I'm chuckling at the brilliant turns of phrase and terrified at the implication. I want to protest the spending freeze and apparent usurpation of the power of the purse... But then I think maybe I should make a video to spread the word. I catch myself thinking "if it's not an online spectacle, what's the point?" The online buzz about the thing is more important than the thing? I hate that I think that way instinctually.
"If it's not online it didn't happen" turned out to be a terrifying and terrible concept--that we all treated like a joke until it wasn't.
We used to say the internet isn't real life. Now, though we don't say it, people behave as though *real life* isn't real life, only the internet is. And because we don't actually have to deal with people face to face on the internet, we seem to have both forgotten how and why it's important to bother.
Speaking of William Gibson, he also said, "The Internet, an unprecedented driver of change, was a complete accident, and that seems more often the way of things. … Had nations better understood the potential of the Internet, I suspect they might well have strangled it in its cradle. Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes." And how.
The problem with anything as foundationally transformative, and therefore disruptive, is there's really no way to tell what the downstream effects of playing Pong with another scientist on connected mainframes will be. Apart from literally science fiction, which is a scattershot blast at a distant board--some will hit, some will go wide, and you won't be able to see which is which until those futures actually come to pass.
One of the reasons I've devoted so much mental energy to this whole way of looking at what's happening right now is that back when I was in my 20s and a small but actual part of the building of the culture on that early internet, the idea that the "third place" we were building joyfully, if fractiously, would be THE tool used to tear it all down was so completely unthinkable it never crossed anyone's mind. Even the dystopian visions of what the internet could become were nothing like this, and entirely failed to see that "what the internet could become" had already come to pass.
What makes me so hopelessly SAD is this weird complacency that's set in.
Elon took over Twitter, and now it sucks. So let's all move to BlueSky, or Threads, and start the whole thing over again.
I'm part of multiple community organizations that use WhatsApp to communicate privately, and/or use freakin *Instagram* as their ONLY way of making public announcements.
I get that a system like Mastodon has friction. I get that setting up an actual website takes work. But my jeebus if people don't take some steps to own their own work it's all going to be taken from us, by some of the worst people in the world.
The problem is, "your own website" will never get the kind of traffic these large sites can. Especially now that the internet is no longer a wide sea of independent sites, but a series of artificially-stocked ponds through which content is accessed. Getting people to go to an independent website is rough these days, and it's a certain kind of privilege to expect every single person on social media (especially those with small businesses) to start, host, code, promote and maintain their own site while also expecting users to navigate to them all individually. Yeah, bringing back webrings, bizarrely, could save the world. But we won't, because once something is so easy, humans don't want it to be hard again.
The value of every one of these sites was always having tons of humans in the same place. That's not just true for VC, but for users. Millions of individual sites are not and never can be that. We WANT to aggregate because it's SOCIAL media, not just blogging. I don't know what the solution is, but it's not for everyone to be John Scalzi and have started their own extremely popular webpage a long time ago.
BTW, I didn't mean this as a meta-comment of this blog being on Substack. If I had your job, I would absolutely be on Substack (or something like it).
I more meant that in circumstances where it's plausible to opt out of the major platforms, no one seems to understand why they would do that. It IS a certain kind of privilege, I totally agree, but so is all activism (owning an EV, buying from independent booksellers, making your kids lunch in reusable containers made from unicorn hair, etc).
I still contend that it's not the internet itself that did this to us. It's profit motive, its the corporate walled gardens, its the propaganda model as described in Manufacturing Consent, its the algorithmic gatekeeping. It used to operate a lot more organically, and without moneyed interests fucking everything up. Right as all those social media walled gardens started hoovering everything up is also around the time the internet was connecting multiple oppressed populations around the world and helping them understand their commonalities. I don't think its an accident that folks like Alex Jones ballooned in popularity shortly afterwards.
I'm chuckling at the brilliant turns of phrase and terrified at the implication. I want to protest the spending freeze and apparent usurpation of the power of the purse... But then I think maybe I should make a video to spread the word. I catch myself thinking "if it's not an online spectacle, what's the point?" The online buzz about the thing is more important than the thing? I hate that I think that way instinctually.
"If it's not online it didn't happen" turned out to be a terrifying and terrible concept--that we all treated like a joke until it wasn't.
