialised topic or "niche", as he says. of course, the sad truth is that this was not how things happened. "niche" content/ideas/sites are dying in favour of specialty items that make my day-to-day tasks easier or at least help me finish them faster. it's like we've taken "convenience" to a whole other level that is beyond human thought, where we talk about robots replacing half of our jobs.

Yeah what happens in the post work world?

yeah. in the US you hear about code for america, as if the only jobs will be in tech. the "health industry" will also be important, they say. so the only two options in the future are either you're a code monkey or a nurse. the rest of you will be unemployed but who cares. how is that even sustainable? at one point artists and writers will have to be compensated in order to keep producing their artwork, unless we want a future like something out of that equilibrium movie. that's it. the future is just some bad sci-fi movie. or should i say syfy.

the only two options in the future are either you're a code monkey or a nurse

lol this is bullshit if anything the future needs engineers (says the guy who works in engineering)

and farmers

I've never been/will never be on facebook it can be done

glad i'm not the only one

the only two options in the future are either you're a code monkey or a nurse

lol this is bullshit if anything the future needs engineers (says the guy who works in engineering)

― Οὖτις, Thursday, July 16, 2015 12:30 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, i know it's bs. i was just parodying how the media/gov't spins things

I am still skeptical about the workless society because I feel like capital will just find a way to take as much of the profit from robot labor as possible and then somehow exploit us for even more. If a workless society could have happened under capitalism, it would already have happened amidst industrial plenty.

We have a workless society if you are 62 or born rich.

i think a lot of the post-work stuff from the left is a symptom of grad students not having secure futures in academic work & dreading having to get jobs

this is my favourite recent take on future of work & robots http://economics.mit.edu/files/9835 robots/computers substitute but also complement work

If a workless society could have happened under capitalism, it would already have happened amidst industrial plenty.

― five six and (man alive), Wednesday, July 15, 2015 9:06 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think industrial plenty would run out pretty fast if everyone stopped working

have a workless society if you are 62

You're optimistic!

i think industrial plenty would run out pretty fast if everyone stopped working

― flopson, Wednesday, July 15, 2015 8:28 PM (49 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sure, and we were never literally promised a workless society with industrial plenty, but I think we were promised 10 or 20 or 30 hour workweeks or something like that, and yet our workweeks only grow longer.

j., if you had been asked beforehand (say in 1994), wouldn't you have been inclined to say that leetle boxes were more democratic (that is, less corporate) than a paid editor-type person deciding what the best stuff was? If not, why not?

i might have been. but my qualm wasn't so much with the increase in democratic accessibility to fora, it was that the specific function of the leetle boxes effected a major shift in the role structure of the public spaces on the internet, and in the ways that people defaulted to regarding the purpose/meaning of the typical 'genres'

i.e. it reconfigured the space of discourse-participation to highlight the possibility of 'just commenting' and 'just being a commenter' (no matter how actively); it gave a boost to the status of the 'original' content commented upon, so that it was not so much part of an ongoing exchange as it was its own type of discourse operating according to a separate set of standards with different values (e.g. an increased bias toward of-the-day novelty and greater-internet relevance and opinionz and hot takes)

i think anyone-can-start-their-own-web-page is more democratic than the-comment-box-is-open-to-anyone. i think usenet was more democratic than comment-boxed, blog-hosted debate and discussion.

Sure, and we were never literally promised a workless society with industrial plenty, but I think we were promised 10 or 20 or 30 hour workweeks or something like that, and yet our workweeks only grow longer.

― five six and (man alive), Wednesday, July 15, 2015 9:30 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

our workweeks actually grow shorter, even in the US in the past 30 years. see "Hours Worked Per Workers" http://www.demos.org/blog/7/13/15/why-jeb-bush-wrong-focus-growth-alone

keynes kind of fucked up everyone's expectations with "economic possibilities of our grandchildren" where he said we would all have maids & work 16 hours a week. we've still got it pretty good, historically speaking, and some countries even moreso than USA

our workweeks actually grow shorter, even in the US in the past 30 years

this defies my own personal experience so completely im interested in seeing it unpacked a little more.

i agree w/NA that complaints about 'things being worse now' are generally pretty garbage and could be convinced that the internet as it is now is better than that internet as it was. but i dont think its far-fetched to argue that its culturally different than it used to be. i think i grew up valuing the internet as something adjacent to and thus alienated from 'real life' - a place w/its own culture and mores where me and ppl like me could live w/o many consequences. experiment and play. i liked that it was economically and technologically inaccessible to lots of ppl even if i didnt realize it at the time. web-based platforms feel homogeneous and dull to me often but maybe its better that the internet and the rest of ppls lives are more seamless, that the web is more accessible and frictionless. i still miss the old web tho

man alive gets at something that is also on my mind: "the presentation and even marketing of certain kinds of content had certain rituals to them that in some ways were very important to our relationship to the content... take the idea of a "great writer" in the literary fiction category -- there was this whole series of rituals and events that built up to the making of a great writer, not just great writing being put in print."

Yes! Ghosts of those rituals still shape our relationship to content, and I'm interested in that.

For a writer of literary fiction in the 20th century US, there was a monstrous gulf between "published" and "unpublished." A writer hoped to become "published" - which meant that a cultural gatekeeper had blessed your work as good, or at least worthy of firing up a printing press for. There were (and are) many things wrong with this world - for one thing it was (and is) very white, very male, and very northeastern. It reeks of Updike and Salinger and whatnot. But its lure was unmistakable, and even people who had nothing but contempt for it still wanted its stamp of approval.

And of course they still do. A literary fiction writer today could easily put all his or her words out there for consumption with a few clicks, but they still find it meaningful to be published in the New Yorker, they still want a book deal from Knopf, they still want to see hardcovers in Barnes & Noble. It may be silly or outdated or (gasp) capitalist. But it does symbolize a level of arrival and validation that is hard to fake and hard to replace in a truly democratized media landscape. I'm not an elbow-patched literary dude, but know I felt validated the first time I saw my byline in print.

Similarly people still want to have their piece on Salon or Pitchfork or Cracked or whatever, even though those gatekeepers aren't keeping anybody off the web. The approval of a recognized outlet means something.

Compare that with a "signed" vs. an "unsigned" band. The distinction isn't relevant to whether you can make and distribute music, but plenty of people still want the industry stamp of approval that indicates you're not just drinking your own bathwater.

Yeah like for example, so many writers complain about how many dumb useless promo CDs they get but god help you if you send a download code and expect them to actually use it

i think theres a certain vision of a distributed and independent web dying as the internet consolidates onto a handful of major platforms and as lots of money gets injected into the attention industry. it sucks to see it go.

"we would all have maids" - except for maids of course

that's certainly not wrong about validation and the dubious authority that established publications enjoy and confer just by virtue of existing

but i wonder if it might not be productive to take the gatekeeper concept out

too tldr to write this out this early, but lemme just say, it's not necessarily only a social thing, being 'published' by someone else; it's an ontological thing too; gives the thing a different mode of existence

our workweeks actually grow shorter, even in the US in the past 30 years

this defies my own personal experience so completely im interested in seeing it unpacked a little more.

i agree w/NA that complaints about 'things being worse now' are generally pretty garbage and could be convinced that the internet as it is now is better than that internet as it was. but i dont think its far-fetched to argue that its culturally different than it used to be. i think i grew up valuing the internet as something adjacent to and thus alienated from 'real life' - a place w/its own culture and mores where me and ppl like me could live w/o many consequences. experiment and play. i liked that it was economically and technologically inaccessible to lots of ppl even if i didnt realize it at the time. web-based platforms feel homogeneous and dull to me often but maybe its better that the internet and the rest of ppls lives are more seamless, that the web is more accessible and frictionless. i still miss the old web tho

― affluent white (Lamp), Wednesday, July 15, 2015 10:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i guess i don't see why "things being worse now" is inherently a bad argument because believing that it is necessarily means that you think things couldn't get worse! which of course they could, things get worse all the time

as far as work hours i haven't seen stats but yeah i don't know what to say other than it seems not true for like everyone i know

i also realized that calling it the "golden age" was sort of 'leading' but this thread already existed and it had a provacative headline so i figured ppl would click (just like buzzfeed!)

i think theres a certain vision of a distributed and independent web dying as the internet consolidates onto a handful of major platforms and as lots of money gets injected into the attention industry. it sucks to see it go.

― max, Thursday, July 16, 2015 8:24 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a good way of putting it

j.: If you are at all interested in US culture and/or her stepson, US politics, you might have complicated feelings about dethroning the Old Corporate Gods in favor of embracing a more-democratic Economy of Likes.

To go back a ways: If you were a 20th century eastern white male (Homo sapiens preppyensis), you likely cared what the editors of the New York Times and the New Yorker liked. Because you felt their tastes reflected yours. And when they were comparatively adventurous - for example, when they published a James Baldwin or an Ann Beattie or an Audre Lorde or a Jamaica Kincaid or a Banana Yoshimoto - you thought they were broadening your tastes and challenging you, in the way you thought art should.

Okay. Let us grant that the web did us a service in dethroning those Old Gods (William Shawn, Ahmet Ertegun, Alfred Knopf, George Martin, etc.). More voices are out there, great. Lower barrier to entry, great (with caveats, because a lot of stuff is crap).

So if we dethrone those dead-white-male Old Gods, and put in their place a crowdsourced system of peer/friend recommendations, the first result is a jubilant democratic flowering of a thousand long-silenced voices. To which I say Yay.

Another result is a vigorous attempt by our corporate overlords to co-opt and capture that democratic energy and turn it to their own ends. This is of course ongoing and will probably always be with us. See Thomas Frank on this point. Radical sports drinks, badass XTREME tennis shoes, etc.; punk rock on major labels.

But what concerns me most is how cultural and political polarization is accelerated by a system of "I like X, which I know about because my friends liked X."

In the last few weeks, most of my friends and family had rainbow-colored Facebook avatars. Almost all called for taking the Confederate battle flag down, lots of them liked Obama's "Amazing Grace." If that's the stuff you like, you bask in in the glow of your screen as you see your own views reflected back at you.

But then I think, wait. Shit. That also means that there's a Cletus somewhere basking in the glow of HIS screen, which is busily championing "Heritage not Hate," lamenting that NASCAR caved on the Flag, saying Trayvon got what he deserved, and oh yes let us lament the thousands of poor cake-makers who are being persecuted for their beliefs.

Our current pattern of information consumption will inevitably keep driving the process whereby we inhabit separate worlds that don't resemble each other at all. That is kind of sad.

yeah, there's even this now, which i'm sad to say i'm considering

https://paign-free.com/static/index.htm

Great post, although surely this isn't a new thing, but a more visible, hyped-up manifestation of it?

xp

Jordan: no, it's not a new thing and yes it is an accelerated version of an old thing. For example, cities used to have multiple newspapers; the one you subscribed to amplified and confirmed your preexisting views.

We can now shut out voices we don't want to hear with greater speed and efficiency. This is good news for some of us, but remember that the people you don't agree with are doing the same thing, just as fast (if not faster). The existing polarization is accelerated at the speed of broadband. Cletus and I are moving farther and farther apart by the second - which I wouldn't mind except that he and I are trying to inhabit the same country and (to an extent) the same culture.

And Commodify Your Dissent is 23 years ago, gah.

xp yeah i dunno how much of that i agree or disagree with, puffin, but i note that i was promoting the value of a pre-'likes', relatively pre-'social' stage of the internet. i don't think the alternatives are only between an unruly coopted socially coercive demos and a well-maintained sulzberger hand on the nyt tiller.

j., agreed - it shouldn't be either/or. I would love to hear about a third option (and fourth and fifth and nth).

Ten years ago I had set 10 different tabs to open when I opened Firefox - I can't remember what those sites were, but it seems like there's less stuff online for me now. I'm almost only online at work (actually sold my computer 8 years ago and haven't had internet at home since) and when I start the day I open gaffa.dk (Danish music site, mostly reduced to clickbait), rapspot.dk (Danish hip hop board, almost dead), P4k reviews and ILX. The only thing that takes me more than 5 minutes to browse is ILX and I've no clue what I would be doing online without it - I guess maybe I'd be on reddit...

Regarding workless societies I read a good (but soooo long) review of some books (probably even longer!) on robot labour in LRB. On the possible outcome of succesful implementation of Google robot drivers:

The catch: all the money would be going to Google. An entire economy of drivers would disappear. The UK has 231,000 licensed cabs and minicabs alone – and there are far, far more people whose work is driving, and more still for whom driving is not their whole job, but a big part of what they are paid to do. I suspect we’re talking about a total well into the millions of jobs. They would all disappear or, just as bad, be effectively demonetised. Say you’re paid for a 40-hour week, half of which is driving and the other half loading and unloading goods, filling out delivery forms etc. The driving half just became worthless. Your employer isn’t going to pay you the same amount for the other twenty hours’ labour as she was paying you for forty, since for twenty of those hours all you’re doing is sitting there while your car does the work. That’s assuming the other part of your job doesn’t get automated too. The world of driverless cars would be amazing, but it would also be a world in which the people who owned the cars, or who managed them, would be doing a lot better than the people who didn’t. It would look like the world today, only more so.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-coming

xp over the past few years this instructional technologist has been writing a lot about developing non-corpo educational tools that take advantage of current realities but recall the virtues of the internet from the era i have in mind (i.e. up through 2000 or so):

http://umw.domains/

this idea itself is a pretty simple one: basically, that in order for people to make good use of the medium it helps if they are technically enabled to own their own spaces and see themselves as makers of their spaces

in other words, paul ford's tilde club, but for people who need to be walked through the whole idea of having your own web space

I don't think that pre-internet system of validation was important only to authors but to audiences. And I don't know whether its "bad" that the conditions for the creation of a John Updike may no longer exist, but I think they probably no longer exist -- there will be no John Updike of the kindle self-publishing world. Much in the same way that there was no Beethoven of the second half of the 20th Century -- the structures that would support a Great Orchestral Composer were no longer in place.

BTW massive xposting but one thing that occurs to me about internet at work is that we have an entire sub-economy of companies now who are RELIANT on us wasting time on the internet at work. Like imagine how much Facebook revenues and profits would sink if more companies cracked down.

man alive otm re: Updike/Beethoven

golden shower of the internet

So if we dethrone those dead-white-male Old Gods, and put in their place a crowdsourced system of peer/friend recommendations, the first result is a jubilant democratic flowering of a thousand long-silenced voices. To which I say Yay.

yay to dethroning old gods, but yay to the idea of other voices, but i'm not sure that crowdsourcing recommendations is necessarily a better system. the piece that was linked to upthread and elsewhere - the web we have to save - touches on that a little:

...A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the Stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant Internet presence.

