The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

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

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

― max, Thursday, July 16, 2015 6:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't get the killing online advertisement stuff, don't google and facebook sell info to online advertisers? why would they want to kill them off just so pages load faster? i don't really understand the big deal with the facebook native content thing either, just doesnt seem like it would work

it's hard for me to imagine things taking a drastic turn for the worst wrt online media. i feel like a lot of the pain from the transition out of print is behind us now. maybe that's naive idk just a feeling

that's pretty accurate, i'd say.

big business has been wanting to automate content for a long time now, and they've reached their limits. most of the sports news you see instantly published is about the only thing that is automatically generated that looks somewhat deceiving. stock stuff, as well. anything data-driven or number-heavy basically.

in the end, they know they need one dweeb proofreading that stuff or fact-checking things to make it look more organically written and more enticing to read. what's saddening is content is being produced to game a system where more clicks means better conversion rates. so you get english majors writing seo'd buzzfeed listicles. so companies pay them $10 an hour or per article and they end up barely scraping by. the bar is just really low.

and it's just safari that will be blocking ads, as far as i know. google is essentially an ad company, so it's difficult to imagine they'd want ads to disappear completely.

change is a constant. i was bitter for a couple years after usenet drowned in a sea of garbage. then i changed enough to not be bitter anymore.

at the time, '95-'00, there were plenty of people bemoaning the "imminent death of the net", and i wholly embraced any change that broke down cliquishness, opened discourse to anybody who wasn't a computer nerd. i didn't see, probably couldn't foresee, that the internet would turn into a replica of a high school.

the problem with the internet is, i believe, a basic one of design. the people who designed it were technologically and not socially oriented. they were, fundamentally, optimists. they believed in the cold war ideology of freedom, that if we broke down the barriers dividing people we would make a better world. they believed that people and computers alike were fundamentally trustworthy.

these basic assumptions are unsustainable in the face of current reality. professionally, i deal with privacy and security. right now on the internet we do not have either in any meaningful form. this has devastating social consequences. the social consequences are not the worst problem right now.

the paradox of privacy and security is that without security, privacy is impossible, but to implement security, the existing models of privacy will have to be utterly destroyed. we're not just dealing with the close of the internet's golden age, but of its iron age.

if we design a system that is, by its nature, paranoid, we may reach a point where we stop requiring human beings to be paranoid to use the internet at all. imagine a world where you could speak your mind without fear of reprisal. now think about how different that is from the internet today.

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

but this was always a small group of people compared to today's 3 billion internet users ... and probably there are more of them now rather than less? (if you include blogspot / wordpress blogs.)

but i mean, yeah. i get it. the direction looks bad. i'm actually considering implementing some geeky decentralized social web shit just ... because. in my optimistic moments i talk about pendulum swings.

it's hard for me to imagine things taking a drastic turn for the worst wrt online media. i feel like a lot of the pain from the transition out of print is behind us now. maybe that's naive idk just a feeling

nah things are definitely bad for online publishers, who pretty much operate like print publishers for a long time. online ad spend is getting more and more automated, the supply of online ad space is ever expanding, everyone is looking at your page on their phone now which is not a great place to show an ad, your entire company's fate is in the hands of fb and google and who knows what next year (and btw zuckerberg is wondering if you want to just stop making a website).

who pretty much operated*

not to be THE MONEY RUINED IT MAN but the money ruined it, man

I feel like the money-was-coming side of this was inevitable, but one thing I wonder is if the corporate monopolies were natural. was only-one-search-engine inevitable? could we be living in a world w/ 5 pretty good search engines right now? people could rib each other for their search engine choices at parties?

one fb-type social network of record does seem like it was kinda inevitable, but lots of aspects of how it developed that just seem like a part of the world now - 'likes', the newsfeed as it exists weren't.

I work for a digital publication that's never been print and therefore never had to deal with that transition but regardless, the ad revenue is down, probably 50% of what it was five years ago. So the revenue crisis is not just about the transition.

Basically what happened to the Internet is that it matured into google/facebook/apple, with each of these being a virtual monopoly in its field, as is the way of late capitalism. The big things have happened. Start ups will continue to be sold for millions or billions, but you'll never have two guys in a garage becoming google or facebook or apple again.

