If this article resonates with you in even the smallest way, I urge you to read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business".
I am currently re-reading this book and am amazed by the apparent accuracy of his analysis, which is that the mediums in which we communicate or express information (print vs. TV vs. TikTok) have a massively understated role in the quality and type of communication we participate in. That is, as print lends itself naturally to logical argument and less to emotional knee-jerk reactions, the type of conversations taken place in long-form print will by nature be more logical and intellectual. Compare this to TV or short term videos, which captivate us using more primal forms of distraction (bright lights with moving images, fast talking, "Gotcha" type rhetoric, cool dances, sexual/romantic behaviour, or background subway surfers), and it is obvious that the nature of what we see is inherently less based around logic and reason.
And as a consequence, if we are what we consume, it is only natural to surmise that the quality of the mind follows the quality (and qualia) of our media.
People in computing like Alan Kay and Ted Nelson were reading people like Postman and Marshall McLuhan and worrying about this kind of thing decades ago. Unfortunately, instead we've got to the point where the computer industry has created TV on the computer from the visionary post-war manifesto Don't Create TV on the Computer. And while it was probably always the case that most people would end up mostly taking the path of least resistance through their lives, the state of the technology is actively funneling them there, because it usually makes it so bloody painful, and sometimes quite isolating, to do things which are more thoughtful or effortful, or even just to do the same things in a more thoughtful way.
(Probably the single thing that most needs to get fixed immediately, right away, is to get content-addressable networking—IPFS, a better iteration of IPFS, your favourite alternative to IPFS, have your pick—up to an adequate level of practical usability, support and actual adoption. This is a blocker or near-blocker for many things, sometimes in unobvious ways.)
All that said, the fact that that Postman book is from 1985, still pretty solidly in the pre-Internet mass-media world, illustrates that the cultural-decline issue probably isn't really, or mostly, a computer or even a consumer-Internet problem. Revolution in the Head is another book of the same kind of cultural pessimism, also from (basically) the pre-Web era.
> The Society of the Spectacle. When I reread this, I was alarmed at how applicable it is today.
i read this too young and it set me up for a lifetime of hopeless depression. highly recommended. i just started 'simulacra and simulation' and the development on the ideas covered in 'spectacle' is even less optimistic.
When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?"
There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things.
Yeah, I sometimes miss the way we socialized in the 80s and 90s. I was an early adopter of the Internet myself, and it was really awesome for a while. But what it has turned into now ... I can't shake the feeling that it is definitely a net negative, we would be better off forgetting it ever existed.
For me it's been the same as always, I'm able to connected with others that have the same niche interests as me, wherever they are in the world, and I'm eternally grateful for it existing.
Everything new always end up being "less useful" or "actively harmful" to some people once it's exposed to the real world, but that doesn't mean there is a large part of us that benefit from it many ways it regardless. I grew up in a rural place where no one cared about the same things as me, and once we got the internet for the first time, it was like a whole new world opened up. I still feel like this today.
But even so, others get pulled into it, or spit out of it, and they get harmed. And it sucks, ideally nothing should harm others. But it seems unavoidable that it does, even the bestest of tools with the bestest intentions will be misused by people, to harm themselves or to harm others. Maybe human nature just sucks.
The good:
The internet enabled access to a wider diversity of cultures.
The bad (I think?):
Culture decoupled from geography, which makes it harder to connect with local community.
The ugly:
The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting, with a second order consequence of biasing culture to perceive everything in upsetting ways, even when it doesn't need to or benefit from that perspective. So culture as a whole has been biased towards pessimistic rituals and values.
