The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

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

now i'm like

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/12/08/article-2520401-19DF8DB600000578-910_638x426.jpg

If everyone is always reading the same things, that encourages conformity. Like, one of the reasons diverse perspectives are valuable, and even just why it's fun to talk to other people, is that other people know different things than you do, which influences what they pick up on when examining a given topic. Today everyone has a "hot take" but the loudest ones tend to be really predictable. Maybe this isn't different than the past though. I barely remember the pre-2007 internet.

A world where the internet is a giant library and everyone is off in their own corner seems better than one where the internet is more like a television station, where everyonr is looking at the same thing at the same time more or less

literally a few years hence i'm gonna have students who are younger than MY WHOLE BLOG and we're gonna have a history lesson about the internet and they're gonna be all shaddap grampa my phone my phone

I remember the "web that was" somewhat. There was more ASCII art, right? And more Star Trek-themed erotic fanfiction. Ah, good times.

Kidding aside I am not sure that usenet was all that much of a democratic utopia. It didn't have ads and logos and corporate co-optation, nor did it have a zillion pictures of your aunt's cat encountering a dripping faucet. But it was still a fairly small, relatively privileged group of people segmenting themselves into microgroups to discuss the finer points of the things that interested them, and mostly only those things.

I sympathize with (and envy) Karl Malone's idyllic, lyrical memory of "exploring and wandering off into corners of the web that felt untouched and new." I take it on faith that there must have been a lot of that. But there was also a lot of alt.binaries.furries.felching or whatever.

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.

This rings true, at least in terms of the financial rewards not being there (except for the very few) to encourage young writers/artists/etc to pursue greatness, and to facilitate a life spent working towards it.

But in other ways, I feel like the gatekeepers are more important than ever. Aside from fluky viral successes, it takes PR money to break through the white noise and funnel a critical mass of people towards anything in particular. Although maybe the main difference is that money is coming less from old-world publishers, labels, etc and increasingly from car companies and energy drink manufacturers.

Ok you know what sucks about Internet 2015? Facebook just insisted on telling me that Amy Schumer can be seen in this month's GQ "deepthroating a lightsaber" and I reflexively GIS'd it.

"Things used to be better" is generational gatekeeping. It's saying "we had this awesome thing and then we fucked it up so you'll never get to experience it yourself, sorry not sorry." It's the same mentality as calling yourself The Greatest Generation.

tumblr is pretty anarchic and rad tbh, the kids are all right there, they're figuring stuff out

"Things used to be better" is generational gatekeeping. It's saying "we had this awesome thing and then we fucked it up so you'll never get to experience it yourself, sorry not sorry." It's the same mentality as calling yourself The Greatest Generation.

― Immediate Follower (NA), Thursday, July 16, 2015 12:32 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

again though i'm more curious about a discussion of how things have changed. and they could be better for some or worse for some but again, i think, like for example not the internet. but your position basically just cuts off discussion, everyone can have their own values about what's better or worse.

and i don't necessarily think it's odd to have the early days of anything cultural be pretty exciting. like i always understood why people who grew up in the 60s or went through WWII were so stuck on those events, they were huge events!

max's post above about the internet consolidating rings true to experience but at same time the internet is also expanding faster than ever right now?? there's a race between the natural uh entropy of the network and the forces of consolidation, idk if that tension is solely resolved by consolidation winning

also the consolidation has some positive aspects, right? like i'm sure everyone who posts in goon threads has fond memories of the early rap blog era. but a lot of those writers are now getting $ to write for complex or noisey or npr or whatever, for a wider audience. so you lose some of the independence & hyper-specificity, but the writers and their potential audiences gain

Again - however anarchic and freeform the web may have been in (say) 1995-2000, its glories were largely reserved for those with computers and good connections. Technically literate people at the time implied a pretty affluent (and strongly white and male) subset. I don't mean to knock it for that - the same can be said of a lot of things. It's just, let's not get all pastopian about it without acknowledging such.

what do you want out of that acknowledgement, a cookie?

Again - however anarchic and freeform the web may have been in (say) 1995-2000

i'm actually more concerned with the differences between now and say, 2006, in terms of how aggregation, BIG DATA (TM), "curated content", "user-generated" content, click farms, etc have changed

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.

fwiw,

Erin Kissane
‏@kissane
BLOGS ARE DEAD yell tech dudes in an empty room next to a carnival of wildly popular DIY fashion and beauty bloggers, religion bloggers, boo

Again - however anarchic and freeform the web may have been in (say) 1995-2000, its glories were largely reserved for those with computers and good connections. Technically literate people at the time implied a pretty affluent (and strongly white and male) subset. I don't mean to knock it for that - the same can be said of a lot of things. It's just, let's not get all pastopian about it without acknowledging such.

yeah, did we ever think the web was going to go mainstream without becoming 80% terrible? has anyone linked "eternal september" yet?

i don't mean to cheapshot the more nuanced conversation above btw, i just want to say that broad trends are not necessarily the whole story.

If everyone is always reading the same things, that encourages conformity. Like, one of the reasons diverse perspectives are valuable, and even just why it's fun to talk to other people, is that other people know different things than you do, which influences what they pick up on when examining a given topic. Today everyone has a "hot take" but the loudest ones tend to be really predictable. Maybe this isn't different than the past though. I barely remember the pre-2007 internet.

― Treeship, Thursday, July 16, 2015 10:57 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Again - however anarchic and freeform the web may have been in (say) 1995-2000, its glories were largely reserved for those with computers and good connections. Technically literate people at the time implied a pretty affluent (and strongly white and male) subset.

If you were not technically literate you could go to a public library and ask someone for help. Or use it at school.

LOL @ the 'glories' of the 1995-2000 internet. This is the era of 56k capped dial-up, where you would have to browse w images turned off if you wanted to get anywhere without waiting for things to load. Usenet was fine, Napster or FTP good for pirating, and HTML for band fan pages. It felt more freeform because it was decentralized, the internet was there and you accessed it through various different programs. Nowadays everyone sees it on the same 2 or 3 platforms.

You should look back even earlier from the 70s to the mid-90s at BBS culture for the true anarchic web. Homebrew personal internets, often crossing the Iron Curtain, East-West Germany, and other places, subverting the geography of the Cold War. The internet is accessible to anyone as long as they get the knowledge and tech.

Another reason the internet wasn't walled-off is that flood of "50 Free Hours" AOL CDs there must be landfills full of those.

honestly i'm not necessarily nostalgic about those days

i guess i just feel like in the last 3 or so years more and more outlets for good writing and good content have gone down and the pace seems to be accelerating, and more and more writers (tons of ones who i was colleagues with) have just said fuck it (as have I!) and just went into PR and marketing or other stuff....

which is concerning because i enjoy good writing