And not only do the algorithms behind the Stream equate newness and popularity with importance, they also tend to show us more of what we’ve already liked. These services carefully scan our behaviour and delicately tailor our news feeds with posts, pictures and videos that they think we would most likely want to see.

Popularity is not wrong in and of itself, but it has its own perils. In a free-market economy, low-quality goods with the wrong prices are doomed to failure. Nobody gets upset when a quiet Brooklyn cafe with bad lattes and rude servers goes out of business. But opinions are not the same as material goods or services. They won’t disappear if they are unpopular or even bad. In fact, history has proven that most big ideas (and many bad ones) have been quite unpopular for a long time, and their marginal status has only strengthened them. Minority views are radicalized when they can’t be expressed and recognized.

sorry for long quote. i'm not sure that the algorithms that steer us to content now really "replaced" any older paradigm of browsing the internet, but i do know that i spent a lot more time these days doing internet homework - reading the thing that 50 friends liked or that launched a thousand shit thinkpieces - where in the past i spent most of my online time exploring and wandering off into corners of the web that felt untouched and new. in other words, for me at least, my internet experience has shifted from one-to-many model to a many-to-one. in the past i was an individual internet being exploring at my leisure, where now i'm funneled toward certain topics along with millions of other people. that has the benefit of feeling like i'm being drawn into some sort of collective "conversation" that's populated with people i know as well as strangers, but it also means that i feel like a spectator because my opinion means practically nothing in a sea of voices, most of which are more articulate than me, some of which are much louder than mine.

god, homework, ugh

it also means that i feel like a spectator because my opinion means practically nothing in a sea of voices, most of which are more articulate than me, some of which are much louder than mine.

to which one could accurately say, "so what? now you are in your proper place. there are billions of other people so why would you expect to stand out in a sea of voices?". to which i would say, "yes, that's right. but all i'm saying is that in the old internet days i felt more like

http://i.imgur.com/iXeBir1.gif

now i'm like

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/12/08/article-2520401-19DF8DB600000578-910_638x426.jpg

If everyone is always reading the same things, that encourages conformity. Like, one of the reasons diverse perspectives are valuable, and even just why it's fun to talk to other people, is that other people know different things than you do, which influences what they pick up on when examining a given topic. Today everyone has a "hot take" but the loudest ones tend to be really predictable. Maybe this isn't different than the past though. I barely remember the pre-2007 internet.

A world where the internet is a giant library and everyone is off in their own corner seems better than one where the internet is more like a television station, where everyonr is looking at the same thing at the same time more or less

literally a few years hence i'm gonna have students who are younger than MY WHOLE BLOG and we're gonna have a history lesson about the internet and they're gonna be all shaddap grampa my phone my phone

I remember the "web that was" somewhat. There was more ASCII art, right? And more Star Trek-themed erotic fanfiction. Ah, good times.

Kidding aside I am not sure that usenet was all that much of a democratic utopia. It didn't have ads and logos and corporate co-optation, nor did it have a zillion pictures of your aunt's cat encountering a dripping faucet. But it was still a fairly small, relatively privileged group of people segmenting themselves into microgroups to discuss the finer points of the things that interested them, and mostly only those things.

I sympathize with (and envy) Karl Malone's idyllic, lyrical memory of "exploring and wandering off into corners of the web that felt untouched and new." I take it on faith that there must have been a lot of that. But there was also a lot of alt.binaries.furries.felching or whatever.

And I don't know whether its "bad" that the conditions for the creation of a John Updike may no longer exist, but I think they probably no longer exist -- there will be no John Updike of the kindle self-publishing world.

This rings true, at least in terms of the financial rewards not being there (except for the very few) to encourage young writers/artists/etc to pursue greatness, and to facilitate a life spent working towards it.

But in other ways, I feel like the gatekeepers are more important than ever. Aside from fluky viral successes, it takes PR money to break through the white noise and funnel a critical mass of people towards anything in particular. Although maybe the main difference is that money is coming less from old-world publishers, labels, etc and increasingly from car companies and energy drink manufacturers.

Ok you know what sucks about Internet 2015? Facebook just insisted on telling me that Amy Schumer can be seen in this month's GQ "deepthroating a lightsaber" and I reflexively GIS'd it.

"Things used to be better" is generational gatekeeping. It's saying "we had this awesome thing and then we fucked it up so you'll never get to experience it yourself, sorry not sorry." It's the same mentality as calling yourself The Greatest Generation.

tumblr is pretty anarchic and rad tbh, the kids are all right there, they're figuring stuff out

"Things used to be better" is generational gatekeeping. It's saying "we had this awesome thing and then we fucked it up so you'll never get to experience it yourself, sorry not sorry." It's the same mentality as calling yourself The Greatest Generation.

― Immediate Follower (NA), Thursday, July 16, 2015 12:32 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

again though i'm more curious about a discussion of how things have changed. and they could be better for some or worse for some but again, i think, like for example not the internet. but your position basically just cuts off discussion, everyone can have their own values about what's better or worse.

and i don't necessarily think it's odd to have the early days of anything cultural be pretty exciting. like i always understood why people who grew up in the 60s or went through WWII were so stuck on those events, they were huge events!

max's post above about the internet consolidating rings true to experience but at same time the internet is also expanding faster than ever right now?? there's a race between the natural uh entropy of the network and the forces of consolidation, idk if that tension is solely resolved by consolidation winning

also the consolidation has some positive aspects, right? like i'm sure everyone who posts in goon threads has fond memories of the early rap blog era. but a lot of those writers are now getting $ to write for complex or noisey or npr or whatever, for a wider audience. so you lose some of the independence & hyper-specificity, but the writers and their potential audiences gain

Again - however anarchic and freeform the web may have been in (say) 1995-2000, its glories were largely reserved for those with computers and good connections. Technically literate people at the time implied a pretty affluent (and strongly white and male) subset. I don't mean to knock it for that - the same can be said of a lot of things. It's just, let's not get all pastopian about it without acknowledging such.

what do you want out of that acknowledgement, a cookie?

Again - however anarchic and freeform the web may have been in (say) 1995-2000

i'm actually more concerned with the differences between now and say, 2006, in terms of how aggregation, BIG DATA (TM), "curated content", "user-generated" content, click farms, etc have changed

i think theres a certain vision of a distributed and independent web dying as the internet consolidates onto a handful of major platforms and as lots of money gets injected into the attention industry. it sucks to see it go.

fwiw,

Erin Kissane
‏@kissane
BLOGS ARE DEAD yell tech dudes in an empty room next to a carnival of wildly popular DIY fashion and beauty bloggers, religion bloggers, boo

Again - however anarchic and freeform the web may have been in (say) 1995-2000, its glories were largely reserved for those with computers and good connections. Technically literate people at the time implied a pretty affluent (and strongly white and male) subset. I don't mean to knock it for that - the same can be said of a lot of things. It's just, let's not get all pastopian about it without acknowledging such.

yeah, did we ever think the web was going to go mainstream without becoming 80% terrible? has anyone linked "eternal september" yet?

i don't mean to cheapshot the more nuanced conversation above btw, i just want to say that broad trends are not necessarily the whole story.

If everyone is always reading the same things, that encourages conformity. Like, one of the reasons diverse perspectives are valuable, and even just why it's fun to talk to other people, is that other people know different things than you do, which influences what they pick up on when examining a given topic. Today everyone has a "hot take" but the loudest ones tend to be really predictable. Maybe this isn't different than the past though. I barely remember the pre-2007 internet.

― Treeship, Thursday, July 16, 2015 10:57 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Again - however anarchic and freeform the web may have been in (say) 1995-2000, its glories were largely reserved for those with computers and good connections. Technically literate people at the time implied a pretty affluent (and strongly white and male) subset.

If you were not technically literate you could go to a public library and ask someone for help. Or use it at school.

LOL @ the 'glories' of the 1995-2000 internet. This is the era of 56k capped dial-up, where you would have to browse w images turned off if you wanted to get anywhere without waiting for things to load. Usenet was fine, Napster or FTP good for pirating, and HTML for band fan pages. It felt more freeform because it was decentralized, the internet was there and you accessed it through various different programs. Nowadays everyone sees it on the same 2 or 3 platforms.

You should look back even earlier from the 70s to the mid-90s at BBS culture for the true anarchic web. Homebrew personal internets, often crossing the Iron Curtain, East-West Germany, and other places, subverting the geography of the Cold War. The internet is accessible to anyone as long as they get the knowledge and tech.

Another reason the internet wasn't walled-off is that flood of "50 Free Hours" AOL CDs there must be landfills full of those.

honestly i'm not necessarily nostalgic about those days

i guess i just feel like in the last 3 or so years more and more outlets for good writing and good content have gone down and the pace seems to be accelerating, and more and more writers (tons of ones who i was colleagues with) have just said fuck it (as have I!) and just went into PR and marketing or other stuff....

which is concerning because i enjoy good writing

BBS culture for the true anarchic web. Homebrew personal internets, often crossing the Iron Curtain, East-West Germany, and other places, subverting the geography of the Cold War. The internet is accessible to anyone as long as they get the knowledge and tech.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, July 16, 2015 8:38 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i never liked usenet, personally. but i only used it once or twice and it kind of frightened me.

i used bbs the most, and i thought it was so cool.

the problem with the Internet came about when the Web became popular and people started talking about "commerce", which happened really early on than what i see people saying here.

but bbs was only cool precisely because it was closed off to a lot of people. after that, it's the typical sell-out syndrome, though. it happens when things become big and popular/mainstream.

but the 90s weren't so bad. what is depressing now is the scalability of it all. e-commerce and monetary value is entrenched in every single aspect of the web.

i have a friend who was a bit of an anarcho-hacker back in the 90s and up until 7 years ago he would broadcast his printer and internet connection so people can access it freely. it's that idea that the web was never meant to be about making money left and right wherever, however you could from the user. now it's the opposite. ironically, this guy went on to work for facebook after his firstborn and became the epitome of a dad, which is fine. but these really smart guys are now building smart tools to help big corpos monetise web use any way they can, because they want to support their growing family.

things can be better -- i'm not saying it's all bad compared to before -- but when you have the majority of devs in silicon valley working on making shiny apps that help me wipe my behind better because it makes him rich, there's something askew about it all.

some asshole is making money off me right now i just know it

blog about your enabler status

no even just from my sitting here

at least i'm worth more alive than dead for the time being

reform or revolt

but facebork says there are boobies trending

although i guess every modern generation has complained about ennui.

― Treeship, Wednesday, July 15, 2015 8:30 PM (Yesterday)

this

i used bbs the most, and i thought it was so cool.

I was in an ansi art group when I was 14 and thought I was the fucking coolest dude ever

fwiw,

Erin Kissane
‏@kissane
BLOGS ARE DEAD yell tech dudes in an empty room next to a carnival of wildly popular DIY fashion and beauty bloggers, religion bloggers, boo

― the most painstaking, humorless people in the world (lukas), Thursday, July 16, 2015 3:03 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, i dont think that the like... SPIRIT of the internet is dead, by any means, just go on tumblr, but i think where there used to be a kind of janky framework of interconnected personal tilde-fronted pages and janky geocities and listservs and whatever else, everything is mediated by an incresasingly smaller set of very large, creeiply smooth, and rather fickle corporations. not to be THE MONEY RUINED IT MAN but the money ruined it, man

keep interweb janky

max's post above about the internet consolidating rings true to experience but at same time the internet is also expanding faster than ever right now?? there's a race between the natural uh entropy of the network and the forces of consolidation, idk if that tension is solely resolved by consolidation winning

also the consolidation has some positive aspects, right? like i'm sure everyone who posts in goon threads has fond memories of the early rap blog era. but a lot of those writers are now getting $ to write for complex or noisey or npr or whatever, for a wider audience. so you lose some of the independence & hyper-specificity, but the writers and their potential audiences gain

― flopson, Thursday, July 16, 2015 2:10 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

without really knowing how any of this is going to shake out or if any of it will change i think the big things on the horizon that could make things better/worse/both are like

- apple, google, and facebook essentially teaming up to fully kill most online advertising--the big meme in the Best and the Brightest-type tech circles right now is about page load time--apple building adblock into mobile safari and facebook trying to swallow external content, etc.

- the consequent & real death of web sites in favor of apps--yr home screen turns into a notifications scroll

- the block chain idk???

the end result is everyone living in pods deep in converted abandoned big box stores on the far edge of suburbs, jerking off to their ock rifts, soylent flowing into the epidural

i wonder if this ("this" the Great Late Internet Malaise or w/e) wouldn't be solved by much stricter internet access rules for people who work in offices. if eyeballs are the prize now, the attention economy, etc, well, that would artificially constrict the aperture through which all this bullshit has to flow

a pointless suggestion i know. but norms of work for people not doing physical or attentive labor seems like a big part of what's going on.

think about this: you know those pictures showing an old tv, phone, clock, calendar, etc and saying "this fits in your pocket now!" well imagine a picture of a stack of every single newspaper and magazine printed out daily, vhs's of funny animals and pratfalls, a few vaguely dirty jokebooks -- "it's totally ok to just flip through all this shit at your desk!"

― goole, Wednesday, July 15, 2015 5:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think about this a lot. no one has a job anymore! advertising is like a WPA for "knowledge workers." samsung funded five years worth of tech blogging + hundreds if not thousands of bloggers, sellers, copywriters, ad tech people, etc. i almost buy the idea that we're living in full communism, it just hasnt been distributed yet. seen from an angle amazon is just a wealth redistribution system. rich investors losing money so you can buy goods more cheaply.

we're living in full communism, it just hasnt been distributed yet

idk what you mean by communism

the end result is everyone living in pods deep in converted abandoned big box stores on the far edge of suburbs, jerking off to their ock rifts, soylent flowing into the epidural

but employed and better off than ever, don't forget.

what the knowledge economy is working on is deploying all possible knowledge within its frame, that's the real singularity imo

xp also rich investors aren't losing money.

I wonder what Ned thinks? I think of him as "the watcher" of the Internet, like plugged into every network

no one has a job anymore!

very few ppl are currently doing necessary or productive work anymore but i feel like thats super different from 'no one has a job anymore!'?

