future of ~the internet~

http://grab.by/93lb

hey doodz thinking we could muse abt the state of technology/design/business of the net in here - feel like theres some good ilx conversion on the topic but its sort of scattered and intermittent - itd be cool if people went full nerd and dropped some knowledge in here regardless of its esotericism

porn rules.

despite not having any background in IT, that's what half of my job revolves around. We've been working on pilots all year to test out "Linked Data" (AKA Linked Open Data or LOD, and heavily overlapping with the Semantic Web) concepts that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has been pushing for the last several years.

Linked Open Data is actually pretty exciting because it's a way of structuring data so that it can be automatically detected by other machines - could be a huge boon to researchers. could also help Watson REALLY kick ass on Jeopardy! next time. However, unfortunately I'm not yet educated enough to go full nerd on the concept. :-/

ie, a human would never be able to keep all of the connections between these datasets in mind, but properly structured linked open data could:

http://i55.tinypic.com/xdxge0.png

anyway i was gonna this comment on one of the gawker threads but ima put it here - thinking abt how the gawker redesign is trying to port some of the functionality/ui of native mobile apps back to the web and its not really working out mostly because its hard to get the feel right - i imagine its because of the variety of platforms/browsers/machines people access the web on is so vast

this is obvs part of a larger trend - theres chrome apps for nytimes and huffpost that are v similar and have the same jankey feel problem - the only site that seems to have done it right yet is twitter - and they kept it super simple by just implementing the pop out side pannel - on native apps particularly like iphone where youre developing for four devices total its much easier to control the feel

its interesting cause theres all this powerful technology that makes these sites possible but then youre left w/this subjective very hard to control in the fractured web environment make or break proposition which ends up being just sort of vibe based - like do people feel they can groove w/yr site

btw lmao scott

zs this more or less talking abt the semantic web that people think is the next big leap right

ever since 2001, yep

i swear it's ALMOST here this time, promise!

btw infos on the image of obama nerd dinner http://www.businessinsider.com/people-at-obamas-tech-dinner-2011-2 p amazing collection of people

all of the semantic stuff is pretty much brand new to me, but yeah, whenever we talk about it with people at work there's always an old grizzled IT pro who is basically like "people have been talking this up for a decade, and nothing ever gets done."

ha yeah i think one of the main things thats made the web so successful is that its really easy to make web pages and theres a lot of different ways to do it - that flexibility has made barriers to entry low and a lot of creativity possible but its also made the whole thing a big delightful mess - people have tried to organize it but even like xhtml got the gassface because it was too uptight

if the future of the internet involves "ECM solutions that don't arbitrarily try to jam everything in a bunch of nested tables" i for one support our new etc

anyway, that's going to be about the extent that i can "contribute" to this thread because i barely even know about the present state of the internet, let alone the future, but pretty excited to see what others have to say!

well im personal v interested in what u have to say re being involved in this semantic web project in proximity to the god tim berners lee - come back and tell us more - i think youll find by attempting to explain what youre all up to youll understand better and in no time at all youll be in charge of the entire internet!

thinking more abt the gawker/twitter redesigns and the urge to port native app qualities to the web while making and eating pancakes that the subject connects nicely to a popular shift in design/development practices which is the preference for frequent minor iterations over big redesigns - an example would be the way facebook goes abt tweaking things here and there constantly - the benefits are obvious from the pov of easing users into changes and testing discrete aspects of what youre trying to do - there are some draw backs from the pov of lock in/status quo bias/ability to be bold

but i think an underrated aspect of this approach is it helps you think abt what youre doing - really contemplate each lil piece and how it fits into yr strategy/philosophy - it can bring you back down to earth and open up compelling new lines of thought

gawker is maybe not the best example to continue using in this convo as they have a whole nother related problem in that their new shit is just quite broken - although obvs that couldve been avoided w/a more agile approach

its interesting too that they got in early in this trend but theyre not a technology company so maybe they dont really have the chops to pull it off

was thinking the first big departure from the feel/functionality of the traditional slide show style one full page after another web site model to a more flowing/asynchronous environment is the infinite scrolling on the facebook/etc news feed - everyone is p confortable w/it at this point - that i imagine will be the thing that first filters down to more traditional sites

im trying not to comment on the redesign but this is a kind of interesting thing:

http://qawker.linkbouncr.com/

i.e. what the redesign could be like if it isnt/wasnt so buggy

also thats a much nicer, cleaner design--hate the faux-3d shit on the real site

but note for example how much it changes the feel of the page when scrolling actually works

was thinking the first big departure from the feel/functionality of the traditional slide show style one full page after another web site model to a more flowing/asynchronous environment is the infinite scrolling on the facebook/etc news feed - everyone is p confortable w/it at this point - that i imagine will be the thing that first filters down to more traditional sites

would LOVE if that became more common, but isn't the whole point of the tedious slide show format to drive up page views/ad revenue?

