Other way around for me, 14+ years on reddit, youtube maybe 8 or so. Watched videos occasionally, but wasn’t really hooked on something. I feel that started when reddit got more mainstream and I wanted to consume media without the constant comment wars and downvote tirades. I’m sure that happens on youtube as well, but I just deactivated comments and done.
I’m not getting any ads and intrusions just yet with my blocker setup, but it really feels like the internet is changing. It grew up from being a rebellious teen to a mainstream adult, and that doesn’t sit right with me. Guess current generations will in time alienate the generation older than the internet to the point where we won’t feel at home anymore.
That’s a good analogy. The internet’s kind of like a gen-Xer, super into anti-establishment punk and grunge music, wearing nothing but Nirvana t-shirts well into its twenties, who woke up one day to find itself a NIMBY-esque middle-manager who votes every election for either corporate democrats or your mildly less homophobic Republican candidates and who cares about no issue beyond getting his taxes lowered. And the sad thing is, that’s the internet people wanted. We/they wanted it banal, tame, sanitized, and, ultimately, lifeless. All the porn is sequestered into its own little corner of things, where it used to just be everywhere (you couldn’t go to the front page of reddit without just seeing a ton of T and A) and all the media is hyper-sanitized because corporate sponsors want everything family friendly so they can feed the same advertising to kids that they do adults. And instead of interesting, new websites cropping up every other week that you find with Stumbleupon, it’s just screenshots of comments from 4 social media websites reposted ad-nauseam on each other and the same mundane youtube videos you’ve been watching on repeat the past 6 years. And now corporations like Google and Reddit are starting to go the extra mile and box people out of even quietly bypassing the web of bullshit they’ve put around the content they host, dictating not just what kind of content is available, but how you interact with it.
It kind of reminds me of this passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson is talking about the sixties. You can read it here. He talks about strange memories, about this feeling like you were a part of an important time that meant something. The internet of the early 2010s was a special place. Alive and vibrant and strange and perfect for weirdo loners who couldn’t figure out how to interact with people in real life. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully quantify or describe how much of that time shaped me into who I am, or about what ideas and thoughts and beliefs that live within me that all those moments, aimlessly frittered away in some little corner of cyberspace gave rise to. Maybe I would have been better off if I never was an “internet person.” I know the changing of the time and the end of this era would hurt less. I know I wouldn’t feel so old seeing the internet, which was once something that felt like a good friend, dying of cancer-like greed and the pathological centralization of all its myriad services.
Perhaps this is the story of all history: of how new frontiers, like the “Wild West,” always become settled, and how we remember the best parts of what we experienced and try to forget all the bad parts of it, or forgive those flaws because they didn’t really affect us. I know the new internet is certainly kinder to women, LGBT persons, and people of color today than it was back then. And that’s good. And I know that the myths of history, of the Wild West, or the Gold Rush, or the early internet, or any other period of rapid settlement and development is never as neat and clean or as kind or even as “real” as we care to remember. And for the people who come afterwards, the way things are now will be all they know. They’ll never even think to wish the internet was different or better, because they weren’t there and they didn’t experience the internet with all its raw potential before it became a digital stripmall. And for all our lamenting, nothing will really change. There might be holdout places, small corners where nostalgia lives on. Virtual retirement homes for the internet’s senior citizens. And maybe that’s fine. Because nothing lasts forever. Things, people, places, ideas, they all die, and you just have to appreciate the time you had with them. And even the internet as it is now will die and give way to something new, even if it takes decades or centuries to happen.
But even with all that said, you just can’t help but wish the thing it became, in this moment, held more of the dreams of the people who actually helped make it.
That was easily the best-written, deepest-resonating diatribe that I’ve read on the Internet since the OG web. Thank you for giving voice to the pain I’ve been enduring.
Perhaps the whispered decentralized web 3.0 will take off, and I can meet you someday in the virtual tavern at the top of a hill, and we can toast to an exciting new frontier…
I was reading Bruce Sterling’s book the hacker crackdown and it describes the same sense of cultural freedom and possibility, but for phones/computers in the 80s and 90s and of how the open/freewheeling hacker culture got eaten by people turning to moneymaking (crime) and by subsequent government crackdowns. He even explicitly mentions how the same thing happened to the bohemian drug underground of the 60s
So I suspect this cultural pattern is kind of a regular thing, maybe mirroring our economic boom/bust cycles. Iirc both the oughts and the 60s were “on” decades while the 70s and teens had big economic crises.
For me personally the saddest instance of this is the proliferation of cultural and social experimentation in the early Soviet Union followed by well, the rest of soviet history
That sounds like an interesting book. I really like cybercultural history like that. There’s a book with an adjacent topic you might like, actually. It’s called The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll. He managed to start this massive investigation into a fairly prolific hacker who had infiltrated Berkeley computer systems in the late eighties and whose only “trail” he left behind was a few cents worth of network usage time. It’s a true story. Anyway, just a heads up.