Maybe I should start one of those twee donut places

very few ppl are currently doing necessary or productive work anymore but i feel like thats super different from 'no one has a job anymore!'?

― affluent white (Lamp), Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:07 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a seldom acknowledged but very scary & fucked up trend is that demand for jobs that make intensive use of workers' "cognitive skills" has been declining since the turn of the millenium in the US http://www.nber.org/papers/w18901

without really knowing how any of this is going to shake out or if any of it will change i think the big things on the horizon that could make things better/worse/both are like

- apple, google, and facebook essentially teaming up to fully kill most online advertising--the big meme in the Best and the Brightest-type tech circles right now is about page load time--apple building adblock into mobile safari and facebook trying to swallow external content, etc.

- the consequent & real death of web sites in favor of apps--yr home screen turns into a notifications scroll

- the block chain idk???

the end result is everyone living in pods deep in converted abandoned big box stores on the far edge of suburbs, jerking off to their ock rifts, soylent flowing into the epidural

― max, Thursday, July 16, 2015 6:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't get the killing online advertisement stuff, don't google and facebook sell info to online advertisers? why would they want to kill them off just so pages load faster? i don't really understand the big deal with the facebook native content thing either, just doesnt seem like it would work

it's hard for me to imagine things taking a drastic turn for the worst wrt online media. i feel like a lot of the pain from the transition out of print is behind us now. maybe that's naive idk just a feeling

that's pretty accurate, i'd say.

big business has been wanting to automate content for a long time now, and they've reached their limits. most of the sports news you see instantly published is about the only thing that is automatically generated that looks somewhat deceiving. stock stuff, as well. anything data-driven or number-heavy basically.

in the end, they know they need one dweeb proofreading that stuff or fact-checking things to make it look more organically written and more enticing to read. what's saddening is content is being produced to game a system where more clicks means better conversion rates. so you get english majors writing seo'd buzzfeed listicles. so companies pay them $10 an hour or per article and they end up barely scraping by. the bar is just really low.

and it's just safari that will be blocking ads, as far as i know. google is essentially an ad company, so it's difficult to imagine they'd want ads to disappear completely.

change is a constant. i was bitter for a couple years after usenet drowned in a sea of garbage. then i changed enough to not be bitter anymore.

at the time, '95-'00, there were plenty of people bemoaning the "imminent death of the net", and i wholly embraced any change that broke down cliquishness, opened discourse to anybody who wasn't a computer nerd. i didn't see, probably couldn't foresee, that the internet would turn into a replica of a high school.

the problem with the internet is, i believe, a basic one of design. the people who designed it were technologically and not socially oriented. they were, fundamentally, optimists. they believed in the cold war ideology of freedom, that if we broke down the barriers dividing people we would make a better world. they believed that people and computers alike were fundamentally trustworthy.

these basic assumptions are unsustainable in the face of current reality. professionally, i deal with privacy and security. right now on the internet we do not have either in any meaningful form. this has devastating social consequences. the social consequences are not the worst problem right now.

the paradox of privacy and security is that without security, privacy is impossible, but to implement security, the existing models of privacy will have to be utterly destroyed. we're not just dealing with the close of the internet's golden age, but of its iron age.

if we design a system that is, by its nature, paranoid, we may reach a point where we stop requiring human beings to be paranoid to use the internet at all. imagine a world where you could speak your mind without fear of reprisal. now think about how different that is from the internet today.

but i think where there used to be a kind of janky framework of interconnected personal tilde-fronted pages and janky geocities and listservs and whatever else

but this was always a small group of people compared to today's 3 billion internet users ... and probably there are more of them now rather than less? (if you include blogspot / wordpress blogs.)

but i mean, yeah. i get it. the direction looks bad. i'm actually considering implementing some geeky decentralized social web shit just ... because. in my optimistic moments i talk about pendulum swings.

it's hard for me to imagine things taking a drastic turn for the worst wrt online media. i feel like a lot of the pain from the transition out of print is behind us now. maybe that's naive idk just a feeling

nah things are definitely bad for online publishers, who pretty much operate like print publishers for a long time. online ad spend is getting more and more automated, the supply of online ad space is ever expanding, everyone is looking at your page on their phone now which is not a great place to show an ad, your entire company's fate is in the hands of fb and google and who knows what next year (and btw zuckerberg is wondering if you want to just stop making a website).

who pretty much operated*

not to be THE MONEY RUINED IT MAN but the money ruined it, man

I feel like the money-was-coming side of this was inevitable, but one thing I wonder is if the corporate monopolies were natural. was only-one-search-engine inevitable? could we be living in a world w/ 5 pretty good search engines right now? people could rib each other for their search engine choices at parties?

one fb-type social network of record does seem like it was kinda inevitable, but lots of aspects of how it developed that just seem like a part of the world now - 'likes', the newsfeed as it exists weren't.

I work for a digital publication that's never been print and therefore never had to deal with that transition but regardless, the ad revenue is down, probably 50% of what it was five years ago. So the revenue crisis is not just about the transition.

Basically what happened to the Internet is that it matured into google/facebook/apple, with each of these being a virtual monopoly in its field, as is the way of late capitalism. The big things have happened. Start ups will continue to be sold for millions or billions, but you'll never have two guys in a garage becoming google or facebook or apple again.

Personally, I think it's pretty scary the power these guys have over content. If all content ends up being read in a Facebook app then that gives them enormous power over what content gets most visibility. In my company we had an entire business that was destroyed when Google changed its algorithms.

i don't get the killing online advertisement stuff, don't google and facebook sell info to online advertisers? why would they want to kill them off just so pages load faster? i don't really understand the big deal with the facebook native content thing either, just doesnt seem like it would work

it's hard for me to imagine things taking a drastic turn for the worst wrt online media. i feel like a lot of the pain from the transition out of print is behind us now. maybe that's naive idk just a feeling

― flopson, Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think i mean web advertising specifically; obviously facebook and google sell attentive users looking for specific things, without advertising they wouldn't make money! but facebook notices that when you click off of it to another page, especially from your phone. it takes x microseconds faster to load than it would if it were hosted on facebook itself; over the long term users associate that slow load time with facebook, spend less time on facebook, etc.

i dont think facebook native content will work either, but until the internet shifts again toward decentralization and away from platforms and all-in-one apps, some kind of hosted content product will become prevalent. probably not the norm but not odd to see. ny times reporting on iran via decayed minions macros on instagram.

I feel like the money-was-coming side of this was inevitable, but one thing I wonder is if the corporate monopolies were natural. was only-one-search-engine inevitable? could we be living in a world w/ 5 pretty good search engines right now? people could rib each other for their search engine choices at parties?

one fb-type social network of record does seem like it was kinda inevitable, but lots of aspects of how it developed that just seem like a part of the world now - 'likes', the newsfeed as it exists weren't.

― iatee, Thursday, July 16, 2015 9:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i wonder this a lot too! i jokingly argue for the nationalization of google and facebook but i kind of do think they should at least be declared some kind of common carriers. i REALLY think the post office should launch its own endearingly janky "public option" social network.

We had three or four search engines before Google too, but (my recollection is) only one at a time, they would come up and crush all opposition, but Google seemed good enough to stick. I think you'd at best end up with "Safari's default search engine" vs "Chrome's default search engine" vs etc etc - in fact you kind of have that now (assuming that IE's is Bing?).

I think that Google being that big has actually been crucial to surviving the dotcom crash (a major contributing factor to which was the realisation that the conversion rates for online advertising was TERRIBLE, when a lot of business models had been built around it). One Search Engine = one target for SEO optimisation and one reliable source for ad sales (at one point Google AdSense was making half of the global profit on online advertising - more money than Microsoft was making selling Windows).

I think you'd at best end up with "Safari's default search engine" vs "Chrome's default search engine" vs etc etc - in fact you kind of have that now (assuming that IE's is Bing?).

soon we will have siri vs google now, probably!

vs Cortana, too.

But yeah, in ten years kids will probably look back in the same wonder (about SOMETHING) that kids today feel that you couldn't just type stuff into the title bar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJ6IhY9lzo

pls to confirm tht by using adblock i am helping bring down capitalism thx

yeah i wonder this a lot too! i jokingly argue for the nationalization of google and facebook but i kind of do think they should at least be declared some kind of common carriers

― max, Friday, July 17, 2015 7:28 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://twitter.com/fl0pson/status/527588884012892160

i think this by brad delong in 2000 was pretty prescient

http://www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/726/635

The case for the market system has always rested on three implicit pillars, three features of the way that property rights and exchange worked:

Call the first feature excludability: the ability of sellers to force consumers to become buyers, and thus to pay for whatever goods and services they use.

Call the second feature rivalry: a structure of costs in which two cannot partake as cheaply as one, in which producing enough for two million people to use will cost at least twice as many of society's resources as producing enough for one million people to use.

Call the third feature transparency: the ability of individuals to see clearly what they need and what is for sale, so that they truly know just what they wish to buy.

...

There is every indication that they will fit the 21st-century economy relatively poorly [7].

...

In the absence of excludability, industries today and tomorrow are likely to fall prey to analogous distortions. Producers' revenue streams, wherever they come from, will be only tangentially related to the intensity of user demand. Thus, the flow of money through the market will not serve its primary purpose of registering the utility of the commodity being produced. There is no reason to think ex ante that the commodities that generate the most attractive revenue streams paid by advertisers or by ancillary others will be the commodities that ultimate consumers would wish to see produced.

...

[I]f goods are non-rival - if two can consume as cheaply as one - then charging a per-unit price to users artificially restricts distribution. To truly maximize social welfare, we need a system that supplies everyone whose willingness to pay for the good is greater than the marginal cost of producing another copy. If the marginal cost of reproduction of a digital good is near zero, that means almost everyone should have it for almost no charge. However, charging a price equal to marginal cost almost surely leaves the producer bankrupt, with little incentive to maintain the product except for the hope of maintenance fees. There is no incentive to make another one except that warm, fuzzy feeling one gets from impoverishing oneself for the general good.

...

Thus we have a dilemma. If the price of a digital good is above the marginal cost of making an extra copy, some people who truly ought (in the best of all possible worlds) to be using it do not get to have it. The system of exchange that we have developed is getting in the way of a certain degree of economic prosperity. But if price is not above the marginal cost of making an extra copy of a non-rival good, the producer will not be paid enough to cover costs. Without non-financial incentives, all but the most masochistic producer will get out the business of production.

More important, perhaps, is that the existence of large numbers of important and valuable goods that are non-rival casts doubt upon the value of competition itself. Competition has been the standard way of keeping individual producers from exercising power over consumers. If you don't like the terms the producer is offering, you can just go down the street. But this use of private economic power to check private power may come at a high cost if competitors spend their time duplicating each other's efforts and attempting to slow down technological development in the interest of obtaining a compatibility advantage, or creating a compatibility or usability disadvantage for the other competitor.

One traditional answer to this problem (now in total disfavor) was to set up a government regulatory commission to control the "natural monopoly." The commission would set prices and would do the best it could to simulate a socially optimum level of production. On the eve of World War I, when American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), under the leadership of its visionary CEO, Theodore N. Vail, began its drive for universal coverage, a political consensus formed rapidly both in Washington and within AT&T that the right structural form for the telephone industry was a privately owned, publicly regulated national monopoly.

Google should totally be nationalized and regulated like a utility imo

xp

idk despite tweeting that i think it's p obviously a terrible idea. like, at what point should we have nationalized google? when it had a monopoly on search engines? after gmail? would we now have all kinds of sick shit like maps, streetview, scholar etc if we had then? obviously not. google isn't really a "utility" cause it keeps producing new crazy shit, and spending tonnes of money on r&d for stuff that doesn't pan out. from today's pov we can't imagine the future stuff their r&d might produce, how much shittier products would be if nationalized etc and i don't think those losses would outweigh the benefit from nationalization

vs Cortana, too.

But yeah, in ten years kids will probably look back in the same wonder (about SOMETHING) that kids today feel that you couldn't just type stuff into the title bar.

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, July 17, 2015 12:52 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idg cortana, afaict you ask a question and it looks up some of the words you said on Bing and shows you the search results

xp You are aware that, say, NASA was not actually a for-profit company?

I am pretty sure there would be a good online maps company in a world without google. youtube, gmail, maps and the search engine could totally be torn into separate companies without the world ending.

Mapquest would have had a multi billion dollar IPO by now.

FWIW the integration is actually one of the things I really dislike about Google - it seems much more designed for optimal advertising and data harvesting than optimal user experience. And stop trying to get me to do shit on google plus already!

xxp i am aware nasa was not actually a for-profit company (however a lot of early developments in space were privately funded, and the vast maj only became public during the cold war--although that's just a historical tidbit.) my argument (that google offers & develops lots of services and products many of which don't exist yet and shouldn't be regulated the same way as electricity) applies to google specifically. FTR i think governments should spend way more on r&d than they currently do, but i don't think nationalizing the companies that spend a lot on r&d is an obviously good thing, i would have to be convinced i guess

the alternative (ie, the one we currently have) seems p shitty to me

republicanson

google isn't really a "utility" cause it keeps producing new crazy shit

as iatee notes, this is hardly an obstacle - nationalize the utility part (ie, the search engine), they can keep their ridiculous R&D shit

(if you can't guess I'm not exactly impressed with their self-driving cars and facecomputers etc.)

there are similar arguments about the most efficient ways of doing drug research, and who benefits

BBC Radiophonic Workshop is another example - there is absolutely nothing about innovation which requires a private company.

kinda tangential but something that 1000% should be nationalised, imo as a branch of the library of congress, is the internet archive. like it should just be funded at arm's length because it is holding the internet up.

this is kind of a tangent though

the carles article identifies the nut of the problem posed by the thread, the difficulty facing us now

as iatee notes, this is hardly an obstacle - nationalize the utility part (ie, the search engine), they can keep their ridiculous R&D shit

― Οὖτις, Friday, July 17, 2015 12:23 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think is simple and probably not feasible. they use the money from utilities to fund the R&D shit

m@tt- i'm not a republican >_< there is no party whose platform is to nationalize google and there never will be. i even said in another thread i thought nationalizing uber would be a good idea! i just don't think you can make the case as easily for goog. also i just posted a long thoughtful thing about how to regulate markets on the internet when excludability & rivalry no longer apply, i'm not anti regulating shit in the least i just think u gotta think about it

there is absolutely nothing about innovation which requires a private company.