yeah but that kind of stats-juking is getting less popular as advertisers catch on.

the web has been getting more appified as the years go by, and I imagine it'll continue.

I expect that the whole idea of "addresses" will become a retro signifier at some point, like modem sounds are now

i hate that rss feeds are so passe now

i love my google reader

The slideshow thing is an inheritance of Duke Berners Lee. The web was designed to share scientific papers, and so this whole thing about URLs being direct links to pieces of content, sry "representations" became the holy grail for semantic types who wanted the web to be for computers rly (see also: REST).

I think that combines with the whole request/response thing that means content on the web is totally about "ask for a page of things", "get a page of things", "choose another page" and it becomes the dominant metaphor. Now every damn news site is basically the same.

Then apps came along and were totally different -- much more about continuous async flows of stuff instead of ask/wait/ask/wait. This affected how they presented content, and I think it made it easier for people to navigate (certainly the content sites I know of see massively more "pages" per visit on iPhone than they do on their sites or mobile web).

Gawker saw that and wanted in. They fucked it up, but I think that's where we're going. It's being screamed that Gawker is "breaking the web" but not honouring 1 URL = 1 representation, but sites like Twitter and Facebook are already doing the same thing -- there's no useful URL to describe the tangled state "representation" you can get into following a reply chain or drilling into a friend-relationship.

This post reads like a load of wank to me, and content-centric networking sounds like OpenDoc in its "makes sense for a bit then doesn't" plausibility, but maybe there's something in it.
http://al3x.net/2011/02/15/internet-future.html

also thats a much nicer, cleaner design--hate the faux-3d shit on the real site

― max, Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:26 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

omg yes h8 fakeo 3d dropshadow bullshit on so many sites - its like respect things for what they are, use design to elucidate not obscure

thats all apples fault i think, thanks for the brushed metal look "jon ive" you dick

I expect that the whole idea of "addresses" will become a retro signifier at some point, like modem sounds are now

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:38 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

It's being screamed that Gawker is "breaking the web" but not honouring 1 URL = 1 representation, but sites like Twitter and Facebook are already doing the same thing -- there's no useful URL to describe the tangled state "representation" you can get into following a reply chain or drilling into a friend-relationship.

― stet, Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:46 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i think this is a super important thing thatll have to be sorted as the foundation of the web is you know links - as of now im firmly in the everything should have a url including states of web apps or w/e camp - although obvs its p easy to see the problems/impossibilities that come w/this position

All the alternatives I can think of just will never fly commercially, but eg it would be way more useful for a URL to link directly to an actual bit of content, whether that's a text article, movie, mp3 or status update than it would for it to link to a mountain of HTML/JS/CSS/Flash/w/e.

Breaking those two apart would be killer.

Which is sort of what APIs do, I guess, but they're all different and bespoke, and I really don't see REST/autodiscovery fixing that.

The web was designed to share scientific papers, and so this whole thing about URLs being direct links to pieces of content, sry "representations" became the holy grail for semantic types who wanted the web to be for computers rly (see also: REST).

― stet, Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:46 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha i was in boston a month or so ago talking to my friends neighbor who is this old school computer legend, the guy who more or less invented the spreadsheet iirc, and now hes trying to be a internet thought leader - hes super smart but not the best communicator in that dismissive nerd way - we got to talking abt the value of design - i was arguing that its essential as far as getting yr point across to people - eventually he got sort of frustrated and blurted out i dont want to talk to people, i want to talk to computers!

oh I think URLs will always exist, but they won't constitute this visible way of interfacing with the internet. people used to have to tune in their TVs.

