The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

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

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.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, July 16, 2015 8:38 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i never liked usenet, personally. but i only used it once or twice and it kind of frightened me.

i used bbs the most, and i thought it was so cool.

the problem with the Internet came about when the Web became popular and people started talking about "commerce", which happened really early on than what i see people saying here.

but bbs was only cool precisely because it was closed off to a lot of people. after that, it's the typical sell-out syndrome, though. it happens when things become big and popular/mainstream.

but the 90s weren't so bad. what is depressing now is the scalability of it all. e-commerce and monetary value is entrenched in every single aspect of the web.

i have a friend who was a bit of an anarcho-hacker back in the 90s and up until 7 years ago he would broadcast his printer and internet connection so people can access it freely. it's that idea that the web was never meant to be about making money left and right wherever, however you could from the user. now it's the opposite. ironically, this guy went on to work for facebook after his firstborn and became the epitome of a dad, which is fine. but these really smart guys are now building smart tools to help big corpos monetise web use any way they can, because they want to support their growing family.

things can be better -- i'm not saying it's all bad compared to before -- but when you have the majority of devs in silicon valley working on making shiny apps that help me wipe my behind better because it makes him rich, there's something askew about it all.

some asshole is making money off me right now i just know it

blog about your enabler status

no even just from my sitting here

at least i'm worth more alive than dead for the time being

reform or revolt

but facebork says there are boobies trending

although i guess every modern generation has complained about ennui.

― Treeship, Wednesday, July 15, 2015 8:30 PM (Yesterday)

this

i used bbs the most, and i thought it was so cool.

I was in an ansi art group when I was 14 and thought I was the fucking coolest dude ever

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

― the most painstaking, humorless people in the world (lukas), Thursday, July 16, 2015 3:03 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, i dont think that the like... SPIRIT of the internet is dead, by any means, just go on tumblr, but i think where there used to be a kind of janky framework of interconnected personal tilde-fronted pages and janky geocities and listservs and whatever else, everything is mediated by an incresasingly smaller set of very large, creeiply smooth, and rather fickle corporations. not to be THE MONEY RUINED IT MAN but the money ruined it, man

keep interweb janky

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

― flopson, Thursday, July 16, 2015 2:10 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

without really knowing how any of this is going to shake out or if any of it will change i think the big things on the horizon that could make things better/worse/both are like

- apple, google, and facebook essentially teaming up to fully kill most online advertising--the big meme in the Best and the Brightest-type tech circles right now is about page load time--apple building adblock into mobile safari and facebook trying to swallow external content, etc.

- the consequent & real death of web sites in favor of apps--yr home screen turns into a notifications scroll

- the block chain idk???

the end result is everyone living in pods deep in converted abandoned big box stores on the far edge of suburbs, jerking off to their ock rifts, soylent flowing into the epidural

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!"

― goole, Wednesday, July 15, 2015 5:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think about this a lot. no one has a job anymore! advertising is like a WPA for "knowledge workers." samsung funded five years worth of tech blogging + hundreds if not thousands of bloggers, sellers, copywriters, ad tech people, etc. i almost buy the idea that we're living in full communism, it just hasnt been distributed yet. seen from an angle amazon is just a wealth redistribution system. rich investors losing money so you can buy goods more cheaply.

we're living in full communism, it just hasnt been distributed yet

idk what you mean by communism

the end result is everyone living in pods deep in converted abandoned big box stores on the far edge of suburbs, jerking off to their ock rifts, soylent flowing into the epidural

but employed and better off than ever, don't forget.

what the knowledge economy is working on is deploying all possible knowledge within its frame, that's the real singularity imo

xp also rich investors aren't losing money.

I wonder what Ned thinks? I think of him as "the watcher" of the Internet, like plugged into every network

no one has a job anymore!

very few ppl are currently doing necessary or productive work anymore but i feel like thats super different from 'no one has a job anymore!'?

Maybe I should start one of those twee donut places

very few ppl are currently doing necessary or productive work anymore but i feel like thats super different from 'no one has a job anymore!'?

― affluent white (Lamp), Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:07 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a seldom acknowledged but very scary & fucked up trend is that demand for jobs that make intensive use of workers' "cognitive skills" has been declining since the turn of the millenium in the US http://www.nber.org/papers/w18901