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, July 17, 2015 12:26 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree 100% that the state has a huge role in innovation, and that they should pursue that role way more aggressively than they currently do. but private companies also have a role

particularly in turning innovations into products ppl can use, which was exactly my reason for not nationalizing google

flop - honestly i was just joking there!

the reason they can fund their ridiculous R&D shit is because of their obscene monopoly-derived profits. It's true my proposal isn't "feasible" from Google's POV - it would destroy their company - which would be fine with me. Company has created enough billionaires that could go off and fund their own R&D-oriented startups anyway.

Google should totally be nationalized and regulated like a utility imo

xp

― Οὖτις, Friday, July 17, 2015 11:28 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk despite tweeting that i think it's p obviously a terrible idea. like, at what point should we have nationalized google? when it had a monopoly on search engines? after gmail? would we now have all kinds of sick shit like maps, streetview, scholar etc if we had then? obviously not. google isn't really a "utility" cause it keeps producing new crazy shit, and spending tonnes of money on r&d for stuff that doesn't pan out. from today's pov we can't imagine the future stuff their r&d might produce, how much shittier products would be if nationalized etc and i don't think those losses would outweigh the benefit from nationalization

― flopson, Friday, July 17, 2015 11:45 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not to be the guy who always brings up the Bell System, but that would be a nice example of a privately-held monopoly that while never (permanently) nationalized (nor ever a complete monopoly in all of its fields) was super super heavily regulated, and whose R&D arm still produced much sicker shit than google ever has: transistors, digital switching, cell phones, lasers, fiber optic transmission, and apparently evidence for the big bang (?!). they did this within the specific profit margins/dividend payouts they could get away with under the regulated system; the monopoly on long-distance underwrote both the research efforts and the provision of low-rate local service. so there are models that stop short of nationalization, but offer provisions for, as i was rambling about on the uber thread, "the public" or policy leaders to assert "this is the kind of technical infrastructure we want to have. if you can provide that, then great. if not, no dice." so the bigger question would have to be what kind of technical infrastructure do we want to have, and in what specific ways does google exceed the boundaries of this, and will that ever be a big enough issue that the political climate would allow government to step in. privacy issues seem like a potential big one. the paradox is that it would, i agree, have been more feasible for the public to assert this control a long time back, but until google was an effective monopoly it would not have seemed necessary.

it could alternately be an anti-trust "we just don't want this one company to run too many things" - like how AT&T was ultimately forced to get out of the computer business (ceding it to, it turned out, another effective monopoly in IBM. darn that military-industrial complex!). given the patriot act, etc., i'm not sure the government has much credibility on the whole "privacy" front but generally speaking i do sort of prefer the idea of there just being Email and Searching, like there was just Phone Service. some kind of hard guarantees that your correspondence is not being sold to third parties, etc. i honestly don't have any idea though - what's google's operating budget (versus R&D, marketing, whatever else they spend money on)? like how much does it cost just to provide all this email and searching infrastructure? i really have no idea whether in a nationalization scenario it would be like, the size of the post office or the size of the national park rangers or what. would be awesome if government email could balance the post office budget though. maybe they'd invent an app to figure out why the bushwick branch office is such a complete shitshow.

actually it's funny how much this thread is overlapping with the recent contents of the uber thread, re: 3-day workweek, etc.

also yeah the maps thing was happening anyway with mapquest. and the ready access to satellite imagery first appeared i think with microsoft terraserver. the funny thing is that google maps has obviously gotten much, much worse in the last year or two as the monetizable clicks (restaurants) are actually driving the UI. it's, i assume deliberately, become absurdly easy to click away from what you're actually trying to do and onto some stupid fast-casual concept taco operation, and absurdly hard to do things most people actually want. that's maybe a petty example, but the point is that the profit motive is certainly driving various inventions, but it's not clear that all of them are beneficial to the public. i wonder if google has any "we killed the electric car" type skeletons in their closet - amazing, useful inventions that would make the internet less shitty and more useful for everybody, but which cut into the bottom line. strikes me as totally plausible but it's a hypothetical i admit.

the funny thing is that google maps has obviously gotten much, much worse in the last year or two as the monetizable clicks (restaurants) are actually driving the UI.

Er, that depends a lot on what you use it for! I only need it to show me where a postcode is, how to get there from work, and how to get home from there. And sometimes how to peer around it in Google Street View* - all of those are fine. And all of them except the last could be done as well using the perfectly fine government-created Transport for London's website / app - except that when I see a postcode in Chrome, I can select it, right click, and there's a 'search for SE12AQ' option which leads me to a page, which will have a map on it. I think some folk in this thread are really undervaluing the integration of Google as regards being where you go to get information.

*curious as to whether it would have less coverage as Gubmint Street View.

Gawker, he declares, will always “report on married <...> executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives.” What about when the cheating executives are women and the spouse is a man? He doesn’t say.

In fairness, it's pretty clear from reading it that this isn't a Profound Ethical Policy that reveals Max as a misogynist - it's "what do I have to excuse today?" - it says wife because this guy has a wife.

Hah, wrong thread, sorry.

pls to confirm tht by using adblock i am helping bring down capitalism thx

― 2011’s flagrantly ceremonious rock-opera (Bananaman Begins), Friday, July 17, 2015 3:36 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

only skimmed the last few posts but just some thoughts.

adblock + ghostery do affect marketing/advertising companies. so keep doing it if you want to voice your opinion that way.

also an alternative to google is duckduckgo: https://duckduckgo.com/

it isn't perfect but it works pretty well.

i don't understand why people would want to nationalise a company that produces rigged results. obviously google has rigged search. so that page with no links/backlinks and no seo/optimization will never appear in your search, or, if it does, it'll be close to dead last. and even with all of that, if it's a popular keyword, you have to pay your way to the top. which is why search results are dominated by large companies/entities

search is one of the biggest things in tech that is prime for disruption, sorry to use garbage biz slang

Users of adblock, duckduckgo, etc. are a self-selecting population (people motivated to try to avoid advertising and savvy enough to do it in a non-stupid way). Which means advertising will be aimed more and more at reaching and motivating stupid people / nontechnical people.

Thanks a lot savvy jerks.

the thing that's always confused me about the entire modern web economy being based on advertising is...who the hell are these people clicking on ads and spending money based on them? obviously they exist, but it's hard to relate to.

advertising all content will be aimed more and more at reaching and motivating stupid people / nontechnical people.

that sure is a hardworking slash

cat-walking-across-desk clicks, all of them

all content will be slash

the thing that's always confused me about the entire modern web economy being based on advertising is...who the hell are these people clicking on ads and spending money based on them? obviously they exist, but it's hard to relate to.

― lil urbane (Jordan), Friday, July 17, 2015 10:09 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you don't have to click on it. a lot of times all it has to do is load in the browser.

you don't have to search far for an example, because this forum uses (used?) ads to pay for the servers this site is hosted on, isn't it?

i always have ad blocker on, so i don't know if they're still going the ad route.

i recall there was a fundraiser, so that might've been enough to remove ads for the next year or so on the site?

anyway, if you use an ad blocker, those sites you may like kind of suffer. then again, you can just give them some money, which i think works better.

aside from the harbingers of what's to come...

in some ways, the last few years have been kind of a golden age surely? there has never been such a breadth of information available. don't like 2.0 social media stuff? you don't have to use it (yet). the gated walls have started to appear but they certainly haven't closed in.

i mean this is an obvious point, but surely the ennui is simply a matter of having too much of a good thing. along with faster (broadband) and unrelenting (smartphones, spending more time at a computer for work etc.) access to it. roman-emperor-after-an-orgy vibes.

people still haven't quite adjusted from the scarcity mentality that has characterised anything good prior to the industrial revolution.

sure, i just mean that advertisers must see enough return on their investment that they keep paying for ad space, and that in itself boggles my mind. i have an irrational fear that one day they'll realize that no one pays attention to the garbage white noise pop-ups and sidebars, and it'll all come crashing down.

xp

They have an advertising budget to spend.

lots of unscientific ad spending happens on pretty much every medium

yeah, it's kind of hilarious how much companies spend on ads just for the hell of it.

anyway, relevant article regarding safari on mobile being able to block ads, as a refresher: http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/a-blow-for-mobile-advertising-the-next-version-of-safari-will-let-users-block-ads-on-iphones-and-ipads/

The potential impact of “Content Blocking Safari Extensions” even goes beyond blocked ads. Apple is explicitly allowing the blocking of cookies on a site-by-site basis. For example, you could build an extension that blocked the cookies that allow a newspaper paywall to work. The Yourtown Times allows you 10 stories free a month? It’s probably using a cookie to keep track of that count. Block that cookie and the paywall comes tumbling down — you’re a fresh visitor every time. Imagine being able to download an extension that blocked paywall cookies on the top 50 paid news sites. It wouldn’t even be particularly hard to code; unless Apple chooses to prevent it, someone will do it. News sites would be able to build workarounds — changing cookie IDs regularly, requiring user login from article 1 — but winning that sort of cat-and-mouse game is something publishers are unlikely to be good at.

lots of unscientific ad spending happens on pretty much every medium

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker.

Market leaders don't need to be able to track ROI for every dollar of ad spending, though, to think they're still justified in doing the spending.

Cf. Tracy Flick in "Election": "Coca-Cola is by far the world's number one soft drink and they spend more money than anybody on advertising. I guess that's how come they stay number one."

The idea is that if you see the brand "Coke" frequently enough, there's a greater chance that when you would otherwise think "I want a soda" you instead think "I want a Coke." So they want it blinking at you from every purchasable surface, as often as possible. You don't need to click on an ad and then make a conscious purchasing decision based on your affection for (or agreement with) those ads.

^^^

advertising is such a shell-game it's a sad miracle so much of our economy is funded by it

like THAT'S the mysterious blackhole our capitalistic overlords are happiest about throwing money into

labor, r&d, long-term investments eh not so much

you don't have to search far for an example, because this forum uses (used?) ads to pay for the servers this site is hosted on, isn't it?

for un-logged-in users only iirc, although maybe the funding was an issue as to whether ads would have to be shown to all?

Personally, I'd endure the possibility of seeing an ad if that were the price to pay for ilx. Probably better than assuming it's all magical and free and there's no friction or gravity at work in the world.

Maybe I'd draw the line at "jjusten (brought to you by Electro-Harmonix)"

What if we have to make sponsored posts sometimes. "sorry, had to take a break to refresh with a glass of water and some vyvanse (ask your doctor!) anyway that gawker, tsk tsk"

the golden of the internet has yet to come

adblock isn't about capitalism. it's about security. allowing ads on your browser is putting your computer at severe and immediate risk. effectively monetizing content is the least of our concerns right now.

It think it's fairly clearly about convenience? These ads distract me - this product will remove them.

my computer is fuckin aged, it can't take the hit of loading unnecessary bullshit

at this point adblock has moved to a security issue because of the constant bugs where someone can insert malicious content onto a page with an ad, and then inject malware.

for me the more pressing matter is whether carles is right that ultra-optimized, contentless posts in volume for a general audience will always beat quality posts on a particular subject. like if you are an investor in a middling sized media company, which would you want to see more of? it's a rephrasing of a very old question, obvs - these tensions have always existed - but has the clear runaway success of the content farm model tilted the answer decisively (for the present moment at least?) i hear stories about websites where writers are told to produce 4 articles every... hour

That doesn't surprise me. I went over to the dark side but sometimes we would joke about web stories among ourselves like how dumb is this I bet it will do 20k hits in an hour... It was almost predictable like the worse it was the better it would do

last summer when i was really desperate for money i tried to make some doing true content-farm writing, mocking up phony blog posts on set 'topics', the whole job seemed to involved appropriating content from elsewhere and casting it into their format to look 'original', but i was terrible at it, maybe i should have plagiarized a little in college so i would have learned a useful life skill

Truth. A friend of mine, currently funemployed, recently found that some work done for $15/hour via elance was being repackaged and sold again on Fiverr, presumably for $5. It is a ridiculous and mostly bottom-feeding economy.

Some American English-major types, who live in gleaming cities with high costs-of-living, have approached this economy with the expectation of a white-collar income. They are in competition with subcontinental labor that will do just-good-enough work for far less.

So, woe unto my fellow English-major types who live in gleaming cities with high costs-of-living. They would be better off seeking salaried PR, advertising, or technical writing jobs - for which the competition is still fierce, but it has the potential of allowing them to continue to live in their tiny apartments in said gleaming cities, and occasionally getting kick-ass ethnic takeout.

ars technica just posted something on content farms:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/inside-an-online-content-mill-or-writing-4156-words-a-day-just-to-earn-lunch-money/

my feeling is that content farms, like email spam, are an internet problem of the past. the people who came up with these brilliant ideas no longer want your clicks; they just want to control your computer and extort you for money to decrypt your files.

well there are actual content farms like that and then there is viralnova, playbuzz etc which i guess are the "highbrow" alternative :/

that's a good report from inside the beast though. i could read those all day.

The internet has merely centralized and streamlined the cacophony.

In the end, I submitted such fine platitudes as “In the end, a corn maze is a sight to see.”

If there's one thing about the golden age of Internet, it's that it's always been gone.

i did that for a couple years. six "articles" a day, five days a week. my politics changed.

i wrote a really good one once explaining what a computer file was. that was my happiest moment. i still think of it.

The golden age of *everything* has always been gone.

http://bitterempire.com/on-social-media-culture-and-the-hellscape-of-writing-in-the-era-of-new-media/

the hardest part was finding writable articles in their giant dump of seo-bomb topics, most of which were garbage (based on searches that had had no successful results, or had been misconstrued by the wretched peons who converted them to topic sentences) and many of the rest of which required actual research and care and couldn't be written quickly enough to be worth it. sometimes i would write the same article again and again, changing the words each time. eventually the topics slowed to a drip and then dried up completely, sending the forums that had until then mostly just been where people posted the depressingly awful premises of their uncompleted novels into horrifying lamentation.

The golden age of *everything* has always been gone.

Going back a bit:

i don't understand why people would want to nationalise a company that produces rigged results. obviously google has rigged search. so that page with no links/backlinks and no seo/optimization will never appear in your search, or, if it does, it'll be close to dead last. and even with all of that, if it's a popular keyword, you have to pay your way to the top. which is why search results are dominated by large companies/entities

search is one of the biggest things in tech that is prime for disruption, sorry to use garbage biz slang

Is there some objective idea of 'searchability' that you reckon should drive up a page with no links and no links to it? Google are fairly clear that "stuff you find via a lot of links" is one of the main ingredients of it's magic spice.