> The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting
Upsetting some people has been part of art at least since the épater le bourgeois attitude of early twentieth-century modernism. One of the reasons that culture feels stagnant, is that the attention economy optimizes only such such upsetting that is conducive to maximizing engagement and selling advertising. This has resulted in a lot of stoking of outrage about the social and political contexts around art, while there is much less discussion of anything upsetting in the actual content of the art (the melodies, harmonies and rhythms that a music uses, the linguistic resources used in fiction or drama, etc.)
at least where it's active, i find meetup.com to be a good antidote to the "local" part of the situation. Meetup, in person, about the things that interest you :)
When the world was smaller, it was harder for people to get together with their common interests. There wasn't anyone around the coffee pot or water cooler who I could talk to about the shows or music I liked.
Thankfully, nowadays I can find people from all around the world who listen and watch the same things as me.
When the world was smaller, it was harder for people to get together with their common interests. There wasn't anyone around the coffee pot or water cooler who I could talk to about the shows or music I liked.
That was a feature, not a bug. You broadened your knowledge, and did the same for the people you talked with.
Compulsive navel-gazing is not healthy, individually, or for society.
This would be the case if the people who liked the most poopular things ever tried things outside of that, and there was a shared swapping of preferences, and openness on all sides.
But there never is. If you like things that are niche then you don't get a "Oh, that's not something I've heard of, tell me about it!" - and I agree that the world would be a better place if you did.
It's very different to discuss interests online rather than in person. Especially for people who didn't grow up online. This is part of the question about culture I think. Is shifting culture to the internet making things worse?
I don't know, but I can see why some people might think so.
I think this is a salient counterpoint. While I value online interactions, I also don’t want them to be my predominant form of socialization. That works well for some people, less well for others, but it’s increasingly becoming the de facto mode of bonding with people over common interests. Because, you know, you can find that group of people really into the same thing you are. I also work from home full time and it requires a lot of continual work on my part to get my social needs met - sometimes impossible if I’m tired from working a full week.
Surely there is some middle ground. When we don’t have anything in common with our real life counterparts, there’s an issue. Likewise if we are forced to exclusively socialize with people we have nothing in common with. I feel like we’re on a pendulum swing where online interactions are taking over everything, and I’m hoping that swings back to some extent, but not to the thing we had before.
I think there's a bit of a swing taking place, at least among my age group.
I finally found out there's a "Friends only feed" on Facebook which is newish. None of my friends hardly are posting - over the last 7 days, just 5 people had posts.
Seems like the engagement beast has really driven people away, is my take.
Exactly. And the noise, in all forms, has been exponentially increasing. In every medium there is “good” - even in like the “TikTok and its clones” category… but it competes with idiotic rage bait and engagement bait like the “life hacks” that intentionally make no sense, uncreative political BS, advertisements for only fans models, and of course, AI-generated everything that masquerades as content but is actually devoid of meaning or usefulness.
I blame the ad-supported model for everything.
Ad-supported is what made the Internet’s adolescence, in the early 00s, so impactful, because it paid the bills, or at least promised a path to profitability to VCs who paid the bills.
But once the adtech got good enough and everything went mobile, ad revenue became the ultimate bad incentive driver for everyone. Nobody at NBC in 1950 could dream of getting viewers to spend 8 hours a day watching TV, but that kind of watch time is 100% possible today and the TikToks, IG and YouTubes of the world won’t rest unless average watch time reaches 24.00 hours per day.
I don't even think it mattered WHAT we watched. The A-Team and Dallas were pretty awful, but at least we were watching the same things and had some common ground, could see the humanity in the people we see every day. Now it's just "I hate everyone, no one even likes my niche anime about feet and fungi". I mean someone does, but it's some tiny group on the internet and then the tribalism and us against the world starts. The feeling of loneliness just gets worse and worse because you need to see people in your real life that you enjoy.
As another nerd who grew up on the rural side of my country, the internet was a huge blessing and once we first got our first modem in our house I finally got to experience how it felt to talk to people who cared about the same things as me.
That would be a small slice of the section of people you'd be able to speak through the internet. I've probably, since starting to use the internet, spoken with more people in my lifetime than my whole linage before me, by just conversing on internet forums and emailing lists for decades (not that it's a leaderboard or anything, just illustrating the point).
Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same people always, new perspectives are always refreshing regardless of how much I disagree with them :)
> That would be a small slice of the section of people you'd be able to speak through the internet
i mean, you did say "anything in the world" :) that could include a large community, if we decided to get offline more often.
> Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same people always, new perspectives are always refreshing regardless of how much I disagree with them :)
how is that different from being offline?
* i'm probably coming across more accusatory than i feel - i'm interrogating my own feelings on this subject and i've found that i tend to feel like being online has been a net negative for me in pretty much every aspect of my life.
Overall it seems to me like different living situations, different geographical locations and different cultures end up creating people with vastly different perspectives. Put all of these people in the same location and after a while they think a bit alike, or at least "a bit alike" within a spectrum which gets smaller, and very uncommon to find those "outside of the spectrum" when you're actually in a physical space, limited to talking person by person.
I feel like the pervasiveness of the internet makes it much easier to find those perspectives that exists outside the norm, and I guess those are more interesting to me as I don't find those around me always, only under certain circumstances or even just happenstance.
So I guess my mind didn't go to "large community around me where I am" because I'd fear they still wouldn't posses, even less gain, those "fresh" perspectives that I seek.
I didn't feel you being accusatory FWIW, and always appreciate when people think about and question what I think, so thank you.
I think what you're describing is that we used to have more common experiences.
When Seinfeld was on, there were far fewer video options, and very few high quality ones.
Just like how before there were hundreds of thousands of radio stations, most were "full service," so you were exposed to things you didn't necessarily like or want (farm news, blues, morning chat shows). But you were aware that they existed and shared an experience with people who did like them.
Even when radio started fragmenting, I think of the 80's, we all listened to each other's music. If you listen to reruns of American Top 40 on Sirius, you'll hear a disco song followed by an R&B song, followed by a rock song followed by an oldies song followed by a soul song followed by a folk song.
Today, very often people silo themselves into a single genre, or even subgenre, of music, and anything else is "other" and bad.
The internet enables the hyper-optimization of media (music, video, games, sports, politics), which drives us apart, rather than brings us together. And big tech companies are happy to carve out personalized echo chambers for each of us to wallow in.
> Today, very often people silo themselves into a single genre, or even subgenre, of music, and anything else is "other" and bad.
I heard many people who grew up before 2000 say their children, grandchildren, students, or so listened to more varied music than they did at the same ages. I heard none say the opposite.
One thing I noticed while I was reading NASA engineer Allan MacDonald's book about the Challenger accident he tried and failed to prevent was that every time he came into contact with a member of the news media, there was a sense of skilled elitism about the practice of their craft. I started looking back on other nonfiction depictions of the times before the 1990s, and I was struck not only by the amount of elitism displayed by people working in the creative industries, but by how many "sellout creatives" (that were making a living selling advertisements or hosting news segments or whatever) had huge exposure to and experience in past creative culture. It's like every media/art worker at that time had had a goal as a young person to create the next Great Work, and over time they flamed out and settled for sticking niche literary references in the Simpsons or taking pictures for development companies or writing sports magazine articles or teaching or some other lesser-than creative career than being the next Dostoevsky.
By contrast, I don't get that sense at all from people working in "culture" today, neither by the people still staffing "legacy media" or in their influencer replacements.
One of the things I remember about myself and others as young people emerging in the years around Y2K, was that we were taught presumption at every opportunity. Pat answers from the elite circles were to be found for everything, and the referential aspects of pop culture were built on that; they could critique it, make satire, but they couldn't imagine a world without it, and therefore the conversation had a gravity of the inevitable and inescapable. Piece by piece, that has been torn down in tandem with the monoculture. A lot of it has been subsequently called out as something toxic or an -ism or otherwise diminishing.
Every influencer now has this dance they do with intellectual statements where, unless they intentionally aim to create rhetorical bait, they don't make bold context-free claims. They hedge and address all sorts of preliminaries.
