The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

definitely.

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

xp

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

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

"paradigm shit" is an all-time typo btw

i like this book -

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

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

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

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

so many great posts itt

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

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

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

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

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

another rambling post.

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

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

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

Yeah what happens in the post work world?

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

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

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

and farmers

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

glad i'm not the only one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

have a workless society if you are 62

You're optimistic!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this is a good way of putting it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xp

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

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

And Commodify Your Dissent is 23 years ago, gah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://umw.domains/

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

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

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

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

man alive otm re: Updike/Beethoven

golden shower of the internet

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

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

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

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

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

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

god, homework, ugh

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

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

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

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