Good to see you back! I rejoined X recently just in time to find that you'd retreated from it yourself, for understandable reasons. The amount of dross has certainly increased on that site.
Facebook, however, has been largely abandoned and left to slightly unhinged millennial schizos to write lengthy pieces on (e.g.) how geoengineering was predicted by the Book of Revelations, which is actually something of an improvement.
I have to confess to being in on this internet malarkey pretty much from the beginning. I left university in 1981 with a degree in computer science, a somewhat minority pursuit in those days. If only it could have remained so. In the early 90s I recall being assailed by an IBM salesman enthused by something called html and hypertext; I was not especially impressed. Tim Berners-Lee chap was rather wiser.
In 1996 I read a document called 'A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace', a silly, sprawling product of the addled brain of John Perry Barlow. He appears to have studied LSD under one Timothy Leary but evidently lacked the remotest comprehension of economics and most especially, politics. A brief study of Mr Hobbes' Leviathan might have given him and his legion of infantile followers some pause.
'Cyberspace does not lie within your borders' the Declaration says; the government of the PRC in particular, deemed otherwise and the rest of the world's states have followed with enthusiasm.
As to one's individual relationship with the medium, it strikes me that the notion of individual agency and responsibility, though unfashionable, is the key. I gave up on the cesspit of social media long ago and I have one close relative who has entirely spurned the internet. (Substack is different of course.)
Most particularly, parents really ought to take responsibility for their children's use of the internet: were I bringing up my own nippers today, they would have no internet enabled devices until I was satisfied they could use them responsibly.
This can also be seen as yet another reflection of our actions upon nature.
How many wildlife preserves are seen as utter Eden! And yet they need the greatest amount of vigilance and resources they can get, as we see in the Case of Doñana, the Amazon rainforest or coral reefs how leaving the doors barely ajar and not bothering to close it will invite pests, poachers of both animals, plants and minerals (and aquifers), leading us to reconsider bringing life to lawns, abandoned places and anything else that is smaller but nearer to us.
Here in the internet we see the same- The virgin lands of this series of tubes barely got watched as It was raped by round upon rounds of vampire capital, eternal septembers, schemes and anything else, and after the typical Monopoly consolidation strategies that is incurred in any economic sphere, now we look upon smaller circles to bring back the soul.
This Guy on 2023 also told it pretty well, have you read it?
Something I never see mentioned is how reading text generated by AI could be potentially damaging for your brain. We likely shouldn't be reading AI generated text. There should be a health warning. There could be some weird neutral rewiring happening every time we read words by an AI.
You are 100% correct. I fear the trend will only worsen, and shittier content will have more weight and promoted, as it brings clicks and thus ads, thus money. A return to private closed bubbles will be inevitable, as a response. I kinda am looking forward to it
This is an interesting piece that has stirred a multitude of different thoughts and feelings. I have been using the internet for over 20 years, and it is interesting how much it has changed. I remember the greater degree of creativity and individual expression that existed around 20 years ago, with a host of different social media websites allowing a greater degree of customisation. MySpace, for all of its flaws, allowed you to make any random image your background and allowed you to have music on your profile. Early Facebook included features such as poking people, throwing sheep, drawing pictures etc. There were tonnes of creative free Java games that had no adverts and no micro-transactions. One I remember fondly was Zombie Grinder 60000, where you played as a fat man with a shotgun shooting zombies, collecting ammunition, and avoiding fires at a speed dictated by the tempo of the goregrind soundtrack. No ads, all free, and you get to shoot zombies to the relaxing music of Last Days of Humanity, Inhume, and Regurgitate. Whilst it was possibly a bit trashy, it felt much more imaginitive than some of the stuff you have highlighted in the article, since this was something where the speed of your character was dictated by the tempo of the music, with changes in tempo resulting in changes in speed.
Whilst the internet has always had its shitholes, its decline is dispiriting. As others have pointed out, smartphones are the main factor in this, and the problem is how everything is geared around smartphones now. I am not certain there will be a return to the old forum culture of the early 00's due to smartphones, since they do not seem to be suited to that older style of online discussion. It feels as if everything is turning to slop, with substack increasingly being full of the same idiocy seen elsewhere. Podcasts are also a problem, in my opinion, since they also encourage the cottage industry of caterwauling spiritual catamites who indulge in doom mongering and hysteria. Again, this seems to be due to the prevalence of smartphones.
