Imminent Death of the Net Predicted, Film At 11

that was the running joke back in the Usenet days. people would go around like chicken little saying the sky was falling. i can remember that. i can't remember... crying wolf? was that the saying, for when the wolf eventually comes to eat you?

point is that nobody's going to take it seriously if i suggest the internet is dying. certainly i don't see anyone taking it seriously if i say this _on the internet_. if i'm gonna say something like that, it has to be on AFL. there's probably some historic reason shitpost threads go on ILAFL, but i wasn't around then.

maybe there's a little "old lady yells at cloud" to it as well. i used to think the internet was cool when i was 20, now i'm 50 and i think the internet sucks. in some ways i'm old and out of touch, in some ways i've probably genuinely grown and become wiser as a human being. but i'm still me so of course i'm gonna phrase it as "Butlerian Jihad Now", even if, as a good leftist, i'll follow it up with some waffle about whether it's OK to use the phrase "butlerian jihad", since the term "butlerian jihad" was some very dodgy cultural appropriation by a white dude on cocaine. reconciling my woke side and my edgelady ironic nerd side isn't easy. but to explain "butlerian jihad" is a nerd reference to the book Dune by Frank Herbert, where they decided computers were bad and had a revolution to destroy them. it bears no relation whatsoever to the Islamic concept of "jihad", nor to groundbreaking gender theorist Judith Butler.

it's just that sometimes i run across something on the internet and it makes me think "wow, the internet is a terrible place, and the people trying to 'fix' it don't know how much they're making it worse". last week it was reading that harper's magazine had discovered "gooning". i remember when people talked about the "intellectual dark web". the people who claimed that were cringe. the dark web isn't intellectual, it's gooners. i'm not a gooner or a dark web person at all - i'm kind of trying to be "mainstream". that's cringe too and it's something i embrace. it's just...

i post these long posts every few days because a lot of the time i do try very hard to be "no thoughts head empty". i try to be stupid, very very stupid, like doctor who when skagra tries to steal his mind. that's a nerd reference that very few people will understand probably and another time maybe i'll expound upon my theory about how the character of skagra shows unexpected insight into how the totalitarian mind works and why it fails. i don't know how to explain my beliefs except through old doctor who episodes sometimes, which is one of the reasons i don't do well with "mainstream".

like, i still have clippy-as-avatar, and it's not because of whatever weird protest movement the guy who made the video had. it's for my own reasons. it's because i actively want the public internet, ilx excepted, to believe i'm a dumb fucking jerkoff. to believe that i have exactly as much brains and personality as fucking clippy.

because i wake up and i look at the world around me and the world is too stupid for me to think about. if i try to think about it, it makes me crazy. i try to say well, that's just how the world is, and all i can do is live my values, which are not quite the same as the values the internet lives by.

well, since i'm a fucking expert at burying the lede, this all gets back to a new york times podcast that's gone viral: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-child-safety.html

and what strikes me is that discord, in both the gooning article and this podcast, is seen by "respectable" people as an avatar of the online demimonde. most of my online time is spent on discord, these days. discord and signal chats. the harpers gooning article, i detect in the author a little bit of... reflection, not quite anxiety, about the idea that they might be the butt of the joke. i'm not a gooner, but yeah, to me, they are funny, they are a Clueless Old who doesn't Get It. and i say that as someone who is, in a lot of ways, a Clueless Old herself. zoomers, alphas, i'm ok not "getting" them. anybody under 30, they're not people i can really talk to, and i'm pretty thankful for that, because a lot of people in this world are out there saying trans people are "groomers". of course i'm not, and at the same time, Caesar's wife must be above suspicion, yeah? that's how patriarchy works.

what the Harpers writer doesn't understand, what the NYT interviewers don't seem to understand, is _why_ kids flock to Roblox and Discord. at one point one of the interviewers asks "do you think it's a good idea to let roblox users talk to each other?" like this is _why i'm on discord_. because on the open internet i can't fucking _talk_ to other people. because we're always being watched, scrutinized, _policed_. i'm a sapir-whorf girlie, i stan sapir-whorf, but i stan _weak_ sapir-whorf.