Beyond that there are a few things that you can do, which is why SEO is an industry. But SEO is like advertising in that you're paying for some, and some is visibly better than none, but beyond that it gets a little unclear. Obviously Google is never going to say "these guys here appear to have figured out our algorithm", not least because the algorithm's always changing.

Unless you are going full conspiracy, and you reckon there's a line of code that goes "if $seocheckhascleared", which would be suicide - it couldn't stay secret, and people would abandon Google - no-one would use a pay-to-play* search engine.

It would also be stupid suicide, because beyond "no-one has paid for this", all people really want is the most popular results, and nobody's that bothered that this is kind of a cyclical definition.

*I'm assuming you're not actually freaking out about people being able to buy denoted ads for certain keywords, right?

there is a human-social-behavior premise behind the use of the algorithm, too, which is that people will link to things that are of value to people. if there's something really that valuable that no one at all links to then… welp… maybe they need to be getting the word out themselves?

yeah... but... the value of a search engine is also to find things that people AREN'T linking to. like if i'm searching some obscure subject, i would be very happy to find the obsessive loner's deep but utterly overlooked site rich with information and old scanned documents or whatever, even though it is a musty, unloved site linked to by no one. like this was a lot of the promise of the "old internet" - whatever you search, someone out there is working hard on it! - and why it's always so delightful to find a 1998-era site of that type. i dunno. it's sorta like how these days, searching for a band and their lyrics will turn up a hundred bad auto-generated lyrics database sites and bury the site where someone has been analyzing their lyrics in response-poems for the last ten years or whatever. be nice to find the latter once in a while. i'm just an old crank though.

Maybe what Dr. Casino needs is a search engine that automatically filters out anything Google's algorithms would have boosted, on the presumption that anything Google boosts is either too obvious to bother with, or is probably being gamed/rigged. An ungoogle, an Elgoog.

The metaphor could be the way the Dead's old sound system worked (two microphones run out of phase; any signal common to both is removed by summing the equal and opposite waveforms).

http://www.theawl.com/2014/10/cash-and-anxiety-on-the-weird-new-internet

like this was a lot of the promise of the "old internet" - whatever you search, someone out there is working hard on it! - and why it's always so delightful to find a 1998-era site of that type.

finally clicked the about page a couple weeks ago on a website i've used daily for years and discovered an unexpected memoir of time spent on this web

Sure, and the old internet would have had a gopher site which would have these troves of information, and maybe just written down on a post-it note somewhere by People Who Know, but the web is based on links. If it's on the web, someone somewhere will have linked to it (if they don't, it is effectively not on the web, you dig?), you just need to figure out the correct collection of search terms - an interesting game in itself.

Enjoyed that unexpected memoir. Thanks, dlh.

the old internet still exists. on a whim i was trying to find out more information on commercial 8mm films, and i found a labor-of-love site. you could tell it was a "labor-of-love" site because in the middle of all of this extremely useful information on old film there was a lot of crap about how we should all immediately turn to jesus christ and how plurality is killing this country (by which i can only assume he means america, because really, who else would say that sort of shit?)

be careful what you wish for, people.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/19/ad-tech-online-experience-facebook-apple-news

the bandwidth argument against microtargeted ad bloat

that awl article and kaleb horton's thing are way more what i was talking about really...i'm not like a usenet luddite longing for the days of angelfire sites and shit (though that had its charms)

but in general all the cards seemed to be stacked against good writing, good thinking, good content....

there's great stuff on twitter and i think twitter is far better than facebook because it (supposedly) is a real FEED, not chosen for you from algorhithms. twitter can be toxic as fuck but it feels p authentic..that said it's not doing well financially AND there is a downside to twitter, in terms of i love the freeform convos that happen but it also by nature makes everyone be very "quippy" by nature and isn't great for extended thoughts obv (though that one guy's #howiquitspin thing is great right now)

One thing I do kind of wonder about *the future of the internet* is how much of it will still be text-based. One of my favorite things about ILX is that it's like 90% text in a clean, visually easy format. The internet has probably lead to me reading more total words per week than I ever did before, although they're in shorter bursts. Of course the whole internet-at-work thing limits how much video one can watch, so text still has its utility.

Bill Gates' "Content Is King", written in 1996: http://web.archive.org/web/20010126005200/http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1996essay/essay960103.asp

Pretty good characterisation of the Web now with a couple exceptions.

In the long run, advertising is promising. An advantage of interactive advertising is that an initial message needs only to attract attention rather than convey much information. A user can click on the ad to get additional information-and an advertiser can measure whether people are doing so.

god, if there's one thing i'm always searching for it's additional information about consumer products

http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2015/07/brief-book-reviews-internet-of-garbage.html

review of a book on the problem of online harassment that compares it to the problem of filtering/managing spam

http://textfiles.com/

Lots of old internet/pre-internet text files. Anarchist Cookbook, instructions for Blue Boxes, ASCII art, etc.

this one is gold

http://www.textfiles.com/apple/peeks.pokes.3.1

                                     SOUND
X=PEEK(-16336).TOGGLES the SPEAKER {1 click}
POKE -16336,0..TOGGLES the SPEAKER {1 click (longer then PEEK)}

brilliant site!

pertinent to the matter at hand:

http://textfiles.com/100/bbsdeath.pro

re: internet of garbage: i've developed a certain distrust of those who propose technological solutions for social problems, and i regard the "successful fight against spam" as almost as great a victory as the record industry's fight against commercial bootleg records.

  A user would not only answer his or HER mail, but also butt into other
people's conversations and throw in his/her two cents worth.

this file is brilliant the boy is a prophet

For me personally, the internet was at its most exciting between roughly 1996 and 2002, partly because it was a much simpler time. There used to be a wider variety of fansites - granted, some of them were lacking in content and seemed a bit thrown together for the sake of it, but at times you'd stumble across something where someone had made a real effort to build it up into a great information resource. I spent more time looking at fansites for specific bands/albums/movies etc. because I often found they were bigger and better in content than a lot of the official ones at that time. If I wanted to talk to people I knew, I had an instant messenger. If I wanted to talk about a specific band or whatever, I'd use a newsgroup or sign up for the message board. If I wanted to chew the fat with people I didn't know, I could either IRC or again, use a message board. Most of my time on the internet, though, was pretty much spent idly surfing and seeing what turned up. It also helped that in the pre-Google days, different search engines would yield different results, and Yahoo! even kept a directory for all fansites/official sites etc. It was easy to keep things separate, too: online was online, offline was offline, and the two didn't really meet unless you chose to make it so.

While there was a degree of trolling on the internet back in the '90s, I remember for the most part than anyone who was in a newsgroup or on a message board or on IRC was willing to talk and was there to communicate - and I remember, the occasional "character" aside, it being quite a pleasant experience. Nowadays, I can't help but feel that while there's more people online than ever, more people aren't as willing to communicate... but perversely, at the same time, they're willing to throw as much of themselves at their social media profiles as possible. Back in the '90s/early '00s, I distinctly remember everyone was (understandably, and obviously) much more guarded in that respect, but they were so much more talkative.

I have to admit, I'm not really into social media and prefer to use the internet in a far more old-skool way. While I do have a Facebook, I don't particularly enjoy using it and the majority of the time I tend to use it as an instant messenger, really. When I do browse my News Feed, it tends to be 90% of the time either full of crap that I'm either not interested in, or I just don't want to see. I only have so much patience for wading through pictures of people's dinner, "motivational" quotes, daft opinions, Jeremy Kyle Show-like nonsense, or people putting up cryptic statuses that allude to something catastrophic having happened and then when the gossipers come out out of the woodwork and go "OMG! U ok babes?" they're all like "yeh I'm fine lol". I don't have a Twitter and I definitely don't have an Instagram. I'm just not interested in using the internet to that level. I enjoy using Youtube, but definitely tend to avoid watching Vlogs or daft content, and I don't read blogs unless a search engine turns one up.

I enjoy ILX because, from the looks of it, it hasn't really changed and still has some of the old-skool internet spirit to it. I hope it never changes.

Also, Wikipedia has made searching for information so fucking boring.

aw man, i love wikipedia! it feels like a remnant from the golden age that's still relevant and useful and hasn't sold out

nah Wikipedia beneath the surface is a horrible nest of banally evil nerds playing status games with each other and doing the same old nerds-with-power shit. It's the thought-terminating cliche of the web.

If banally evil nerds decide that fact-checking and editing each other is fertile ground for playing status games, then who am I to object? I don't really care much what's under the surface, so long as the surface itself has some factual information on the subject I'm interested in, presented in an accessible format.

The argument is sometimes made that the result of those "games" is a verbal surface sanitized of opinions contrary to those of that particular nerdosphere. Plus that their criterion of "notoriety" privileges those things they think are notable while producing a loud silence on topics that they don't care about. As long as it retains its penumbra of relative objectivity, it will reinforce the hierarchies resident within the heads of those particular nerds.

Imagine a widely respected, frequently-cited source that had detailed plot summaries for every episode of HBO's "Rome," but only season-level plot arcs for "Charmed." Even if I agree with that editorial judgment (and I do), we should not pretend that there isn't power being wielded, groups of people being privileged, and voices being (however trivially) suppressed.

a verbal surface sanitized of opinions contrary to those of that particular nerdosphere

every encyclopedia has its own nerdosphere and includes some editorial power which suppresses perspectives down to that which it finds acceptable. it comes with the territory. I'm not sure that situation could be avoided without rendering the encyclopedia unusable by anyone.

xpost
i mean, yeah! it would be weird if there weren't power struggles contained within something that is open to editing by anyone and aims to provide information about virtually everything.

at the same time, it nearly always provides what you're looking for (assuming you understand what it is and use it with realistic expectations), there's no real substitute for it, and it's not sponsored by honda or rupert murdoch or john galt. so i for one am comfortable with my go wikipedia stance.

Aimless/Karl, I agree - I'm not saying there's an encyclopedia free of those concerns.

I'm arguing with the assertion that they aren't interesting concerns, or that those concerns don't matter as long as the content is useful and engaging.

To go further, imagine a widely respected, frequently-cited source having richly detailed biographical information about Nathan Bedford Forrest and almost nothing about Sojourner Truth. Reams on Alexander Pope and almost nothing about Aphra Behn. Reams on Cecil Rhodes and almost nothing about Ken Saro-Wiwa.* A rich trove of information on Jar-Jar Binks, accompanied by a loud silence on [insert something you like here].

And it's almost every ninth-grader's first stop before they start writing an essay.

These may all be defensible editorial choices, but they are choices, and it's not weird to be curious who's doing the choosing and how and why.

(* = hypothetical examples chosen off the top of my head - I am not claiming to have exhaustively read/critiqued those specific Wikipedia entries.)

FWIW I think Wikipedia almost always offers the perfect level of detail, neither too much nor too little.

I thought 2002-2006 or so was really exciting too, I loved how sites would crop up for every little niche and would kinda function like books instead of weekly-updated content farms. That was when you had a bunch of sites where people would write up reviews and grades for every single Genesis album, thought that was quite endearing. I don't know if anyone's doing that now.

i don't know if this was ever true, but i loved the era of feeling like if you just kept updating your blog (manually updated painstakingly with terrible HTML (some things never never change for me)) and somehow got the attention of the right person in an appropriate web ring, you could really make it

I think that spirit's def. still alive, with vine / youtube channel / instagram / tumblr instead of hand-coded blog.

"These may all be defensible editorial choices, but they are choices, and it's not weird to be curious who's doing the choosing and how and why."

Is wikipedia even edited in the usual sense? Does anyone co-ordinate contributions? Do editors try to keep down the length of certain articles irrespective of the quality of what's submitted?

the spirit of 20XX is alive in this absurdly deep fountain of alien material
https://alienseries.wordpress.com/

I think there was a slightly sad growing up experience for me as the internet expanded, like there was some point at which it still felt like you could tap into some special sensibility via awareness of a certain meme or video or blog, and by extension, because a blogger could be special merely for reviewing 70s jazz oddities, or for taking photos of x that look like y, or whatever, you felt like maybe you could be special too. Eventually the proliferation and multiplication of all this stuff, not to mention its institutionalization as "viral content" has a way of making you feel very unspecial, even that perhaps no human being is all that special, that we're predictable beings fitting patterns and falling into categories.

D:

http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/mill/crisis.html

I now began to find meaning in the things, which I had read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture. But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of music I had often experienced; but, like all my pleasurable susceptibilities, it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had sought relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this time first became acquainted with Weber's Oberon, and the extreme pleasure which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good by showing me a source of pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was much impaired by the thought that the pleasure of music (as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa [Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels], who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way honourable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue; but that if I could see such an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure; content, as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the general lot.

man alive, it's not that "no human being is all that special".

i think there may be two things going on. either very few humans are special and it is difficult to find them, hence we start to believe no one is special; or we are special but it is difficult for us to figure out what makes us unique from the rest, and worst of all, we are taught to suppress our uniqueness because we are led to believe that we must conform to society's rules. so we feel ashamed at whatever makes us feel different from the rest. homogeneity is the name of the game.

so we see a popular blog and think, oh nice, i like to do that, as well. and johnny boy goes and sets up a blogspot on the very same subject because he sees other people really love it. but no one knows about johnny's interest in ancient or mediaeval concrete poetry.

xp, that is great!

I agree that 2002-2006 was the best time. I loved Diaryland and the Flock browser.

either very few humans are special and it is difficult to find them, hence we start to believe no one is special; or we are special but it is difficult for us to figure out what makes us unique from the rest

I'd say very few human beings are special in the sense that they clearly have gifts that are rarely matched when compared to all the other 7,500,000,000 human beings out there.

However, that global framework is highly artificial and not very reflective of our actual reality, which plays out in a much smaller setting, within which we may be seen as genuinely special. Our importance is better measured by those whom we meet, speak with and affect in our daily lives. Take us away and there is a hole in the fabric of our personal community which cannot be quickly or easily filled.

If you think you need to be a world famous genius to be special, I'd suggest you are belittling yourself needlessly.