I am not sure what the answer is. Maybe I am just indulging in nostalgia and things have not declined as much as I feel they have. Nevertheless, it does feel as if the slop has increased and the various niches free of it are disappearing. The internet has revolutionised the world in many ways, largely for the good, but it has undoubtedly had its negative consequences.
I love this! I was just telling my husband the other week, the internet now feels like a carnival - filled with bamboozlers and cheap thrills. And there's no help for it.
You may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Could, on the other hand, just take all the difficulties you describe as wetstones for further sharpening mental focus and discernment.
Around 2015-2020 I stopped taking the internet seriously. That's when the internet rapidly began to become global. The problem is poor market consumers propping up things that are terrible. I've never watched a Jake Paul or Mr. Beast video, I never spent hundreds of dollars on fortnite skins etc. Media has became a poisoned consumer base, and it's worse because of third worlders entering.
They post AI videos as if they were real, they quickly delve and over consume soft to hardcore p*rnography. I never downloaded tiktok but now I have it on Facebook, and i barely see any updates on people I know.
On the upside I have tons of cringe content to post.
Great piece. I subscribed to you upon a whim some months back, after first noticing you some while ago, on whatever has become of Twitter—for the benefit of the peanut gallery I am one of those poor pseudonymous sods with the misfortune of a doctorate in classical studies (slightly less helpful than archaeology, though I've done my time there as well and bear the wounds to match).
I strongly suspect that the two of us should not agree on much beyond chafing under the yoke of orthodox thought in the modern humanities (this is not said from some smug ivory tower: I leant heavily upon Foucault & co. in my own thesis, c. 2015, though I will not venture into specifics, and left academia post-pandemic for the more welcoming private sector).
All the same this is a very welcome piece. Like many people I suspect that I long for an earlier, more free Internet, in which one was truly left alone and could truly encounter anything, no matter how ridiculous or poorly-sourced, and be left to one's own devices re: what to do with it.
I am not sure what to do now, but can see plainly that this Internet is long gone. One thinks of certain ancient authors bemoaning much the same thing—and yet this seems more serious to me than the typical cry of 'o tempora, o mores.'
There is no panacea we might provide, and so I say only, from very much across the aisle and pseudonymous for that or in recognition of an older world: cheers, mate. Will keep chipping in, so long as I can.
Good to see you back! I rejoined X recently just in time to find that you'd retreated from it yourself, for understandable reasons. The amount of dross has certainly increased on that site.
Facebook, however, has been largely abandoned and left to slightly unhinged millennial schizos to write lengthy pieces on (e.g.) how geoengineering was predicted by the Book of Revelations, which is actually something of an improvement.
I have to confess to being in on this internet malarkey pretty much from the beginning. I left university in 1981 with a degree in computer science, a somewhat minority pursuit in those days. If only it could have remained so. In the early 90s I recall being assailed by an IBM salesman enthused by something called html and hypertext; I was not especially impressed. Tim Berners-Lee chap was rather wiser.
In 1996 I read a document called 'A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace', a silly, sprawling product of the addled brain of John Perry Barlow. He appears to have studied LSD under one Timothy Leary but evidently lacked the remotest comprehension of economics and most especially, politics. A brief study of Mr Hobbes' Leviathan might have given him and his legion of infantile followers some pause.
'Cyberspace does not lie within your borders' the Declaration says; the government of the PRC in particular, deemed otherwise and the rest of the world's states have followed with enthusiasm.
As to one's individual relationship with the medium, it strikes me that the notion of individual agency and responsibility, though unfashionable, is the key. I gave up on the cesspit of social media long ago and I have one close relative who has entirely spurned the internet. (Substack is different of course.)
Most particularly, parents really ought to take responsibility for their children's use of the internet: were I bringing up my own nippers today, they would have no internet enabled devices until I was satisfied they could use them responsibly.
Great article gonna share it with normies
This can also be seen as yet another reflection of our actions upon nature.
How many wildlife preserves are seen as utter Eden! And yet they need the greatest amount of vigilance and resources they can get, as we see in the Case of Doñana, the Amazon rainforest or coral reefs how leaving the doors barely ajar and not bothering to close it will invite pests, poachers of both animals, plants and minerals (and aquifers), leading us to reconsider bringing life to lawns, abandoned places and anything else that is smaller but nearer to us.
Here in the internet we see the same- The virgin lands of this series of tubes barely got watched as It was raped by round upon rounds of vampire capital, eternal septembers, schemes and anything else, and after the typical Monopoly consolidation strategies that is incurred in any economic sphere, now we look upon smaller circles to bring back the soul.
