The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

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?

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

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