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it's this idea of internet-as-parent. to the extent that i can understand kids who grow up on the internet, it's because i had a _supremely fucked-up childhood_, one that i took as "normal" but which actually wasn't. i feel like a lot of people on ILX had that same experience. all this stuff that i thought didn't actually happen, turns out it was happening in my childhood home. i'm not going to get into details because it would distract. what i can say is that the shit people are worried about with roblox and discord - the horrific abuse, the social isolation, the way kids, from a young age, are regularly exposed to the most fucked-up, toxic shit... that's not something that just started happening with the internet. i think a lot of these "respectable" people, they haven't wanted to acknowledge the true extent to which it has always happened, the extent to which it was normalized. "gooning" isn't _good_, but i don't think it's categorically different from the "lost weekend". maybe there are some people who had normal childhoods.

maybe there are some happy families. i got some cousins who seem to be, like, genuinely well-adjusted, they seem like they had authoritative parents and all that. it's rare. it's not like my parents _chose_ to be abusive and neglectful. they were doing the best they knew how to do. that's the most fucked-up thing about it. the internet-as-parent does in some ways remind me of my own parents - a place of boundless intellectual curiosity that's psychologically incredibly traumatized and fucked up and isn't willing to acknowledge the full extent of the problem most of the time. when they do, it's by setting up stupid, arbitrary punishments, dumb rules that they can't enforce and don't really try anyway. they're busy with their own problems. were they _qualified_ to be in charge, to have a duty of care? i mean, no. i mean, my youngest sibling actually did better when they were sent to one of those Homes for Troubled Youths, because even though they were surrounded by a bunch of other fucked up and traumatized kids, they at least got their basic needs met. i mean they at least got regular fucking meals.

so yeah, the internet is an abusive parent, by turns authoritarian and neglectful. i'm not literally a child of the internet, but i was there from 1993, for most of my life, and on BBSes before that. and over that time, it's gotten more and more like my parents. you want someone to listen to you? other kids, anyone? youtube won't do it. on youtube, kids are seen and not heard. kids want to talk, kids want to be listened to, and no shit adults are right to be concerned, because a lot of grownups who will listen to kids are people like gordon jump's character in that Very Special Episode of Diff'rent Strokes. a lot of them are also like fred rogers, too, but the grown-ups, they're not very good at telling which is which. truth be told, they never were.

well golly, i wrote an whole entire post without blaming everything on capitalism for once. mark your calendars, that'll never happen again!

https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-12-2015/-INbYN.gif

That Roblox guy is an absolutely ghoul

Roose: Would you ever put a prediction market inside Roblox — like, let kids bet with their Robux and say, “I bet he’s gonna steal a Tung Tung Tung Sahur?”

Newton: Or, “I bet he’s not gonna Dress to Impress.”

Baszucki: We would — I think we would have to do that — once again, I’ll share some of the complexity. Every single country in the world has different legislation around loot boxes and kid gambling. And so we would have to be — it sounds very fun and obvious. Like, I love that —

Roose: Oh, to be clear, I think this is a horrible idea.

Newton and Baszucki: (laughter)

Roose: I was just interested if you were thinking about it.

honestly that roblox interview had me thinking of Gay Byrne's interview with Pádraig Flynn. i'd have to hear the podcast to really get the vibe, but the impression i get is that Roose isn't doing a full Isaac Chotiner, that there is a bit more playing along with this monster the way Byrne played along with Flynn. and I think it's interesting because it reveals just how casually fucking evil these guys are, how routine and ordinary Baszucki's monstrosity is. that to me is where my whole butlerian jihad thing comes from - it's not that, say, mark zuckerberg is evil, or elon musk is evil, or jeff bezos is evil (they are all quite evil, of course), but the way in which the stuff they do is... i'm really not trying to make a comparison, it's just the only way i know to phrase it... _banal_. i mean yeah the internet was always at least a little bit evil but i look at how nakedly avaricious the people in charge are and it absolutely breaks my brain.