This Guy on 2023 also told it pretty well, have you read it?
https://arcanewrit.substack.com/p/updates-become-downgrades?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Something I never see mentioned is how reading text generated by AI could be potentially damaging for your brain. We likely shouldn't be reading AI generated text. There should be a health warning. There could be some weird neutral rewiring happening every time we read words by an AI.
You are 100% correct. I fear the trend will only worsen, and shittier content will have more weight and promoted, as it brings clicks and thus ads, thus money. A return to private closed bubbles will be inevitable, as a response. I kinda am looking forward to it
This is an interesting piece that has stirred a multitude of different thoughts and feelings. I have been using the internet for over 20 years, and it is interesting how much it has changed. I remember the greater degree of creativity and individual expression that existed around 20 years ago, with a host of different social media websites allowing a greater degree of customisation. MySpace, for all of its flaws, allowed you to make any random image your background and allowed you to have music on your profile. Early Facebook included features such as poking people, throwing sheep, drawing pictures etc. There were tonnes of creative free Java games that had no adverts and no micro-transactions. One I remember fondly was Zombie Grinder 60000, where you played as a fat man with a shotgun shooting zombies, collecting ammunition, and avoiding fires at a speed dictated by the tempo of the goregrind soundtrack. No ads, all free, and you get to shoot zombies to the relaxing music of Last Days of Humanity, Inhume, and Regurgitate. Whilst it was possibly a bit trashy, it felt much more imaginitive than some of the stuff you have highlighted in the article, since this was something where the speed of your character was dictated by the tempo of the music, with changes in tempo resulting in changes in speed.
Whilst the internet has always had its shitholes, its decline is dispiriting. As others have pointed out, smartphones are the main factor in this, and the problem is how everything is geared around smartphones now. I am not certain there will be a return to the old forum culture of the early 00's due to smartphones, since they do not seem to be suited to that older style of online discussion. It feels as if everything is turning to slop, with substack increasingly being full of the same idiocy seen elsewhere. Podcasts are also a problem, in my opinion, since they also encourage the cottage industry of caterwauling spiritual catamites who indulge in doom mongering and hysteria. Again, this seems to be due to the prevalence of smartphones.
I am not sure what the answer is. Maybe I am just indulging in nostalgia and things have not declined as much as I feel they have. Nevertheless, it does feel as if the slop has increased and the various niches free of it are disappearing. The internet has revolutionised the world in many ways, largely for the good, but it has undoubtedly had its negative consequences.
I love this! I was just telling my husband the other week, the internet now feels like a carnival - filled with bamboozlers and cheap thrills. And there's no help for it.
You may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Could, on the other hand, just take all the difficulties you describe as wetstones for further sharpening mental focus and discernment.
Around 2015-2020 I stopped taking the internet seriously. That's when the internet rapidly began to become global. The problem is poor market consumers propping up things that are terrible. I've never watched a Jake Paul or Mr. Beast video, I never spent hundreds of dollars on fortnite skins etc. Media has became a poisoned consumer base, and it's worse because of third worlders entering.
They post AI videos as if they were real, they quickly delve and over consume soft to hardcore p*rnography. I never downloaded tiktok but now I have it on Facebook, and i barely see any updates on people I know.
On the upside I have tons of cringe content to post.
Great piece. I subscribed to you upon a whim some months back, after first noticing you some while ago, on whatever has become of Twitter—for the benefit of the peanut gallery I am one of those poor pseudonymous sods with the misfortune of a doctorate in classical studies (slightly less helpful than archaeology, though I've done my time there as well and bear the wounds to match).
I strongly suspect that the two of us should not agree on much beyond chafing under the yoke of orthodox thought in the modern humanities (this is not said from some smug ivory tower: I leant heavily upon Foucault & co. in my own thesis, c. 2015, though I will not venture into specifics, and left academia post-pandemic for the more welcoming private sector).
All the same this is a very welcome piece. Like many people I suspect that I long for an earlier, more free Internet, in which one was truly left alone and could truly encounter anything, no matter how ridiculous or poorly-sourced, and be left to one's own devices re: what to do with it.
I am not sure what to do now, but can see plainly that this Internet is long gone. One thinks of certain ancient authors bemoaning much the same thing—and yet this seems more serious to me than the typical cry of 'o tempora, o mores.'
There is no panacea we might provide, and so I say only, from very much across the aisle and pseudonymous for that or in recognition of an older world: cheers, mate. Will keep chipping in, so long as I can.