At the same time, the entry points to culture have shifted. There's a very sharp divide now, for example, between online posting of fine art, decorative art, commercial art, and "the online art community" - influencer-first artists, posting primarily digital character illustrations on social media. The first three are the legacy forms(and the decorative arts are probably the least impacted by any of this), but the last invokes a younger voice that is oblivious to history - they publish now and learn later, so their artistic conversation tends to be more immature, but comes with a sense of identity that mimicks the influencer space, generally. Are they making art or content? That's the part that seems to be the foundational struggle.
I tried to in my initial comment draft, but I couldn't really come to a satisfactory answer so I thought I'd just post the observation.
I believe the average person today is far more apathetic about the parts of their own civilization that aren't explicitly political than ever before. Morality, cultural expression, architectural aesthetics, manners, fashion, product design, whatever. I think this slide into apathy predates the Internet and has something to do with copyright law, mega-corporate capture of the supply chain (and it's subsequent off shoring), excessive focus on cultural and behavioral neutrality in education, lawsuit culture, and endless video evidence of everything, but I can't spin that into a coherent narrative.
I'm not entirely sure what this implies, but I definitely don't think the introduction of LLMs is going to move the needle back toward widespread elitism and highly motivated creative industries. I wish I had a better answer to your question, which I appreciate you asking.
I can't help but feel the shift to apathy is in part due to a cultural shift from a sense of building society together to a more exploitative view where people have to get what they can while they still can get it. The lack of motivation to produce Great Works feels related to the disconnect from a greater purpose/community.
It all feels related in some way to the dearth of great statesmen. At least the Rockefellers of the past contributed back in the form of great works dedicated to public use.
I think adjacent to this is an element of reduced risk taking from younger people because the stakes are much higher (or at least feel much higher). I've worked with so many smart and talented grads who have seemingly planned their lives/career to the nth degree, in a way that was certainly not that common in my broad circles when I was a similar age.
From conversations with them, it all stems from the view of you can't afford any mistakes/missteps if you want a relatively benign type of comfortable middle class life, in terms of things like housing in particular. If that'd your starting point, you're looking to ge a guaranteedish success at anything you're trying to do and that inherently puts a lid on how much you want to deviate or be creative from the norm. More so than ever, I think, people are more aware of optimising monetisation in all aspects of their lives, and that sort of results in more things being the same or only having minor deviation from what "works".
Culture isn't getting worse, it's getting further and further towards what the masses want. Throughout history very few people got a voice about what culture was created or offered.
In the 1700s, the culture that was created targeted the people who could pay for it: the aristocracy and the very richest of wealthy merchants (people who could afford to be patrons). Culture targeted them.
In the early 1900s, the people who paid for culture were the upper middle class, because they were the people that advertisers wanted to reach. Culture targeted them and appealed to people with college educations (the types who enjoy cultural criticism).
Today, the culture that gets clicks and views is the culture that appeals to the broad masses. The broad masses do not appreciate the cultural criticism of the (college educated) upper middle class. If you want to know what they enjoy, go browse reddit's /r/all. It's not the village voice.
I've observed a trend, both across my own life, and also seems to pattern match elsewhere. It's the idea that the dearer something is, the more carefully it's used, or inversely the cheaper something is the more we waste it. I've noticed it in the sense of money, "environmentalism" (green washed products get consumed more, despite using less being the better response), computing resources, publishing/printing books etc.
I am noticing that the internet makes discourse/arguments essentially "free" and seem to mostly contain garbage takes.
I also am wondering about this same trend with human lives as we break 8B and folks seem to be flippant even with lives.
The advertising/panopticon funding model is turning this timeline into a dystopia worthy of George Orwell. Because of algorithmic tuning to optimize "engagement", the promise of the internet has been turned into a dark pattern instead.
We can run our own servers, curate our own sources of information, and build reputation networks, in spite of the overall trends. The key difference is to do it for any reason other than profit.