Personally, I think it's pretty scary the power these guys have over content. If all content ends up being read in a Facebook app then that gives them enormous power over what content gets most visibility. In my company we had an entire business that was destroyed when Google changed its algorithms.

i don't get the killing online advertisement stuff, don't google and facebook sell info to online advertisers? why would they want to kill them off just so pages load faster? i don't really understand the big deal with the facebook native content thing either, just doesnt seem like it would work

it's hard for me to imagine things taking a drastic turn for the worst wrt online media. i feel like a lot of the pain from the transition out of print is behind us now. maybe that's naive idk just a feeling

― flopson, Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think i mean web advertising specifically; obviously facebook and google sell attentive users looking for specific things, without advertising they wouldn't make money! but facebook notices that when you click off of it to another page, especially from your phone. it takes x microseconds faster to load than it would if it were hosted on facebook itself; over the long term users associate that slow load time with facebook, spend less time on facebook, etc.

i dont think facebook native content will work either, but until the internet shifts again toward decentralization and away from platforms and all-in-one apps, some kind of hosted content product will become prevalent. probably not the norm but not odd to see. ny times reporting on iran via decayed minions macros on instagram.

I feel like the money-was-coming side of this was inevitable, but one thing I wonder is if the corporate monopolies were natural. was only-one-search-engine inevitable? could we be living in a world w/ 5 pretty good search engines right now? people could rib each other for their search engine choices at parties?

one fb-type social network of record does seem like it was kinda inevitable, but lots of aspects of how it developed that just seem like a part of the world now - 'likes', the newsfeed as it exists weren't.

― iatee, Thursday, July 16, 2015 9:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i wonder this a lot too! i jokingly argue for the nationalization of google and facebook but i kind of do think they should at least be declared some kind of common carriers. i REALLY think the post office should launch its own endearingly janky "public option" social network.

We had three or four search engines before Google too, but (my recollection is) only one at a time, they would come up and crush all opposition, but Google seemed good enough to stick. I think you'd at best end up with "Safari's default search engine" vs "Chrome's default search engine" vs etc etc - in fact you kind of have that now (assuming that IE's is Bing?).

I think that Google being that big has actually been crucial to surviving the dotcom crash (a major contributing factor to which was the realisation that the conversion rates for online advertising was TERRIBLE, when a lot of business models had been built around it). One Search Engine = one target for SEO optimisation and one reliable source for ad sales (at one point Google AdSense was making half of the global profit on online advertising - more money than Microsoft was making selling Windows).

I think you'd at best end up with "Safari's default search engine" vs "Chrome's default search engine" vs etc etc - in fact you kind of have that now (assuming that IE's is Bing?).

soon we will have siri vs google now, probably!

vs Cortana, too.

But yeah, in ten years kids will probably look back in the same wonder (about SOMETHING) that kids today feel that you couldn't just type stuff into the title bar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJ6IhY9lzo

pls to confirm tht by using adblock i am helping bring down capitalism thx

yeah i wonder this a lot too! i jokingly argue for the nationalization of google and facebook but i kind of do think they should at least be declared some kind of common carriers

― max, Friday, July 17, 2015 7:28 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://twitter.com/fl0pson/status/527588884012892160

i think this by brad delong in 2000 was pretty prescient

http://www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/726/635

The case for the market system has always rested on three implicit pillars, three features of the way that property rights and exchange worked:

Call the first feature excludability: the ability of sellers to force consumers to become buyers, and thus to pay for whatever goods and services they use.

Call the second feature rivalry: a structure of costs in which two cannot partake as cheaply as one, in which producing enough for two million people to use will cost at least twice as many of society's resources as producing enough for one million people to use.

Call the third feature transparency: the ability of individuals to see clearly what they need and what is for sale, so that they truly know just what they wish to buy.

...

There is every indication that they will fit the 21st-century economy relatively poorly [7].

...

In the absence of excludability, industries today and tomorrow are likely to fall prey to analogous distortions. Producers' revenue streams, wherever they come from, will be only tangentially related to the intensity of user demand. Thus, the flow of money through the market will not serve its primary purpose of registering the utility of the commodity being produced. There is no reason to think ex ante that the commodities that generate the most attractive revenue streams paid by advertisers or by ancillary others will be the commodities that ultimate consumers would wish to see produced.