so the question of who provides the abstraction layer, and how it works, becomes very important. how do you find the "channels" or "apps" (which will each have different models of how much and what kind of interaction to have with "external" "content"). something like YouView comes to mind. the US, as usual, is caught in never-ending wars of attrition between private concerns (comcast, netflix, apple, etc) and may find itself way behind, as it was with mobile phone technology for a decade

so the question of who provides the abstraction layer, and how it works, becomes very important. how do you find the "channels" or "apps" (which will each have different models of how much and what kind of interaction to have with "external" "content"). something like YouView comes to mind. the US, as usual, is caught in never-ending wars of attrition between private concerns (comcast, netflix, apple, etc) and may find itself way behind, as it was with mobile phone technology for a decade

this is pretty otm, but i think governance of the underlying technology behind all this is so decentralized that it's going to continue to be a content issue for the foreseeable future, viz. youview, spotify for instance - it's not as if the issue with mobile phone technology 10 years ago was that americans couldn't play snake ii (imperfect analogy, but you know what i mean)

All the alternatives I can think of just will never fly commercially, but eg it would be way more useful for a URL to link directly to an actual bit of content, whether that's a text article, movie, mp3 or status update than it would for it to link to a mountain of HTML/JS/CSS/Flash/w/e.

― stet, Sunday, February 20, 2011 1:05 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah this makes sense, the content is accessible from wherever, but if you want the social, relational, w/e data you have to specifically connect to the particular network (graph? platform?) - it works from a business pov too as in well give you enough of our stuff to become indispensable but if you want the whole deal you have to play on our turf

i hate that rss feeds are so passe now

i love my google reader

― HOOS the master?? STEEN NUFF (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:45 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

twitter rules rss droolz

also open apis (and, shit, even oauth/clones!) GREATLY simplify the development process of a lot of this stuff, as does the quick evolution of really solid frameworks - jquery ajax retrieval methods now vs. six months ago, my god

i think governance of the underlying technology behind all this is so decentralized that it's going to continue to be a content issue for the foreseeable future, viz. youview, spotify for instance

right, that's what i mean! w/mobile phones it was tech issues that slowed everyone down, but the reasons for those tech issues slowing everyone down was that the major players wouldn't/couldn't work together on common platforms that everyone could benefit from. with the web it's not tech that's the problem (despite endless discussions over HTML5 or whatever) it's content, and common platforms for content.

file systems are dead - the "rest of us" never really used them in the first place. the app was the portal. if i want to write a doc, i start Word, open things, save things. apple twigged this hardcore with the iPhone. similarly, with the advent of walled gardens and app versions of newspapers, addresses will be dead as well. the question is, what will replace the address bar and/or google as the vanilla starting block for accessing all this stuff?

lol quora is a kind of fascinating oversharing look into startup/valley culture atm http://www.quora.com/Mark-Zuckerberg-1/How-smart-is-Mark-Zuckerberg-academic-wise-Is-he-as-smart-as-Bill-Gates

"porn rules" is a joke but fuck it, porn will always be the innovative industry in how much of the internet works. Hell there was just a conference called http://www.contentprotectionretreat.com/index.html where the porn industry decided "The goal of the CPR is to significantly reduce digital piracy of adult content and to effectively drive those who engage in adult content piracy completely underground by January 2012."

i.e. so while newspapers and big production companies (music, tv and film industries etc.) just spend their time bitching and suing individuals, porn is getting shit done.

and its not like they never proved they can do whatever they put their minds to before, either

gdamn it! my answer to the quora gates/zukerb question has already been collapsed

Possible version of Chrome w/out URL bar: http://www.conceivablytech.com/5746/products/google-may-kill-chrome-url-bar/

hee hee.

i thought this was interesting, re walled gardens, payment, etc:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/18/the_payment_problem/

although obvs that couldve been avoided w/a more agile approach

― ice cr?m, Sunday, February 20, 2011 5:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha

for the thread's consideration http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/02/18/ie9-is-the-new-ie6

rounded corners!

more on the subject of content platforms:

http://counternotions.com/2011/02/16/stores/

What choice do publishers have then? They first have to ask themselves two fundamental questions:

1. What business are we in? — Are we in the business of creating scarcity in news and media to leverage it against eyeballs for advertisers? Can our current model survive the transition to digital? Are we capable of setting up our own stores? If not, do we understand we must change our revenue streams radically? What sorts of structural and financial remodeling do we have to undergo internally to adjust to giving up 30% to Apple?

