…to tell you which way the shitstorm’s blowing.
Over the weekend, the accelerating decline of online culture experienced a fleeting reversal with the return of Mister Metokur. If you’re not familiar with the digital gadfly also known as the Internet Aristocrat, the Weatherman, Daddy, or simply Jim, he started as a puckish prankster in the danker corners of the web. He first stepped into the limelight by breaking the Five Guys story that proved to be the opening shot of #GamerGate. Over the next five years–and almost as many Twitter accounts–Jim proved the case behind the 1980s Satanic Panic and sounded the alarm on Corona-chan.
Jim’s own battle with even more serious illnesses, and rising internet censorship, greatly reduced his online presence. That was, until Saturday, when he hosted a playfully titled Ice Cream Social that turned out to be more of an Irish wake for the internet.
Watch to pay your respects for the Worldwide Web:
It’s hard not to sympathize with Jim’s classic Gen Y nostalgia for the net. If you were a kid in the early 90s, you heard the ascendant internet’s praises sung from every rooftop. The Information Superhighway would connect us all together and pave the way to solving all our problems. Instant global communication would usher in a new golden age.
What the grand experiment in worldwide connectedness ended up doing was proving the great pre-Modern thinkers right after all. It turns out that most people really are idiots, and none of us is as dumb as all of us. The internet just gave morons a platform to collectively shout down the right end of the bell curve.
That brain drain is an often-overlooked cause of the rampant censorship that’s reducing the global information freeway to cable TV. A version of the Corporate IP Death Cycle has befallen the major online players, leaving midwit bugmen to man the levers in the original creators’ absence. The third-generation captains of digital industry love to portray themselves as maverick geniuses, but they’re really conformist dullards who’ve hung their hopes on machine learning cargo cultism.
The wholesale importation of linear thinking wage slaves who don’t understand the malfunctioning algorithms onto which they push more and more of their work is the smoking gun at the internet’s murder scene. The transitional period will be rough, especially for Zoomers, but the post-internet world may be the end of Clown World.
For an increasingly prescient vision of a post-Collapse future, read my hit mecha thriller Combat Frame XSeed.
There was a lot of good in UNIX ‘talk’, BBSs, and IRC. Maybe some of that can be saved. But, no one is going to miss the shovelware and vaporware after the SV Building collapses.
Don’t know about you, but I’m quite amused that I lived to see the end of a phenomenon everybody swore would last forever.
Oh, it’s hilarious to me as well! Friend on MeWe posted the EFF’s “Internet Declaration of Independence” from 1996 when we were discussing the pending collapse of Silicone Valley Mid-Wit Park. Talk about not aging well. It’s just icing for the spoiled cake, and it is rich!
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
If only cyberspace could liberate itself from the pesky confines of physical hardware. I call dibs on the cult of transmachinism!
I had never read that before. It just seems bogus and pretentious now, like a teenager declaring independence from his parents but living the safety of his childhood bedroom full of stuff his parents bought him.
The “no bodies/no matter” argument is particularly rich. It manages to ignore the fact that the users are people with bodies, and that every bit and byte has to live somewhere. It’s like techno-gnosticism, announced by someone who had to type the whole thing into a physical computer, with a keyboard, attached to the internet with wires.
The early internet was indeed that pretentious. It was a libertarian theme park where the new reality would immerge to save us all. Then the old reality took away their toys.
The post-Internet world will be great for the future Chris Chans. Nothing exacerbates autism worse than screen time.
Chris Chan would have imploded regardless. He was a deranged person with Boomer parents who made the wrong move in every situation. What did CWS in was that he lived in a culture that rewards alienation and atomization. He never had a chance. Though his decision still remain what they were–Chris Chan never would have existed in any other point in history.
The internet disappearing won’t mean anything if attitudes remain as they have been for the last century or so.
Who knew then that 25 years later, most internet usage would be spent in the exact lame way early 90s futurists predicted – streaming everything to your TV and video phone calls?
At the end of the day, all the death of the internet means is we go back to memorizing friends’ phone numbers, looking stuff up in books, buying things in person, and having face-to-face conversations. Meanwhile, megacorps and the government have no idea what we’re doing.
Millennials and Zoomers will gripe, but they’ll get the hang of it.
Brian,
Assuming we still have books to look things up. The internet is an ideal medium for dictionaries and encyclopedias, with the obvious caveats of course. But still I find the internet superior for finding words and their definitions and obscure information than the printed equivalents
My biggest gripe is the number of good books that are out of print and very hard to find. A lot of French books are good examples. It’s much easier to find Regine Pernoud and Lagrange-Garrigou in English translations than in the French originals.
My naive hope is when Oldpub finally dies, smart investors will buy up the backlists and start reprint previously hard to find stuff.
xavier
Or even better, after unjust corporate interest is purged from government, copyright reverts to something sane like 20 years, and good material naturally falls to the public domain, where concerned citizens can archive it themselves.