...

[I]f goods are non-rival - if two can consume as cheaply as one - then charging a per-unit price to users artificially restricts distribution. To truly maximize social welfare, we need a system that supplies everyone whose willingness to pay for the good is greater than the marginal cost of producing another copy. If the marginal cost of reproduction of a digital good is near zero, that means almost everyone should have it for almost no charge. However, charging a price equal to marginal cost almost surely leaves the producer bankrupt, with little incentive to maintain the product except for the hope of maintenance fees. There is no incentive to make another one except that warm, fuzzy feeling one gets from impoverishing oneself for the general good.

...

Thus we have a dilemma. If the price of a digital good is above the marginal cost of making an extra copy, some people who truly ought (in the best of all possible worlds) to be using it do not get to have it. The system of exchange that we have developed is getting in the way of a certain degree of economic prosperity. But if price is not above the marginal cost of making an extra copy of a non-rival good, the producer will not be paid enough to cover costs. Without non-financial incentives, all but the most masochistic producer will get out the business of production.

More important, perhaps, is that the existence of large numbers of important and valuable goods that are non-rival casts doubt upon the value of competition itself. Competition has been the standard way of keeping individual producers from exercising power over consumers. If you don't like the terms the producer is offering, you can just go down the street. But this use of private economic power to check private power may come at a high cost if competitors spend their time duplicating each other's efforts and attempting to slow down technological development in the interest of obtaining a compatibility advantage, or creating a compatibility or usability disadvantage for the other competitor.

One traditional answer to this problem (now in total disfavor) was to set up a government regulatory commission to control the "natural monopoly." The commission would set prices and would do the best it could to simulate a socially optimum level of production. On the eve of World War I, when American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), under the leadership of its visionary CEO, Theodore N. Vail, began its drive for universal coverage, a political consensus formed rapidly both in Washington and within AT&T that the right structural form for the telephone industry was a privately owned, publicly regulated national monopoly.

Google should totally be nationalized and regulated like a utility imo

xp

idk despite tweeting that i think it's p obviously a terrible idea. like, at what point should we have nationalized google? when it had a monopoly on search engines? after gmail? would we now have all kinds of sick shit like maps, streetview, scholar etc if we had then? obviously not. google isn't really a "utility" cause it keeps producing new crazy shit, and spending tonnes of money on r&d for stuff that doesn't pan out. from today's pov we can't imagine the future stuff their r&d might produce, how much shittier products would be if nationalized etc and i don't think those losses would outweigh the benefit from nationalization

vs Cortana, too.

But yeah, in ten years kids will probably look back in the same wonder (about SOMETHING) that kids today feel that you couldn't just type stuff into the title bar.

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, July 17, 2015 12:52 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idg cortana, afaict you ask a question and it looks up some of the words you said on Bing and shows you the search results

xp You are aware that, say, NASA was not actually a for-profit company?

I am pretty sure there would be a good online maps company in a world without google. youtube, gmail, maps and the search engine could totally be torn into separate companies without the world ending.

Mapquest would have had a multi billion dollar IPO by now.

FWIW the integration is actually one of the things I really dislike about Google - it seems much more designed for optimal advertising and data harvesting than optimal user experience. And stop trying to get me to do shit on google plus already!

xxp i am aware nasa was not actually a for-profit company (however a lot of early developments in space were privately funded, and the vast maj only became public during the cold war--although that's just a historical tidbit.) my argument (that google offers & develops lots of services and products many of which don't exist yet and shouldn't be regulated the same way as electricity) applies to google specifically. FTR i think governments should spend way more on r&d than they currently do, but i don't think nationalizing the companies that spend a lot on r&d is an obviously good thing, i would have to be convinced i guess

the alternative (ie, the one we currently have) seems p shitty to me

republicanson

google isn't really a "utility" cause it keeps producing new crazy shit

as iatee notes, this is hardly an obstacle - nationalize the utility part (ie, the search engine), they can keep their ridiculous R&D shit

(if you can't guess I'm not exactly impressed with their self-driving cars and facecomputers etc.)