2. Quo vadis? — If our current distribution has to change, on whose digital platform will we move? Is there, in other words, an alternative to Apple App Store?

so carmelo anthony jut got traded to the ny knicks - espn is super conservative abt verifying breaking news so theres no confirmation of the deal on their site

http://grab.by/955S

but they do have this lil twitter widget w/all their reporters in it

http://grab.by/955j

clever

I think future of web=

* people who use general-purpose browsers "tomorrow" will all be considered about as normal as these dudes http://✧✧✧.mail-arch✧✧✧.com/lynx-✧✧✧@non✧✧✧.o✧✧/msg03394.html

* although perhaps the ubiquity of web competency nowadays means that many people will at least have the ability to use a general-purpose browser in their toolkit somewhere for such as porn, leaks, pirating, etc.

* "autodiscovery" won't be important if services are all linked to clients by apps. nobody is going to go back to operating and maintaining their own homepages no matter how much this guy wants to help us: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html

* hypertext already failed at sharing academic and scientific literature. we're here 20 years later and ACM, IEEE, AAAS, etc all still guard their content behind paywalls and in the form of PDFs. epic, epic fail. so it's safe to say whatever content or open data initiatives we see in the near term (applying RDF concepts to all our data! learning how to make everything namespace-aware and building sweet XSLTs on the fly!) the keepers of the keys will continue as they always have and the amazing, groundbreaking results of all the potential mashups (as opposed to the obvious, dipshit mercator projection of population density as sampled via x service mashups) will stay in somebody's fucking towers, undiscoverable and unlinkable without $$$ up front

* in fact given that everybody is just going to have an app for their news vs. the other guys news it's liable to get far worse than it is today. I mean shit, the wikipedia model itself is to link internally first and then throw all the sources at the bottom, and they're the best of the latter-day web. everybody else links you to their own content period, fuck the rest; provider-specific apps will just make this far, far worse

* so the future of the web is that it becomes so proprietary that it becomes what we always said we wanted out of cable television: a la carte channels. No links between anything, but at least I'm not paying for some shit I don't want. Where there are links they're to FUNNIEZ between FRIENDZ so hey whatever chill out bro you're not even carles

* twitter already disassociates content by two degrees (tweet > obfuscated link > link > content) and the way people use it with tumblr nowadays the world keeps showing up like this (which is UNBELIEVABLY STUPID by the way): tweet > share/retweet > obfuscated link > link > tumblr > reblog > year-old photoshop and/or other artifact of a fictional event

(btw david shields can go fuck himself. terrible. can't trust anybody these days)

* what's the point of the future of the web? who's driving this bus? there's internet2 techies who want to build services to specific technocratic ends, and they've been doing that for a while. then there's kids and kids at heart who want to dick around web2.0 to build networks to satisfy whatever urge is the urge to have today. can anybody make actual money off of them besides apple, zynga and blizzard?

the web we know today is going to go the way of usenet and homepage rings, I don't think it's going to be replaced by anything so much as forgotten and only used by professors and actual code people. I hate to be all doctorow about it but IF the web is going to be changing significantly in the new social country of the 21st tomorrownets then I think the way it changes is to turn into a thing nobody calls a web anymore

so as for future of the internet I call you 200 channels with nothing on and raise you 80000000 channels. but some of them have porn so there's always something on.

yeah seems to have been sorted now

this wouldn't be a problem if we just agreed to have 5g chips implanted in our brains

Guardian and Reddit back for me but NY Times and Independent still down

Hooray, Twitch is back up in time for me to fix and eat breakfast! *spams a series of hype emotes*

apparently fastly is...

...AMAZON HOSTING!

Amazon style sheets were flaking out so that figoors.

whenever i click a link the anxiety kicks in - how many trackers am i going to need to reject, how many 'x's am i going to need to close. the web has just become a total shitshow.

