The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

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

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