We used to say the internet isn't real life. Now, though we don't say it, people behave as though *real life* isn't real life, only the internet is. And because we don't actually have to deal with people face to face on the internet, we seem to have both forgotten how and why it's important to bother.
The Revolution Will Be Uploaded
Speaking of William Gibson, he also said, "The Internet, an unprecedented driver of change, was a complete accident, and that seems more often the way of things. … Had nations better understood the potential of the Internet, I suspect they might well have strangled it in its cradle. Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes." And how.
Looking forward eagerly to the next installment.
The problem with anything as foundationally transformative, and therefore disruptive, is there's really no way to tell what the downstream effects of playing Pong with another scientist on connected mainframes will be. Apart from literally science fiction, which is a scattershot blast at a distant board--some will hit, some will go wide, and you won't be able to see which is which until those futures actually come to pass.
One of the reasons I've devoted so much mental energy to this whole way of looking at what's happening right now is that back when I was in my 20s and a small but actual part of the building of the culture on that early internet, the idea that the "third place" we were building joyfully, if fractiously, would be THE tool used to tear it all down was so completely unthinkable it never crossed anyone's mind. Even the dystopian visions of what the internet could become were nothing like this, and entirely failed to see that "what the internet could become" had already come to pass.
What makes me so hopelessly SAD is this weird complacency that's set in.
Elon took over Twitter, and now it sucks. So let's all move to BlueSky, or Threads, and start the whole thing over again.
I'm part of multiple community organizations that use WhatsApp to communicate privately, and/or use freakin *Instagram* as their ONLY way of making public announcements.
I get that a system like Mastodon has friction. I get that setting up an actual website takes work. But my jeebus if people don't take some steps to own their own work it's all going to be taken from us, by some of the worst people in the world.
The problem is, "your own website" will never get the kind of traffic these large sites can. Especially now that the internet is no longer a wide sea of independent sites, but a series of artificially-stocked ponds through which content is accessed. Getting people to go to an independent website is rough these days, and it's a certain kind of privilege to expect every single person on social media (especially those with small businesses) to start, host, code, promote and maintain their own site while also expecting users to navigate to them all individually. Yeah, bringing back webrings, bizarrely, could save the world. But we won't, because once something is so easy, humans don't want it to be hard again.
The value of every one of these sites was always having tons of humans in the same place. That's not just true for VC, but for users. Millions of individual sites are not and never can be that. We WANT to aggregate because it's SOCIAL media, not just blogging. I don't know what the solution is, but it's not for everyone to be John Scalzi and have started their own extremely popular webpage a long time ago.
BTW, I didn't mean this as a meta-comment of this blog being on Substack. If I had your job, I would absolutely be on Substack (or something like it).
I more meant that in circumstances where it's plausible to opt out of the major platforms, no one seems to understand why they would do that. It IS a certain kind of privilege, I totally agree, but so is all activism (owning an EV, buying from independent booksellers, making your kids lunch in reusable containers made from unicorn hair, etc).
Oof this hits hard. And now it's coming for our imaginations, with AI. I was there at the beginning, it's careless greedy people all the way down.
The revolution will therefore be offline.
Man, if this doesn't set the table...
I still contend that it's not the internet itself that did this to us. It's profit motive, its the corporate walled gardens, its the propaganda model as described in Manufacturing Consent, its the algorithmic gatekeeping. It used to operate a lot more organically, and without moneyed interests fucking everything up. Right as all those social media walled gardens started hoovering everything up is also around the time the internet was connecting multiple oppressed populations around the world and helping them understand their commonalities. I don't think its an accident that folks like Alex Jones ballooned in popularity shortly afterwards.
I’m just about to read “One Breath, One Stroke” in The Future Is Japanese. (I’m finally reading it.)
Oh, that's wonderful. It's one of my favorites of my own stories. I hope you like it.
I liked it very much.
I haven't seen the commercial because I'm so old that I'd already quit watching TV before it came out.
But I *do* know the "We secretly replaced X with Y. Let's see if they notice!" meme.
Horrible. Glorious. Hit this one with a drink, or escape/coping mechanism of choice at hand...
You might like this:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=m7QEWz-72bw
Wrong box.
https://youtu.be/sVyRkl5qNb8?si=rJw5zk38IntXrZQz