Love the sites where you have to unclick 'legitimate interest' individually for literally hundreds of companies. Though opening a browser console and typing "jQuery('input:checked').click()" usually works, what a world.

i guess this is exactly what FB et al want, for the web to feel janky and broken so you just stay in their apps

hey instagram I HAVE ENOUGH SHORTS

https://kotaku.com/latest

New Dead Space Remake Will Be Next-Gen Only
Horizon’s Aloy Joins Genshin Impact, Is Cute As A Button
Battlefield 2042 Sandbox Mode To Include Bad Company 2 Maps
PUBG Skin Looks An Awful Lot Like Hypnospace Outlaw, Dev Objects
The Best Switch Carrying Cases
You Can Get Vintage Game Magazines Delivered To Your Doorstep
Raphael Lacoste's Art Of Assassin's Creed
Activision Blizzard Sued By California Over Widespread Harassment Of Women (<<actual news)
It's Not Every Day You Get To See New Footage From A Game Nintendo Cancelled Over 20 Years Ago
My Speedrunning Career Lasted A Bit Less Than A Week
Genshin Impact Players Insist On Reaching New Region The Hard Way
Ubisoft Shutters Troubled Tom Clancy Game A Year After Launch
Help, Netflix Made The Witcher’s Vesemir Hot
Guilty Gear Strive’s First DLC Character Is The U.S. Secretary Of Defense
FFXIV Player Won’t Stop Until He’s Eaten Nearly 140K Eggs

----

i don't know why kotaku is still in my mental list of websites i should look at. some things, some topics, just shouldn't be updated every day. there isn't enough to make it a thing that has new articles every hour or so for eternity. but they have to do it, to make money and have jobs. so they publish stuff like this. was it always this bad? i don't know. polygon is essentially the same website. they even run "stories" on the same non-events, like within hours of each other. there are a lot of websites like this. daily content, despite the content being non-daily.

i want kotaku to update in an irregular way, like every 3-5 days. and on that day, it should only run interesting articles, even if there is only one. and kotaku should ICQ me and say "i updated my website! :DD" . i will hear "uh oh!" and walk over to the giant CRT and read it, then excitedly sit down to read what my friend has written this time

the model for quite a long time now, and not just kotaku, has been volume and lots of it

sigh. it's true. but has it always been this vapid? it's relentless.

first of all, why did i just instinctively visit kotaku.com to see what was new? secondly, this was what was new

You may now buy an ugly, slow, Mario-themed TAG Heuer smartwatch for $2,150

the headlines themselves have gotten to a point where they seem intended for the viewer to say "hmph!" in a way that's closest to disillusion with existence itself. but after that, the content of the story is also like that. everything has become fully saturated with it.

why can't a website just focus on the GOOD news!? people would love that! nothing but good news, imagine reading that!

(jk, i know this theory is tested in small towns across the country for the last 50+ years, and in fact, no one wants to read only good news)

https://i.imgur.com/uvi1gU4.png

"finally, in the year 2021, an op-ed by the editorial board of the Washington Post changed the course of climate change for the better. it was called "Hey, world, are you noticing? Floods! Fires! Could it be time to do something about climate change?"

oops! that was an reference to a sentence i deleted from an earlier post, where i wondered whether that same existentialist vapidity had come from, or spread to, newspaper op-ed sections. i deleted it because i thought "...eh, who cares". but then a minute later, over the post, it's right there. it's everywhere on my screen. there must be a solution for this. and the solution is probably on my screen somewhere, hold on

hmph

i wanna know more about these nearly 140k eggs

i would say the ubisoft one is an actual headline too but the rest yeah it's minor updates to games or reporting on social media discourse or whatever

Ray-Ban Stories

https://www.ray-ban.com/uk/electronics/RW4004%20UNISEX%20ray-ban%20stories%20|%20wayfarer-black/8056597489478

i like this

https://search.marginalia.nu

https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-feudalism/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w52CziLgnAc

"Photoreal Avatars"

wild

idk if this is the thread for such concerns, but where is anyone even visiting/reading on the net outside of youtube/reddit/socials anymore? my love affair with the web blossomed in the middle of web 2.0, and community felt so abundant and alive then. i don't think it was rose-tinted glasses; the fun of anonymity, identity and personalization were embedded in the regular infrastructure of many sites - but now, everything feels so homogenous. not to mention navigating through endless captchas, cookies, 2fas, emails, notifications... i guess communities have centralized and blogs have died... but i really feel like i only open safari now to check a few reddit communities and watch yt. it's making me a bit sad...