Maybe the most special people are those who don't think they are so special. The world is full of special individualists who are really just selfish and insecure jerks.

see, i just don't believe in drawing a line between some notional past and the present, between me as a child twenty years ago and the children of today. because knowingly or not (in my case certainly not), the trolls of twenty years ago like me set the stage for the really obnoxious trollfaces of today.

i also don't believe in an inevitable narrative of decline, although for security reasons i suspect the internet has gone past the event horizon. things get worse, things get better, things get worse again. online discourse is generally pretty bad right now, but stuff we can't predict right now will come along and disrupt the current paradigms. always does.

trying to work through "death of the internet" issues lately.

still believe the internet is doomed due to security issues, but i don't think that makes the underlying social issues merely a sideshow, think their causes and solutions are worth understanding because it may come up again.

random google search for a guy who didn't know what kind of business he was running led me to the wikipedia page for "low context culture". it's a sociological term from the '70s, but i think it has relevance when talking about the net.

due to simple volume, net communication has become necessarily high context. writing a lot of stuff is seen as egotistical, because ain't nobody got time to read all that. concision in writing is preferred.

the problem with high context cultures is that they rely on high levels of social cohesion. and it's hard to apply that to a medium that's already crippled due to its lack of ability to convey inflection and non-verbal tics. given these problems, it's no wonder that the net has become so divided into cliques.

for me this is pretty awful, because i share a high level of cultural context with perhaps a dozen people. the remainder of the world has no idea what i am talking about the vast majority of the time, and i have no opportunity to explain. it gets frustrating.

and this, for me, was the big difference between the internet of 20 years ago and the internet of now: 20 years ago the whole object was expanding cultural context, which seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

I'd say very few human beings are special in the sense that they clearly have gifts that are rarely matched when compared to all the other 7,500,000,000 human beings out there.

However, that global framework is highly artificial and not very reflective of our actual reality, which plays out in a much smaller setting, within which we may be seen as genuinely special. Our importance is better measured by those whom we meet, speak with and affect in our daily lives. Take us away and there is a hole in the fabric of our personal community which cannot be quickly or easily filled.

If you think you need to be a world famous genius to be special, I'd suggest you are belittling yourself needlessly.

― Aimless, Tuesday, July 21, 2015 5:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sure, I think there's just something about spending too much time seeking entertainment via the internet that is conducive to feeling lost among the 7.5 billion. All the more reason why, if I were playing in a band today, for example, I'd be much more interested in building up a local following and being part of a supportive scene then in trying to blow up on youtube.

hm, that's interesting, rushomancy

The separation of worlds is also the case within ilx itself

wikipedia's music entries are another great way to tell the demographics of the editorship and who believes what is important

also, i mean
http://www.livescience.com/48985-wikipedia-editing-gender-gap.html

"A 2011 editor survey by the Wikimedia Foundation pegged the number of active female editors at only 9 percent. Other surveys have found slightly different percentages, but none exceed about 15 percent female representation worldwide."

not to mention that the whole 'neutral point of view' hardline stance is sort of weakened by the intrinsic biases of editors and what they see as 'neutral' - kind of like how in american journalism the 'objective' stance is the one that's pro-capitalism and pro-'official statement,' etc

Good point, maura.

I went to journalism school twenty-mumble years ago, and even then no one really believed that objectivity was possible or even, necessarily, desirable. The goal of objectivity was often replaced with a vague "trying to be fair."

That fake, stilted kind of neutrality can lead to what we used to call the "On the other hand, Mr. Hitler contends..." effect. Also to creation science in Texan textbooks, but that's another topic.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

Finally reading this, really great stuff.

I would start the golden age of the internet with the late 60s and end it with the iPhone. Reading about early computer history you keep running across the question "But what do they DO?" as if this new technology was being created because it was possible, because some visionaries and psychedelic engineers envisioned a vague path to the holodeck. Rather than tools being created for a specific purpose, the personal computer was created and the purpose was to be worked out later. Possibly the purpose was completely up to you. External brain enhancer?

I wonder if you traveled back in time to XEROX PARC and told them in the future everyone will have their own personal computer on them at all times and it will have have a single button you would have blown some minds.

it would be fun to travel back in time and speak only in a language that you make up on the spot

if you went back in time and told me neil hamburger would star in a commercially successful adaptation of ant man, i'd be like waaaaaaat?

the computer stuff might be less mind-blowing to 50s, 60s nerds who had already cobbled together working demos at that point. conceptually we're not really that far advanced from that doug engelbart demo.

instead tell them the rolling stones are still on tour.

wikipedia is horrible if you are using it to try and find information on a topic you are already quite knowledgeable about ("these claims Wikipedia is making about Walli Elmlark are spurious in the extreme") or if, god help you, you wish to contribute to the knowledge pool, at which point you quickly become enmeshed in all sorts of grotesque nerd power games. on the other hand, if you want to learn more about something you know nothing about, it is fucking AMAZING.

since people keep arguing about wikipedia, i thought i would test my assumptions. i decided to look at a sample article, on an issue that has political resonance today: slavery in the united states (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States). this is an interesting topic because it's one on which the popular consensus belies the historical debate. because historians, like the public, believe "slavery was bad", but their professional duties mean they can't stop there.

i'm going to focus in particular on the "treatment" section. this is actually pretty fascinating. the first thing you see is the famous photo of a badly whipped slave from the 1860s. frankly, after that picture everything else in the section might as well just read "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet". nevertheless there are certain apologists clearly fighting the good fight here, as the caption indicates that "the guilty overseer was fired", implying that there was justice under slavery, ignoring the fact that the very existence of that picture is a direct and visceral denial of that claim.

as far as the text, the first sentence of the section is a mealy-mouthed non-statement that treatment of slaves "varied widely". the overview paragraph ends with the unsourced statement "It was part of a paternalistic approach in the antebellum era." i fully expect this sentence to be shortly deleted, because it's clearly added by an editor arguing with the previous (sourced) sentence which claims that "some slaveholders improved the conditions of their slaves after 1820". i wouldn't be surprised if this section looked entirely different tomorrow (for reference, the text i'm referencing is as of noon gmt on 2015-07-23). this is unusual, to say the least, for an institution which was abolished 150 years ago.

there are nine paragraphs in the section, with the first section being the overview i mentioned, and the other eight addressing various aspects of treatment of slaves at random with no coherence whatsoever.

of these nine, paragraphs 5, 7, and 9 contain open apologism for slavery. these apologies all follow the same pattern, in that they lead by naming a respected historical source, and continue on to cherry-pick a statement out of the context of a longer and more comprehensive work of theirs to make it look as though slavery was "not that bad". these paragraphs are all very short, two sentences at most.

paragraphs 6 and 8 are thorough and damning indictments of the practice of slavery. paragraph 6 begins "Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment." these paragraphs are the longest and most compelling in the section. paragraph 8 deals with sexual abuse of slaves. the tone is npov, but the content is heart-wrenching and sickening. this paragraph is wikipedia at its best.

paragraphs 2 and 4 deal with how american slaves were forbidden to read and prohibited from associating in groups, except for churches. though brief, each paragraph contains mitigating codicils.

paragraph 3 deals with medical treatment of slaves, and is flatly bizarre. unlike all the other paragraphs, it contains no reference whatsoever to their owners. given that this was the defining feature of slavery, it seems wholly inappropriate. perhaps in one version of the article it may have held relevance, but it has no place in its current position in the article it stands today.

there is also a link in this article to a lengthier article entirely devoted to "Treatment of Slaves in the United States", which i am sure is also fascinating and worthy of deeper analysis, but i don't have time to address it right now, except to say that wikipedia's ability to self-contradict is one of it's fascinating eccentricities. one of the things i kind of love about wikipedia is that it actively punishes the tl;dr impulse by feeding you skewed misinformation on the summary page. frequently summary sections of longer separate articles will contain information not in the longer article; more frequently these summaries will deliberately distort the content of the longer article.

in conclusion, this section is terrible. utterly, utterly, terrible. you could get more accurate information on slavery from a texan history book than you can from wikipedia. i love wikipedia dearly, i believe in their mission, i have learned and continue to learn countless incredible things from it. however, looking at this article, i am forced to conclude that it represents a serious failure of the wikipedia content creation and editing process. if the wikimedia foundation hopes to contribute to a more knowledgable world, as opposed to simply stuffing us all with trivia, it has a great deal of work to do.

Regardless of what you think of Wikipedia's current state, it doesn't result from the various ills discussed upthread - SEO gaming, content mills, popup ads, likes, click-throughs, or corporate malfeasance.

On the surface, Wikipedia's ethos is pretty much the ethos of the "web that was" championed by the pastopians. Volunteer-driven, democratic, a labor of obsessive love, crowdsourced, and (theoretically) open to quirky monomaniacs and people with huge amounts of knowledge about obscure topics.

And yet. For all its virtues as an information source, it is a niche phenomenon. A domain of nerdy white dudes with lots of spare time, good internet connections, and the technical savvy to use them toward their own ends. So, again, rather like the internet in the alleged Golden Age.

yo did someone take wrong turn on the way to debate society or something

And yet. For all its virtues as an information source, it is a niche phenomenon. A domain of nerdy white dudes with lots of spare time, good internet connections, and the technical savvy to use them toward their own ends. So, again, rather like the internet in the alleged Golden Age.

― Ye Mad Puffin, Thursday, July 23, 2015 11:03 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like you've purposefully read past my post several times in this thread that i'm not necessarily talking about going back to usenet i'm more disturbed by what's happened in the last five or six years

puffin's post is too high-context for me. i don't know what they're talking about. are they replying to my post? or talking about wikipedia in general? is j making fun of my post or puffin's? i feel like there's a lot of people talking past each other in this thread.

i guess i should lay my cards on the table. my problems are more with Internet Classic(R), with the failure of the social and technological models the net was founded on, than with the evils of New Internet, which seeks to ameliorate those failures by reducing the internet to a greeting card factory. i've never had a great deal of interest in or fruitful interaction with New Internet. i'm an advocate of privacy and freedom of speech who has seen those principles catastrophically fail to scale, with the biggest threats to those values not infrequently coming from their fiercest proponents.

so i find myself advocating New Internet in the hopes that it might somehow figure out how to do something useful. worst comes to worst at least i don't have to worry about being doxed by people whose only interest in the internet is to post betty boop memes. it's an odd position to be in.

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/2/27645/871913-betty_boop.gif

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/6/9099357/internet-dead-end

sorry for vox link

https://twitter.com/EnvGen/status/629007382513885184

Cute!

iOS 9 "Crystal" Ad Blocker Benchmarks – 74% speed increase, 53% less bandwidth: http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/8/22/crystal-benchmarks

This thread has made me go and check if the Phone Losers of America is still a site... to my surprise they are up and still update regularly!

Cactus! I still listen to their podcast on occasion.

I have thought many times about rushomancy's long post on the "Slavery in the United States" Wikipedia article. Super super OTM. Not to say I know exactly how you could fix Wikipedia, but it's super useful as an illustration of how the current editing process/population gives rise to stuff that looks NPOV but turns out to be either noxiously biased or just totally incoherent if you actually think about all the inclusions and exclusions taken together.

Using Wikipedia as anything other than a starting point for further research/inquiry has always been problematic at the very least.

which sites do you use besides ilxor? I can't find a single online blog/magazine/newspaper that holds my attention

facebook

i have become an email newsletter kind of guy

l-r: tracer, email newsletter editors

https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/500x/72711660/your-ideas-are-intriguing-to-me-id-like-to-subscribe-to-your-newsletter.jpg

websites are over

always feel like I'm wasting time when I check fb

email newsletters sound interesting, any recommendations?

depends on what you're into! for news i get beat the press (though he's just now gone on vacation). click on the envelope icon here: http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/

and stephen bush's newsletter: https://www.newstatesman.com/staggers-morning-call

a lot of blogs have a newsletter option these days

cosign on staggers

cool, thanks!

websites are over

shut up brad this is stupid you're stupid websites are FOREVER websites RULE

they rule HARD

It's strange that so many sites I used to read 10, 15 or 20 years ago are still around, but usually in an unreadable form

RSS feed reading all the way!

which sites do you use besides ilxor? I can't find a single online blog/magazine/newspaper that holds my attention

― niels

so are you fishing for porn recommendations or what

seriously, though, just the Digital Antiquarian and my youtube subscriptions. the Digital Antiquarian RULES.

the golden age of the internet was Google Reader

Perfect Sound Forever is one I usually read it all when it publishes each month for seemingly forever.

RSS feed reading all the way!

the golden age of the internet was Google Reader

rss was the greatest internet thing that ever happened

i don't even understand why it has died -- i have subscribed to yr feed, i am interested in yr content, just fucking tell me what's new and i'll fucking click on it

Pocket!

pocket is good. it is not a replacement for rss

Pocket and Longform have replaced magazines for my lunch reading since phones got big enough to be comfortably readable.

Was thinking recently it would be nice to see a resurgence of personal websites/blogging that aren't Tumblr/Twitter micro-blogging and not attempts to monetize cooking or whatever.

"podcasting" the elephant in the room here no

I don't have the patience to listen to podcasts, but probably there's a move from reading to listening these years bcz smartphones

rss was the greatest internet thing that ever happened

i don't even understand why it has died

it... didn't? I never noticed any decline at least, just about every site still has feeds to subscribe to like they had a decade ago

Feedly+Reeder still works really well

ffs podcasts suck ass

i don't want to be mean and i know radio has existed forever and that they're useful for ppl who work deadening office jobs or commute a lot but when some people on here post about the 7 or 8 podcasts they listen to weekly i'm like, fuck that's depressing, listening to clucking smug men talk over each other for like 18 hours a week

I don't listen to any podcasts that even remotely fit that description, and I listen to quite a lot of podcasts

Yeah, you’re kind of off-base there. Smug, chuckling men are the morning drive-in DJs of the podcast world.

there are a LOT of them tbf

sorry sorry i don't want to be mean, and i actually even know the feeling of liking and anticipating the next episode of a pod; forget i said anything. but just, if podcasts are 'the good thing on the internet' in 2017 we're fucked

reading on the internet has just become so basically shitty most of the time, autoplaying videos, intrusive ads, anti-ad-blocker blockers, the uh.. writing itself.. podcasts feel relatively uncluttered and handleable somehow

well you can get people to subscribe, can't you

yes! almost as if it were an...... rss feed!

flopson’s characterization isn’t at all unfair. maron, simmons, fucking barstool - those are all wildly popular. plus all the godawful comedians out there. i also kind of hate the light smirkiness of a lot of big time podcast network shows, especially when i’m interests in the meat of their content - that sort of uneasy “ha ha don’t want to appear too SERIOUS because it would muss my carefully curated brooklyn aesthetic” just falls so flat

ta for the nudge re feedreader ...
welcome back rss feeds.
i loved google reader, and this seems to do everything i need.
now to go find my archive of rss feeds that i used to subscribe to.

xpost i totally agree. that said you can break out of that bubble and once you do there are a ridiculous number of frankly miraculous podcasts right now. top of my list at the moment are rumble strip and first day back, both produced and presented by women, neither of them smirky or annoying, both with an incredible facility for channelling stories into your ear. but yeah it's also a totally different mode of engaging with something, it takes longer. it's not a substitute for reading. although for some people it kind of is now??

i also can’t listen to anything while i’m working, especially people talking while i’m trying to write. and i don’t commute. so that knocks out a lot of my podcast listening time

flopson otm

I need to take a break from the internet for a while, this thing has become a beast. When I was younger and spent all my time online, late 90s/early 2000s, it was still a relatively hidden place. I was on it because I had made really good, close friends with people who I'd have real conversations with everyday, and around hobbies (making music and sharing it, writing and sharing that, drawing, etc.)