there's maybe some convergence here with the super eyepatch wolf video i was talking about... the bit that struck me is the bit that starts at 39:20 in "The Most Disturbing Fake Video Game", the section about "Vermis Malum". All of this talk about "parasociality", David Graeber's "hypernormalisation", liminal spaces... Super Eyepatch Wolf's centering of the "player" in these videos I think is a key insight, and it also ties in, I think, with the video that broke Elsagate, "Something is Wrong on the Internet". The Elsagate phenomenon itself is, these days, ordinary, banal. It's just something we "radically accept". We have a generation of kids raised on 4chan and Elsagate content, and surprise surprise, a lot of them are really fucked up. And I can understand that because I've dealt, am dealing with, similar issues to the issues some of them seem to be dealing with. Vermis Malum I think is also I think an iteration of the old Jonathan Blow game "Braid", which is a game on some level about a shitty dude who treats a woman in his life terribly and is in denial about it, as well as a game like Doki Doki Literature Club. He rejects her reality and substitutes his own. When Super Eyepatch Wolf talks about "potemkin villages", it's an analogy I use a lot.. the Internet as potemkin village, capitalism is potemkin village, America as potemkin village. None of this shit is REAL.

Super Eyepatch Wolf talks about the way Vermis Malum, well, worms its way into the fictional player's head. The way it's doing _something_ to him, and he doesn't see or recognize it. The Internet of 2025 is all about gamification, and what's happened is that these games, they do become "hyperreal". More real than our corporeal reality. To the extent where corporeal reality is strange and disturbing, because it's not like what we see on our screams. Uh, screens. I'll leave the typo. The text adventure section of Vermis Malum... to me, it's influenced by "Milk Inside of a Bag of Milk Inside of a Bag of Milk". That experience is just the reality of so many people. That's the horror. I try not to think about it because, you know, I have to radically accept it, right? Radically accept that people are isolated and dying in front of these screens. These joybooths.

"The potemkin village - this place attempting to appear like something it's not - is in itself a space masquerading as a video game, but in actuality a nest of some terrible parasite that has crawled inside the player.... Now, unable to deal with reality, he has isolated himself, and cut off from the outside world, he is now the corpse rotting in the tombstoneless grave -- and that is what let the parasite crawl in."

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Well I haven't watched or listened beyond that yet. My mind ain't so open that anything can crawl right in, as Magazine said. I don't watch The Amazing Digital Circus because I'm aware what it does to me. I get confused about whether or not I'm real. I know it seems silly. I know I'm real. I just spend so much of my time alone, behind this screen. It's hard to remember what the Internet actually _is_ to me.

Because from the beginning, I couldn't accept the Internet as merely a _subtitute_ for reality. I was a weird, fucked up kid who didn't know how to get along with real people. What I saw in the Internet was a place where I could find _my_ people. It sounds really fucking arrogant and presumptuous for me to say that the problem wasn't me, the problem was the world. The fucked up thing is that, in one specific case (and _only_ that one case), it appears to have been true. I am, it turns out, an basic middle-aged white lady, among other things, yet I grew up in a world that didn't really acknowledge my _basicness_, the ways in which I am, honestly, a pretty ordinary white girl. The Internet, for me, was a means to an end - my attempt to figure out how to get my emotional needs met in the real world.

Well, I was telling a friend yesterday - they used to say "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." And for me, on the Internet, nobody knew I _wasn't_ a girl. I didn't, though, tell anybody I was a girl. I didn't think I was or could be a girl. Because for all that "gender is a social construct", at the same time it _is_ real for me. Being _perceived_ as an ordinary middle-aged white lady in the world around me - which I am - that's a lot more powerful than knowing that if I went on a gooner server they'd respect my pronouns, you know? That is privilege, absolutely, and it's a privilege I believe that _everybody_ deserves, everybody deserves to be treated with respect, regardless of what they "pass" as. Well I guess it was never an easy sell, but to the extent I do "norms entrepreneurship", well, that's the product I'm peddling. The idea that whoever we are, we can be "normal".

Except that through the magic of the Internet... not only is there "no new normal", there's no normal at _all_, that I can see. Just a screen on which people reject material reality and substitute their own. Not my bag. Never been my bag.