I still use RSS feeds as much as I ever did; that and Twitter is still taking me to places across the web but definite drop in the non-homogenous weird-little-site I rock up to

outside of work, where I spend a lot of time on Slack and stack(overflow|exchange)-type sites, I find my internet usage decreasing to almost nothing in my spare time. A few social sites (ILX being one of them), hobby Discords, and a handful of kinda-trustworthy news sites. Search engines have gotten to the point of being almost useless unless a person cares enough to get good at filtering out the vast sea of seemingly “AI”-generated dreck that try to pass as how-to or product review articles.

basically i've become the fulfillment of the ad-based internet economy, pretty much everything i do on the internet leads to some kind of purchase. idk it's helped me to be honest about that rather than think the information i consume is "important" in any way.

even after spending a lifetime on the internet and using it to escape the shitty culture i was born into, i frankly just don't believe that "actual" community can exist solely through the internet, and that it never did. internet can be a support but there has to be bodies in shared space or there isn't community imo.

I still go to a fair number of sites, don't know if there's much point listing them tho as they're so niche - mostly to do with comics, food in London, a few movie blogs.

What I've stopped doing tho is exploring - hardly ever find a new site via links from one I'm reading, never google a term to find sites associated with it. That's def been supplanted by YouTube, sadly.

Hanging out in discords has a bit of that old message board feel and is def superior to facebook and twitter.

I got on the internet in the mid-1990s, when anonymity was not the default - people posted to Usenet with their real names and indeed email addresses - so I suppose in that respect Twitter is a bit of a throwback. It was smaller then and perhaps because of that it felt more information-dense, but I'll concede that there's a lot more content nowadays, it's just that the ratio is unfavourable. And people were assholes back then. Massive assholes. Not in the way you'd expect, but still massive assholes.

As for general internet use I am occasionally reminded of how bleak large chunks of the modern internet are whenever I have to use a computer that doesn't have adblock, or I'm abroad and Google insists on making me use the non-personalised version of Google News. Google News' default is its own take on what is relevant in the US, which almost certainly isn't what people in the US actually want to read. I have met people from the US in real life - I was going to say "Americans" but you're going to complain that I could be talking about people from South America or Canada etc - and neither of them were dummies.

Also, simple technical queries. What's the difference between Crucial's MX and BX SSDs? Google presents page after page of links such as Crucial BX500 Vs MX500 - Which Is Better One? [New 2021], which is supposed to make you think the page was made with love and care by a human being, or alternatively "robo-content", which usually goes e.g. "SSDS are solid state drives. There are many differences between them. You might be looking for the differences. I'm going to tell you the differences. It's important to understand the differences etc" without getting to the point. In which case Reddit etc are the only option, because they're written by real people. For the record Crucial's MX SSDs have on-chip write levelling, or some kind of memory chip that looks after the SSD, whereas the BX models don't have that.

Meanwhile professional media organisations are a wasteland of poor-quality writing by unpaid interns, or on-message rubbish written to fill a quota. I don't want to hear what a 21-year-old man has to say about human society. You're 21, you're a five-year-old sixteen-year-old boy. You've memorised a lot of command line switches and facts and figures. You don't have a soul yet! You aren't conscious, or self-aware, and more importantly you aren't in a position to speak your mind because you're sackable. Totally sackable.

This is one of the reasons I participate on Ilxor etc. Firstly because it sets my mind in motion, and secondly so that I have something to read in the future. A few years from now I'll forget that I wrote this post, and I'll stumble on it and think "that was entertaining" and "that man is witty but could do with proofreading" and of course that man will be me. I am lighting a candle, but it's my candle, and it's actually a tape, as in Krapp's Last Tape, and I mean some of you are pretty good as well.

It has to be said that the internet circa 1995 was also filled with assholes, but a different kind; petty little fifty-something engineers. There are a few relics of that demographic on e.g. Airlines.net or Photo.net, because they've been around since the 1990s and have some of the same participants, now old men. Also blu-ray.com, which is full of people boasting about their collection of 4K blu-rays that they bought to replace their original blu-rays that are now junk. The same people in the 1990s would have had a large shelf with Star Trek VHS tapes, two episodes per tape, total spend £700 etc.

But this was predicted. I remember an old essays from 2001 or so called Content is Not King. It argued that the internet was email and social connections, not newspapers. It's one of those "too early to say" topics twenty-one years later:
https://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742

I've been covering bad parts of the internet for long time now.