Now it's turned into this abomination taken over by corporations. Just about every website I use has been made with addictive design, and it's getting pretty bad for my health.

It's hard to admit it's not the same place it used to be, but it's not.

Now it's just mindless, repetitive clicking over and over again, and it's like that by design, like being a slot machine addict. Talk about something going from life-changing to life-screwing so quickly.

A lot of popular podcasts sucking doesn't feel like a particularly strong condemnation of the medium to me, I mean how good were the most popular sites of 2006, or 1998? At this stage you could listen to podcasts 24/7 without listening to a single man, or a single comedian; there's a very low barrier to entry in terms of cash and technical skills, chances are there's a podcast for any interest you could think of.

I think this is fundamentally different from twitter or facebook, where the problem isn't (only) who's popular but the actual medium itself and what it's trying to do with you. Closest podcasts have to that is Apple constantly fucking up their podcasts app but plenty of ppl listen by other means and the bad shit in iTunes feels more about incompetence than insidiousness in general.

Google search is becoming more and more useless, often I'll get pages and pages of results from fucking quora.com or thedailymail.com

i agree w that. quora's ok but yeah these are not really definitive sources.

too heavily weighted toward newness as well - anything more than like a week old gets crowded out if it's a name in the news. the "news" tab should favour newness but the main results should be more even-handed

I googled 'outback' the other day because I needed information about rural Australian climate and the first few pages of results were for Outback Steakhouse and the Subaru Outback.

it's hot btw

Also Google Image Search which these days returns a slurry of contextless Pinterest sludge with the occasional genuine image on a useful site.

i use duck duck go but it's just as bad tbh

longing for the prelapsarian non-SEO'd web

googling "prelapsarian" now

Yeah, Pinterest has fucking destroyed image search.

Agreed that both google search and image search are noticeably worse than they once were. Image search is muuuuuuch worse, I can’t believe it. Even the “visually similar” search is somehow worse. Possibly a truck full of tartar sauce crashed into their algorithm room

FUCK PINTREST FOREVER for polluting Google image search results with useless garbage.

^^^

it’s the worst

youtube thumbnails in GIS results are also deeply fucking aggravating. it's getting to the point where you have to start using elaborate filters to get viable results, ex.:

cute pigs
(9 of the top 20 results are facebook, pinterest, or youtube images)

cute pigs -inurl:pinimg -inurl:ytimg -inurl:twimg -intitle:facebook
(problem solved!)

site:ilxor.com cutest pigs
(pretty decent if you can put up with the occasional giant isopod and/or Thom Yorke headshot)

https://gizmodo.com/100-websites-that-shaped-the-internet-as-we-know-it-1829634771

i don't think i'm much of an outlier here, but it was really odd to scroll through this list and know EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM already

Ha, same

ILX was robbed!!

the screenshots should really go below the headline, not above....

interview w/ jill leopore about her new book, 'these truths':

https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academy-Is-Largely/245080

Q. For democracy to work, of course, the people must be well informed. Yet we live in an age of epistemological mayhem. How did the relationship between truth and fact come unwound?

A. I spend a lot of time in the book getting it wound, to be fair. There’s an incredibly rich scholarship on the history of evidence, which traces its rise in the Middle Ages in the world of law, its migration into historical writing, and then finally into the realm that we’re most familiar with, journalism. That’s a centuries-long migration of an idea that begins in a very particular time and place, basically the rise of trial by jury starting in 1215. We have a much better vantage on the tenuousness of our own grasp of facts when we understand where facts come from.

The larger epistemological shift is how the elemental unit of knowledge has changed. Facts have been devalued for a long time. The rise of the fact was centuries ago. Facts were replaced by numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries as the higher-status unit of knowledge. That’s the moment at which the United States is founded as a demographic democracy. Now what’s considered to be most prestigious is data. The bigger the data, the better.

That transformation, from facts to numbers to data, traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact, as well as other factors. When people try to re-establish the prestige of the humanities with the digital humanities and large data sets, that is no longer the humanities. What humanists do comes from a different epistemological scale of a unit of knowledge.

i often think about the mixture of humanistic and scientific/technical cultures that seemed to me to characterize the aspects of the internet i liked back in the 90s. i don't know fully what lepore has in mind here but i imagine that in my 90s internet even the technical stuff was sort of on an even footing with humanistic 'fact' because of the way the gears were relatively visible and lots of people had knowledge of how they ran things. dealing with a compiler error is something on the same scale as close-reading a poem; having a debate on usenet is something on the same scale as holding a city council meeting. comparatively speaking, 'numbers' and 'data' held little sway in the sense lepore apparently has in mind.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/log-off-facebook-twitter-social-media-addiction

👍

Things I was shockingly old when I learned: the internet had a golden age. Here I thought it was always something of a hot mess.

https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/12/19/18148701/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-year-in-review

max: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

yeah it's good

max links to this on tw too, which is good value in the "post it directly into my veins" school of internet ire

Amazing thread https://t.co/bLxjIaNgGJ

— Max Read (@max_read) December 26, 2018

What I liked about the internet in the past was that websites from regular folk populated the search results. Blogs, niche websites created by one person, user groups... Nowadays you are lucky if you can go through all the google search results for something specific and come across a site that isn’t mainstream - which has plenty to do with search engine algorithms. This keeps the little guy from wanting to make their own (non-commercial) site in the first place.

had an argument with my spouse who didn't understand why i was so upset about tumblr. no, i don't look at tumblr porn, or much of anything on tumblr really, but my impression was that a lot of tumblr was what i now think of as the "wikipedia internet" - knowledgable enthusiasts sharing their knowledge, what that ny mag article would characterize as "real". and it's become increasingly clear to me that the corporate internet dislikes this model and favors shouty internet, people angrily yelling about anything and nothing, because it's more profitable than genuine information.

i don't know. obviously there are still pockets of value. my dream is to one day be able to treat the internet the way i did facebook, as something that does more harm than good and something therefore to be avoided at all costs, but i don't actually believe we'll ever get there.

man I love all these articles about the internet eating itself.
I'm quite happy to have been a teenager online during the Golden Age. when I started cybersurfing the information superdotmotorway I used to chat to the only other people online: teen manics fans, German goths, American nerds and music journos

"Why do I need a 4Ghz quadcore to run facebook?" This is why. A single word split up into 11 HTML DOM elements to avoid adblockers. pic.twitter.com/Zv4RfInrL0

— Mike Pan (@themikepan) February 6, 2019

fuckin lol

well this Instagram egg thing just totally fuckin passed me by

j. that post from a few months back (epistemology) is great, thanks.

a moment of looping silence for YTMND, which quietly shut down yesterday

— 🍀🌳 eevee 🌳🍀 (@eevee) May 15, 2019

funny to read the OP of this thread, which is like, "am i onto something?" when it seems so clearly obvious now, four years later.

sorry, not the OP, the M@tt H3lg3s0n post from 2015

we call him ums, man

a moment of looping silence for jaymc.xls

one type of guy you don't hear much about anymore is the Linux Guy. if you were on the internet in the '00s you knew all about the Linux Guy. you had to. for your own safety.

— Jingleghost (@JeremyMonjo) October 16, 2019

it's sad, i miss their can-do spirit

A lot of Linux guys are now trans women

wait wut?

yeah um

what exactly are you going for there?

could he have been any clearer

Not sure what's confusing

The Linux Guy
1h 14min 2016

The Linux Guy is an interesting story about five college losers who become achievers when a new college professor teaches them linux and networking. During the project under Alok Sir, each student's life begin to turn around after memorial events and competing for the project of the year. Full of love, drama,fights, family issues, friendship and great college life fun.

it reads to me as a slam on transwomen since the context is the idea of a stereotypical and unpleasant "linux guy," and even the idea that some particular group is more likely to be trans

there's also a weird "used to be into Linux, is now into something different" thing to it

not a slam on anyone, including Linux guys! Just an observation, I shouldn't have said "a lot", could say "some" or "a discernible amount"

anyway to get back on topic as late as 2008 or so a rather hippieish Linux guy at college was going around pressuring unsuspecting fellow students to install Linux on their computers and also sleep with him

I think he got expelled for some reason

as a onetime Linux-guy-adjacent type I now advise people not to use computers

they don't anymore, everyone's on phones, running Linux. Huzzah!

not a slam on anyone, including Linux guys! Just an observation, I shouldn't have said "a lot", could say "some" or "a discernible amount"

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Friday, October 18, 2019 11:09 AM (two hours ago)

my comment ("wait, wut?") was about the actual content of your message. some like how many? a discernible amount? is this based on personal experience or some other observation? the comment put me into 1000 questions mode

not to criticize but because i am curious

i dunno about silby but just eyeballing it from my internet experience i would have said yeah, that's a definite social ~identity~ now

"Linux guy" is too narrow a scope really; I know several and know of many trans women and nonbinary ppl (NB mostly white) who are software or systems or devops people, to the point where I would believe they're overrepresented in those professions (no hard data though). Like it's enough of a "thing" that one sees complaints that too much is made of it, like I've read tweets like "yeah most trans women are not white programmers in lesbian polycules" in response to the currency this social identity has gained.

Oh! Hey! Another opportunity for me to run my mouth about Trans Shit! Thank you!

Geek culture is where I come from. These were the people who were my heroes growing up. Dani Bunten was the first trans person I ever heard of. It's one of the things I have so much guilt about taking so incredibly long to finally come out. If Dani had that shit figured out in the '80s, why did I not figure it out until 2017?

My feeling on this is that the stereotype of the Trans Geek, which is both a stereotype and rooted in reality, is in some sense a function of the staggering amounts of privilege these people were handed, perhaps possibly coupled with an equally staggering deficit in their understanding of or ability to conform to conventional social norms.

These were weirdo outcast kids and the people with the power and the money for some reason decided that they were essential to the Future of Humanity, that they were the homo superior. So the people with the power and the money said to them "You can have anything you want".

A lot of them bought sports cars. Richard Garriott decided he was going to go to outer space. Compared to that, I guess, just saying "Cool, I'm a woman now" seemed fairly reasonable?

And nobody of course ever told me I could have anything I wanted, I idolized these misfits but I wasn't really like they were. That's where I come from, though. That's where I learned about this first. Wasn't punk rock or queer spaces or sex work, it was these awkward weirdo geeks who invented the Internet while wearing dresses. These days I respect the latter more than the former.

great post, rusho, thanks, that's v helpful for me.

silby, sorry if i came at you hard, i read your post in the wrong tone/voice.

I was genuinely curious and my questions have been answered! Thanks!

v informative. I use Linux most of the time but it's been a long while since I was involved in any sort of community aspect with it. I'll read Slashdot a few times a week and find myself kinda confused at the huge battles going on in the comments every time it would be in the news that X is enacting better community standards or Y is fired for being a creep. A good chunk of the "outcasts" in tech have been extremely controlling arsehole types too. It's interesting to see them coming to grips with a lot of this.

https://gen.medium.com/the-decade-the-internet-lost-its-joy-4898c2c44cb4

Get one more story in your member preview when you sign up. It’s free.

At the beginning of 2015, Alex Balk, then-editor of the now-defunct website the Awl, wrote a post of advice for young people in which he supplied three laws about the internet. The first: "Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people." The second: "The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything." But Balk's third law was most prescient, especially as we end this miserable decade: "If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while." He went on: "The moment you were just in was as good as it got. The stuff you shake your head about now will seem like fucking Shakespeare in 2016." Reader, we've waited a while, and today it seems indisputable that Balk's law has held: The 2010s is the decade when the internet lost its joy.

The internet was always bad, but at least it used to be fun. At the start of this decade, being online still had less of the feeling of chaotic good than the years preceding it, but it wasn't yet consumed by the monolithic forces that rule today's web. Since the turn of the millennium, we've been used to the flood of emerging platforms -- Myspace, Xanga, Friendster, Napster, Flickr, Tumblr, Neopets -- each vying to be a better version of the last.

By 2010, personal blogs were thriving, Tumblr was still in its prime, and meme-makers were revolutionizing with form. Snapchat was created in 2011 and Vine, the beloved six-second video app, was born in 2012. People still spent time posting to forums, reading daily entries on sites like FML, and watching Shiba Inus grow up on 24-hour puppy cams. On February 26, 2015 -- a day that now feels like an iconic marker of the decade -- millions of people on the internet argued about whether a dress was blue or gold, and watched live video of two llamas on the lam in suburban Arizona. Sites like Gawker, the Awl, Rookie, the Hairpin, and Deadspin still existed. Until they didn't. One by one, they were destroyed by an increasingly unsustainable media ecosystem built for the wealthy.

As user experience became more seamless, we began to miss the internet's seams. We used to begrudgingly click through individual pages and archives -- now everything has an infinite scroll. Where we once felt in control of the amount of a site we wanted to see, feeds now pull us down and down into the ever-widening abyss. Uh oh! Our phones tell us like the babies we are, You've reached your time limit! Insatiable and hungry for the next tok, we crush the hourglass with one tap of the "ignore" button.

Ten years ago, niche platforms prioritizing user-generated content were still able to flourish. But people could also enjoy themselves on the bigger, more wretched sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In its early years, Twitter had Weird Twitter, a new home of sorts for the inside joke-filled-forum Something Awful. Now it is best known as the platform that refuses to moderate its white supremacists.

