I posted on facebook recently “This thing is over. The thing you’re looking at right now is over. You know where to find me.” which got me some accusations of vague-booking and concerns of suicidal ideation. Facebook is over: it’s now an advertising stream of salty sugary shit no one really wants to see, but that someone somewhere is paying for you to look at for no real discernible reason. It is no longer my friends and family updating me on their lives and thoughts. People telling me about cool things they are putting on show up AFTER the thing happened and I most assuredly had been on facebook after they posted it but before it happened. Friends write amazing articles, but then six months later I catch a post lamenting on how no one saw that post. They are right because Facebook is most assuredly over.
Google is over. You type in your search results and it gives you spam pages, zombie sites culled from other internet copy and promoting shit for sale on Amazon and whatever company owns that spam site gets a kickback from amazon. Just garbage.
The most recent internet as we knew it (I am from the ancient times and knew it in all its forms) is over and like the I.T. guy asks you first, have you turned it off and on again. I think it’d be foolish to think that the internet is over, but we are definitely at a “disrupting” “inflection point” that is “paradigm-shifting” whatever bullshit lingo we’re supposed to say next blah blah blah.
No one reads this site, but here are my thoughts on what should happen next:
- No A.I. Don’t link to A.I. sites, put up a pledge to not use A.I., and blacklist the A.I. internet. Autocorrect is fine, I don’t even care if your first private pass is from prompted A.I., but nothing that makes it online, word or image, should be created by the machine. If a site uses A.I., turn off all links to it (If a multi-contributor site accidentally has someone sneak something through, it should be scrubbed and apologized for). The network should be to connect us, educate ourselves, share things, and not for surveillance and robot culling.
- We should end cookies. Browsers should not allow cookies. You can write down and memorize your passwords, people. Back in the olden times, you’d have codes for your nintendo games to get you back to a certain place; we could easily have a new internet that has urls change if you need to establish a path on a site (if you’re playing some kind of game), but cookies suck and spy and we should pay a little more on the remembering passwords side and surrender the convenience of the digital panopticon that modern cookies supply.
- No chum. If sites want to have ads, they can have ads, but no automated chum. You know what chum is: those weird blocks of ads advertising garlic clove treatments doctors don’t want you to know about, vote now on Trump’s latest fart noise, and sexy ladies want to tell me things. Maybe those are just my chum and I’m snitching on myself, but no chum ads. If a site has chum, it’s like A.I. content and it should be relegated to the shitternet.
- There should be an oppositional syllabus for web designers and programmers. You want to learn css, pair that with a read of Jonathan Crary’s “Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World.” Interested in Javascript, you also read accessibility manifestoes that talk about making a website for your entire audience and the histories of exclusionary texts. Mindless web leads to A.I., smarter developers lead to more interesting developments.
- And related, but not entirely online: An explicit political rejection of rent-seeking and a return to open source. The people who make the web should build the tools for others to make the things that they make: tools to code, tools for art, tools for sharing, encrypting, communicating, and building popular political power. Anything that smells of rent-seeking for regular users should be rejected. Subscription models, be they patreon or Adobe, are part of the problem. Instead, developers should make tools, distributed freely or with a nominal cost (a dollar) to regular users, and a second-tier price for business usage. On the one hand, there are hundreds of millions of users on the internet and a culture of throw a buck in the cup can be sizeable, but just as importantly, it will force developers to imagine different funding streams besides our capitalist masters: public subsidies, art funding, partnerships with artists and organizations to build the tools we need. What if the Association of Illustrators crowd-sourced a new non-adobe illustrator that was free and built with direct input of artists? What if professional video editors and their unions made an open-source premiere? The possibilities are endless, but more importantly, it would end the nightmare scenarios of google buying and shuttering important resources, of subscription models suddenly reducing cultural workers to feudal serfs, of A.I. cannibals destroying your art for some shithole to simply churn out another copy image.
Politically, in the United States, we are in a moment of impending rupture. This list is distinct from that, but while we’re up, let’s do it all.
UPDATES
- Peter Hart shared that “Flaming Hydra was running a series of fantastic essays on the magic of the 1990s internet” called The Lost Internet. I’m starting to read that.
- Tim Judson asked what my beef with Patreon is and I clumsily responded: “I’m fairly dour on podcasts at this point (I think they often fall into this semi-unhealthy parasocial dynamic), but on patreon specifically: my experience from talking to people about it from the production side is that patreon can create a subtle feedback loop where people are paying close attention to what episode is adding subscribers and losing subscribers (and therefore money) and this chase can lead to a really clumsy politics and analysis. We have to figure out a way for cultural workers to be paid, but I think more collective efforts (like channels instead of shows) and aggregating the funding (your show is generally this popular, your audience is sharing and responding in this way, no need to hyper fixate on this one episode) seem like a healthier way to go around.”
- Rufus de Rham shared Cory Doctorow’s much better piece on the Enshittification of the web:
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