For years, there was one site extremist researchers warned me not to cover because publicizing it would be dangerous.

But it's time people know KiwiFarms—and how they're chasing political enemies around the world.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 2, 2022

#legs are coming soon

search results are SO TRASH it’s driving me bananas and AI seems guaranteed to make it worse, help me i used to really like the internet

Time to start publishing printed books of cool links again

xp i tried to talk about this on another thread and somebody told me "just go to the library"

https://i.imgur.com/6x1qcOA.png

Google Image Search is especially impressive in how frequently it fails completely.

living through this whole ai thing and seeing phone-addicted young people everywhere - how they inhabit space while looking at their phones - and then seeing how people essentially become tweets and reels and posts irl - has me increasingly believing that the mobile internet and info tech at large is some kind of lovecraftian force of sublime horror longing to subsume us.

otm

I remember when the idea of being disconnected from the internet used to fill me with dread. Now I'm like a person slowly psyching myself up to quit a substance - convincing myself how little I really use it, and how I wouldn't really miss it that much especially after a month or so of detox.

I often take a little walk on my 'lunch break' (working at home) and will get a beer and walk down to a nearby nondescript park - last week I realize I'd left my phone at home and had this mini-panic... but then I was just like 'dude, you don't need your phone - get a beer and watch the dogs and the redwood trees and the birds' and it was perfectly enjoyable and the world didn't end

I might start enforcing this once in a while

living through this whole ai thing and seeing phone-addicted young people everywhere - how they inhabit space while looking at their phones - and then seeing how people essentially become tweets and reels and posts irl - has me increasingly believing that the mobile internet and info tech at large is some kind of lovecraftian force of sublime horror longing to subsume us.

― she freaks, she speaks (map)

you know, i was just contemplating how the more i think about the american president, the more sanity damage i take. lovecraftian horror works, but i tend to think of the internet as more of a memetic hazard, a Langford Death Parrot

I Love Dumbphones and believe they are the future

I was thinking early this morning that I'm addicted to my phone (I was going to put in a qualifying statement there; don't need one). Quitting booze was relatively straightforward, since I needed to think about avoiding compulsions, etc, at certain points of the day/week. My phone is so entwined in my life, I don't really know how I'm going to extricate myself from it. The moment I think about not having music and podcasts available, I panic.

That said, my most pathetic capitulation is usually 'but what about my steps?!'

i honestly think it's ok to be ok with things we don't really have a say in, where the force is stronger than our will. is that why hitler / trump happened? i don't know but i can't keep myself on the hook for things i have literally no control over any more. some of phone integration into life is like that, i think. maps is probably the big one for me. i don't think it's given enough thought and acknowledgment how much having a satellite map in your pocket has changed our experience of being physically in the world. anyway that's a pet topic of mine.

i'm basically being forced to use my phone less because i can't afford a new one. it's mostly an ipod i can use to call and text for me at this point. i've offloaded a lot of apps to have enough room for a few extra albums. it can't handle video and it can barely take a decent photo. it's still a few steps above a dumb phone. there's that old adage about being poor - nothing will teach you to become less attached than having less to attach to. lol.

the bar I go to for some reason is a total dead spot for my phone, I'll be honest it's actually pretty nice

I still have an old cell plan without any data (or barely any, I have 250mb per month, which I reserve for text messages and google maps) which keeps me from just randomly checking internet stuff when I'm outside of my house. The problem isn't so much the cell phone, whose primary use continues to be as a music/podcast player, it's the internet connection. Not having data works pretty well for me for the most part, I just have to work on getting out of the house more often.

I'm not tied to my phone at work, thankfully. I teach, and whole days can go by where I *can't* check my phone at all. Which brings its own problems...

I've worked *really* hard at not being available to the demands of messaging and social media. WhatsApp, etc., set up a whole suite of implied contracts with response times, availability, etc., none of which we sign up for. I've had to coach people to accept responses when I can, or when I want to - not because I don't care but because I don't want the expectation that I'm always available. A few people have pretty much cut me off because they think I'm rude. Eh.

i've definitely been using my phone less since my recent 'upgrade' to a new one, they're making it pretty easy with how shitty and intrusive all the software has gotten

i'll never abandon the hobbyist internet but that's practically a different thing than the normie internet at this point, with only a couple points of intersection like youtube and wikipedia