In 2010, Facebook had 500 million users. Today, that number has risen to an unfathomable 2.4 billion, and the company has hoovered up other major platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp. Before influencers existed, teens of yore -- the best and worst users of each internet era -- could go viral thoughtlessly. Now, they are pressured to market themselves, whether they want to or not.

As someone best described it to me recently, the internet has moved from a flat ecosystem -- with a multitude of smaller, trusted communities -- to a vertical one, with everyone being pushed together into the same few platforms (investor parlance termed it FAANG -- Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google), all in the pursuit of data collection and ad revenue. Yahoo purchased Tumblr in 2013 and promised "not to screw it up." Both companies were later scooped up by Verizon who later passed Tumblr off to WordPress. Vine was acquired by Twitter ahead of its launch in 2013, which subsequently shut the platform down in 2016. The fact that being online feels less fun is a serious matter. Today, Democratic presidential candidates incorporate breaking up big tech as central parts of their platforms, and the general public has finally come to understand that these monopolies only know how to do one thing: eat hot chip and lie.

The internet still contains fragments of joy, because people still do. (They did surgery on a grape!) Weird videos continue to proliferate on apps like Tik Tok, which New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino recently described as "the last sunny corner on the Internet." But on a systemic level, it's impossible to ignore the immense effect of capitalistic forces on how we experience the internet today. The pockets of fun will continue to erode until we are all flattened into a single pancake of behavioral data. To rediscover joy on the internet will mean reforming it entirely. When Deadspin was shuttered by its private equity-instilled bosses earlier this year, I blogged that instead of looking backward, we needed to imagine something entirely different. The same goes for the internet as a whole -- we need a digital world that is built to take care of us instead of profit from us.

It's true that every generation is too easily fleeced by the nostalgia of the Good Internet of yesteryear. But if every new moment of the internet feels like the worst one, it's because it is. Just take, for example, my Facebook from the beginning of this decade. In the pursuit of truth for this piece, I recently scoured my posts going nearly 10 years back, where I found this status update: "We're all just babies with internet access." Now that, my good bitch, is Shakespeare indeed.

As someone best described it to me recently, the internet has moved from a flat ecosystem — with a multitude of smaller, trusted communities — to a vertical one, with everyone being pushed together into the same few platforms (investor parlance termed it FAANG — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google)

nnnnnghhhhhhhh

had never heard of FAANG until now

c&p is cool, was just saying this is what the internet has come to: reading rants on sites run by giant corporations about how giant corporations ruined the internet.

still not sure if a spectacular crash and burn is still in the internet's future or if it has reached its terminal state. probably the latter. most of us just aren't quite _irresponsible_ enough to destroy a machine which, at the end of the day, is keeping a lot of people alive - not simply out of spite.

investor parlance termed it FAANG — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google

RIP Twitter

poll: which of FAANG will end up purchasing twitter

twitter is a tiny minnow compared with those companies

poll: which of FAANG will end up purchasing twitter

― Peaceful Warrior I Poser (Karl Malone)

the only reason to buy up a smaller company is to ruin it so that it can't compete with you

twitter is pre-ruined

fuck, didn't disney consider buying twitter before deciding not to on the grounds that twitter is terrible?

i'm sure people will gripe about that article but it seems otm to me

obv point but the big thing is the narrowing of the internet down into the aforementioned platforms. that's where my dread comes from, at least. ilx is a safehaven not only because of the people and the format but because it's truly an independent platform. we don't have to worry about stet trying to increase revenue or clicks, it's fine as it is, and it'll (most likely, i hope?) continue like this. it's sustainable and not trying to endlessly grow. that's comforting. but the rest of the internet feels like a shitty mall

ok, shitty malls are a bad analogy

we don't have to worry about stet trying to increase revenue

I would love to turn this into a money fountain but there's no way to do it which isn't hideous beyond description and so, y'know, no thanks. Clicks remain remarkably constant, traffic is at the level it's been at since I started counting in about 2008 and doesn't vary massively.

which of FAANG will end up purchasing twitter

My preference would be Jeff Bezos, World's Richest Humanoid. He would then drown Twitter in a bucket just to spite Donald Trump, who would consequently become increasingly isolated.

of course, if you ever want to entertain revenue-generating ideas i have this really bold plan that involves a pyramid scheme, cryptocurrency, and a minimum of 4 hectares of reasonably secure and well-drained land

but until then i'm very glad to donate as much as i can, as often as you need it, and i know that's true for many many others as well

xp

I've never even seen a hectare

anyway irc still functions, it's literally easier than ever to stick some html on the internet, everyone has access to secure private group chats on their phones, and no one forum needs to take over the world to be good. Discord is probably gonna turn out to be evil at some point but the spirit of irc is strong on there to a certain extent

Hectare? No, we never even kissed

anyway irc still functions, it's literally easier than ever to stick some html on the internet, everyone has access to secure private group chats on their phones, and no one forum needs to take over the world to be good. Discord is probably gonna turn out to be evil at some point but the spirit of irc is strong on there to a certain extent

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby)

hell, Discord is probably evil _now_, I've heard stories about white nationalist communities. that's the risk of adopting the old "decentralized" model - no corporate hegemony, but also little in the way of functional oversight. it's a mess and it's inconvenient and everything is whispers and shadows, finding things is reaching out blindly in the dark, and every five months the community falls apart or a corporation buys it to destroy it and you have to move on to something else. it reminds me of piracy, honestly, the life, but nobody's trying to break a law that's been written, we're just trying to have an honest conversation without it being turned into a fucking shoe commercial

i don't mind the _idea_ of monoculture, it's just that the people in charge of the Majors are all manifestly bastards, probably how they got in charge in the first place. no, no, i do mind, because i've seen it, community just doesn't scale. probably one reason i keep going after bands only three people listen to, god you think i can have a discussion on the internet about _radiohead_?

my partner spent a lot of time on Radiohead's own weird web 0.9 technology messageboard in high school and the one rule there was not to talk about Radiohead

:) ask your partner if they remember feedback, HeadOfState, or penisfingers on that board. for a couple years i was in the top 5 posters (by quantity, not quality)

i actually found ilx through the rhmb!
we actually talked about radiohead all the damn time

top poster by quantity not quality by poster penisfingers #humblebrag

:D

feedback was my main name. penisfingers was my first sock!

i learned a lot on that board, about how to a complete weirdo on the internet

Ah, the glory days!

my man :D

jia is proof that platform is 90% of intellectual success these days, which feels related to the vertical internet phenomenon

otm

maura is that a burn on jia? :(

she’s bad, sorry

actually i’m not sorry but

she's good

no

she’s an adderall-fueled solipsist with boring arguments

:,(

i gotta be me

Adderall-fueled solipsist makes me shrug and doesn't mean a whole lot. The boring arguments though, that's def true.

I like Jia sry I guess

and boring is a fake idea

i should have said banal instead, you’re right

a friend of mine once summarized tolentino’s work as “clever but not smart” and that reads 100 percent correct to me. everything i’ve read by her on any subject i have remotest knowledge of has had its routine incidents of bullshit and received wisdom. she is good at affecting an intellectual surface through sentences. she’s done some good reporting too

anyway it’s fine to like her, so many people agree with you

I have very little confidence in my own taste, if someone on a messageboard posts that a thing I think is good is bad actually I get all kerfuffled

:O if i ever kerfuffled you i'm sorry silby!

Silby! <3

she's the one from the hulu fyre fest doc?

i should also say i like exceedingly few modern writers, probably because i am one, adjust for inflation

i still consider myself a late 90s writer, protoblogger

brad posts for me / i get anxious when i dislike stuff a lot of people are into, so

'Here We Go. The Chaos Is Starting': An Oral History of Y2K

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/20/almost-half-of-young-people-would-prefer-a-world-without-internet-uk-study-finds

almost half of young people otm

tapping the "it's not the technology, it's the capitalism" sign one more time

it's a brand new era
but it came too late

tapping the "it's not the technology, it's the capitalism" sign one more time

― i got bao-yu babe (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, May 20, 2025 6:23 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

is it possible to reap the benefits of an information network produced by and infused with capitalist systems at a molecular level, but without capitalism? maybe. increasingly it feels to me like the internet is capitalism, and capitalism is the internet. i don't think it's necessarily clear-cut where one begins and the other ends, or how you'd go about salvaging the so-called benefits of this or that technology -- most of which, in any case, feel more like scams to manipulate or imprison our consciousness as opposed to sites for liberation. i think at this point i'd prefer a harper's ferry-type event that cripples the amazon servers and brings about some kind of widespread reckoning with our relationship to our screens, each other, and our physical environment -- as opposed to a world where we sit around all day with our VR headsets arguing the fourth international

I'd say yes, the golden age of the internet has come to a close

(also, budo jeru, booming post)

is it possible to reap the benefits of an information network produced by and infused with capitalist systems at a molecular level

Here is Ralph Ellison on the subject

That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of my money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I've wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know.

thread was started in 2006... that year as an endcap to the 'golden age' of the internet seems right to me

yea that was around the time the music biz went all in on digital downloads after years of suing teenagers and their parents for downloading LiNkIn-PaRk-nUmB.exe, in retrospect maybe a harbinger of what was going to happen in the future

specifically I mean the way corporations took all the stuff you used to be able to do online and got their grubby hands on it and turned it into their own shitty version of the same thing, but with ads and tracking software and sponsored results and all that. I don't think enough is made out of the fact that the internet's basic hub - the search engine - has been deliberately made shitty for overtly capitalist reasons. while there was plenty that sucked about the internet circa 2002 it was at least by the people for the people, and that is definitely not true at all anymore

Sympathetic as the 21st century has made me to the Luddites, the Saboteurs etc, I don't think any revolutionary break worth making is predicated on erasing the technology of the preceding regime. But yeah it's a reasonable point Budo, and worth thinking through, it feels lazy or defeatist to just write off the whole thing imo

2006 was also when FB introduced the news feed, which was kind of an epochal change that we're still sifting through

2006 was the year when facebook opened to everyone and twitter was launched.

produced by and infused with capitalist systems at a molecular leve

usenet was good

2007 was the year the iPhone began the process of converting the internet to smartphone content

I think 2013 was the first time i had an editor respond to a pitch with “could you do this as a list?” Felt seismic

Three reasons why I will not be writing this as a listicle:

1. Because

2. Fuck

3. No

Number 4 will SHOCK you

I think 2013 was the first time i had an editor respond to a pitch with “could you do this as a list?” Felt seismic

Yeah, that was definitely the height of listicles. Everyone was trying to copy Buzzfeed. I worked at a very legacy publication at the time (known more for print books than its website) and we started publishing online lists and quizzes in 2012 because a product manager told us to. It actually wasn't a bad idea, just very of the moment back then.

is it possible to reap the benefits of an information network produced by and infused with capitalist systems at a molecular level, but without capitalism? maybe. increasingly it feels to me like the internet is capitalism, and capitalism is the internet. i don't think it's necessarily clear-cut where one begins and the other ends, or how you'd go about salvaging the so-called benefits of this or that technology -- most of which, in any case, feel more like scams to manipulate or imprison our consciousness as opposed to sites for liberation. i think at this point i'd prefer a harper's ferry-type event that cripples the amazon servers and brings about some kind of widespread reckoning with our relationship to our screens, each other, and our physical environment -- as opposed to a world where we sit around all day with our VR headsets arguing the fourth international

― budo jeru

ok, it's been six years

some further thoughts on the structural failure of the internet

i _don't_ think the internet is inherently and foundationally a capitalist project. in its early years the internet was noncommercial - a product a little bit of the military but mostly of higher educational institutions. for me, the central problem was that the internet was built on a foundation of _trust_. the idea of a decentralized internet failed the second "serdar argic" started spamming usenet saying that no, actually, it was the _armenians_ who genocided the _turks_ - if not before then. i wasn't around in the early days. nobody on the internet particularly trusted the american government to provide that oversight (see: the communications decency act of 1996), so in fact what was left was a power vacuum. so for-profit corporations were given basically complete control of the most powerful propaganda outlet ever created. and now the world is in a fascist death spiral. whoever survives the impending geopolitical collapse (probably not me lol) will have to reconstruct based on what's left.

any truly global internet, i think, would have to have pretty serious restrictions on what can be expressed. given that reality, i'd prefer for there to not be a global internet. i'm definitely in favor of the annihilation of the corporate behemoths of the internet - amazon, twitter, facebook, etc. haarp? is that what they said in 2019? anyway. as much as i denounce "gatekeeping" i don't want to be on the same internet as fascists. so i'd suggest kind of returning to earlier ideas of digital communities - the WELL was allegedly a global network, but it was also rooted in place, rooted in community. ILX similarly - it's rooted in a particular time and place. now, it spread beyond that place, but i think that inceptional rootedness made it a more successful, well, "intentional community", if you will.

most of my interactions with the net now take place in small, centrally controlled, independent spaces. it is _fraught_ and _difficult_. one of the things i'm trying to do most is merge my online activity with my "meatspace" activity. i'd do better if it wasn't for the existential despair. the communities i belong to simply _aren't adequately resourced_. by this i mean that governing electronic spaces ought to be done _professionally_ by people who are _paid_ to do so.

so what i'd envision is, you know, if california exists as an independent polity, california has its own internet, and the state is responsible for the content put onto the internet by its users. if someone in california decides to post some fascist bullshit, california then has the responsibility and authority to...

i mean for me, the only workable form of law enforcement is exile. i don't believe in carceral states-within-a-state. rather than put someone in jail, you just kick them the fuck out of california.

the problem with this is that genocidal fascist states _do_ still exist, with their own genocidal fascist internets. it's not just. and there would inevitably be conflict. ideally you'd want to establish a global consensus that says hey, genocide is bad, but you know what, we've never done it before. there would probably be a lot of conflict over resources. california bombing the shit out of texas for causing global warning, i mean, if i was california i'd consider that a casus belli.

i should note that i didn't sleep at all last night. i often have this tendency towards deranged, paranoid apocalyptic fantasies, but when i get enough sleep it's not so bad. also here in america we kind of are literally living through the apocalypse. that doesn't help.

2006 was also about the last time that major websites were still updated by uploading HTML files via FTP. it was about the last time that random schmoes like me could audtodidact their way into "tech jobs". after that you start to like, actually need to know how to program

when was the last time you could buy an "seo" book and get your mom and pop website to show up #1 on google? 2010?