Other way around for me, 14+ years on reddit, youtube maybe 8 or so. Watched videos occasionally, but wasn’t really hooked on something. I feel that started when reddit got more mainstream and I wanted to consume media without the constant comment wars and downvote tirades. I’m sure that happens on youtube as well, but I just deactivated comments and done.
I’m not getting any ads and intrusions just yet with my blocker setup, but it really feels like the internet is changing. It grew up from being a rebellious teen to a mainstream adult, and that doesn’t sit right with me. Guess current generations will in time alienate the generation older than the internet to the point where we won’t feel at home anymore.
That’s a good analogy. The internet’s kind of like a gen-Xer, super into anti-establishment punk and grunge music, wearing nothing but Nirvana t-shirts well into its twenties, who woke up one day to find itself a NIMBY-esque middle-manager who votes every election for either corporate democrats or your mildly less homophobic Republican candidates and who cares about no issue beyond getting his taxes lowered. And the sad thing is, that’s the internet people wanted. We/they wanted it banal, tame, sanitized, and, ultimately, lifeless. All the porn is sequestered into its own little corner of things, where it used to just be everywhere (you couldn’t go to the front page of reddit without just seeing a ton of T and A) and all the media is hyper-sanitized because corporate sponsors want everything family friendly so they can feed the same advertising to kids that they do adults. And instead of interesting, new websites cropping up every other week that you find with Stumbleupon, it’s just screenshots of comments from 4 social media websites reposted ad-nauseam on each other and the same mundane youtube videos you’ve been watching on repeat the past 6 years. And now corporations like Google and Reddit are starting to go the extra mile and box people out of even quietly bypassing the web of bullshit they’ve put around the content they host, dictating not just what kind of content is available, but how you interact with it.
It kind of reminds me of this passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson is talking about the sixties. You can read it here. He talks about strange memories, about this feeling like you were a part of an important time that meant something. The internet of the early 2010s was a special place. Alive and vibrant and strange and perfect for weirdo loners who couldn’t figure out how to interact with people in real life. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully quantify or describe how much of that time shaped me into who I am, or about what ideas and thoughts and beliefs that live within me that all those moments, aimlessly frittered away in some little corner of cyberspace gave rise to. Maybe I would have been better off if I never was an “internet person.” I know the changing of the time and the end of this era would hurt less. I know I wouldn’t feel so old seeing the internet, which was once something that felt like a good friend, dying of cancer-like greed and the pathological centralization of all its myriad services.
Perhaps this is the story of all history: of how new frontiers, like the “Wild West,” always become settled, and how we remember the best parts of what we experienced and try to forget all the bad parts of it, or forgive those flaws because they didn’t really affect us. I know the new internet is certainly kinder to women, LGBT persons, and people of color today than it was back then. And that’s good. And I know that the myths of history, of the Wild West, or the Gold Rush, or the early internet, or any other period of rapid settlement and development is never as neat and clean or as kind or even as “real” as we care to remember. And for the people who come afterwards, the way things are now will be all they know. They’ll never even think to wish the internet was different or better, because they weren’t there and they didn’t experience the internet with all its raw potential before it became a digital stripmall. And for all our lamenting, nothing will really change. There might be holdout places, small corners where nostalgia lives on. Virtual retirement homes for the internet’s senior citizens. And maybe that’s fine. Because nothing lasts forever. Things, people, places, ideas, they all die, and you just have to appreciate the time you had with them. And even the internet as it is now will die and give way to something new, even if it takes decades or centuries to happen.
But even with all that said, you just can’t help but wish the thing it became, in this moment, held more of the dreams of the people who actually helped make it.
That was easily the best-written, deepest-resonating diatribe that I’ve read on the Internet since the OG web. Thank you for giving voice to the pain I’ve been enduring.
Perhaps the whispered decentralized web 3.0 will take off, and I can meet you someday in the virtual tavern at the top of a hill, and we can toast to an exciting new frontier…
I was reading Bruce Sterling’s book the hacker crackdown and it describes the same sense of cultural freedom and possibility, but for phones/computers in the 80s and 90s and of how the open/freewheeling hacker culture got eaten by people turning to moneymaking (crime) and by subsequent government crackdowns. He even explicitly mentions how the same thing happened to the bohemian drug underground of the 60s
So I suspect this cultural pattern is kind of a regular thing, maybe mirroring our economic boom/bust cycles. Iirc both the oughts and the 60s were “on” decades while the 70s and teens had big economic crises.
For me personally the saddest instance of this is the proliferation of cultural and social experimentation in the early Soviet Union followed by well, the rest of soviet history
That sounds like an interesting book. I really like cybercultural history like that. There’s a book with an adjacent topic you might like, actually. It’s called The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll. He managed to start this massive investigation into a fairly prolific hacker who had infiltrated Berkeley computer systems in the late eighties and whose only “trail” he left behind was a few cents worth of network usage time. It’s a true story. Anyway, just a heads up.