Another weakness of the evolved systems is the whole "Up/Down" voting system that happens everywhere. When you force everything into that single dimension, you waste almost all information that can be gleaned from someone who has just spent their attention on something. I think that we need to have systems that can vote with vectors. Something can be funny, technically wrong, and insightful all at the same time... wouldn't it be nice to be able to learn those things?
Also, a pet peeve - HTML doesn't allow the Markup of Hypertext. It actively works against the idea of a Memex, a thing we still don't have 80 years later. 8(
Re: the alternative of the Up/Down system, the only big one I have seen succeed is the Steam reviews community. There is a Helpful vote and a Funny vote, this system seems mostly to work to be able to quickly filter out all the low effort and joke reviews. I wish they would add this to a platform like Letterboxd too, because there you need to scroll through so many jokes before you find an actual insightful review someone shared.
Yes, but that is either what the people want, OR, our bubbles are mini torture chambers. It's one of those two, I'm leaning towards the ladder right now.
The internet compresses culture from analog beginnings to symbolic interchange, whether voice image or text. Of course culture is worse, the internet renders it maladaptive in every dimension possible with only a few exceptions.
I enjoyed this. I find it somewhat telling though that while the title is about "the internet", the actual discussion about what's changed focuses a lot on money. You can argue that the internet changed how money is made, but I think it's a mistake to conflate technology with our societal response to and management of it. As gun-control advocates love to point out, firearms have been around for centuries but that doesn't mean people everywhere are shooting each other constantly. We have things like laws to contain the effects of technology. I think a major component of the culutral changes described in the article is a lack of political will to ensure, by force if necessary, that the economic gains of technology are spread widely.
Another caveat to the title is that the article seems mostly to be talking about the "web 2.0" or post-social-media internet. I'd say that earlier stages of the internet, particularly what some people now see as the "golden age" from the late 1990s to around 2010, actually involved a remarkable flowering of culture. Blogs proliferated, traditional media started making websites with substantial content, and there were valuable achievements in new media like Flash games. The article says:
> The internet has made it easy to evaluate all content — including criticism — against three key metrics: views, likes, and shares.
And that's true, but it's not "the internet" that did that, it's the specific subset of the internet that we allowed to run amok. Blaming that on the internet is like looking at a street full of obnoxious advertising signs and saying that paint ruined this town; maybe that's a factor, but another one is a lack of signage laws.
The part of the internet that has destroyed and continues to destroy culture is the part that's built on pandering and profiteering, which, not coincidentally, is the same part of other industries that has destroyed beautiful and promising things in the past.
That said, the article makes a lot of good points. This one in particular:
> What happened to journalism in the 21st century is, in many ways, the story of the conflict between two utopian values: Information wants to be free and Writers should be paid.
There's no denying that technology played in role in the creation of this dilemma. It's not just about journalism, of course. It has to do with the fact that computers enable the essentially resource-free copying of information, and that's affected many industries (perhaps most notably the artistic ones like movies and music that the article discusses in other contexts). But just because technology brings us new problems doesn't mean we can't address those problems by updating our expectations and standards of behavior.
The worse thing about the Internet is that it enabled all the socially maladjusted & anti-establishment types to find each other since the cost of discoverability & distribution of information plummeted.
> The 20th century, apparently, was the last time we had great art, literature, or music.
this is totally absurd. I'm in middle age and the golden era of music for me is the late aughts, mostly bedroom recordings that never would have seen the light of day in the age of MTV.
I might agree with the thesis of the piece overall but it's hard to continue after such an obviously asinine statement
Yes. Considering you cannot even say write/speak things without vindictive people using various methods like down voting or abusive language to stifle conversation and discussion and that has metastasized into things like "moderator" censorship and evil like shadow banning, hiding conversations ... not from being said, but controlling what adult humans are allowed to see ... all of which are directly and inherently treasonous for Americans to engage in due to their responsibility to uphold and defend the Constitution and the universal human right to free speech; then yes, it seems clear the internet, as the replacement of the public square AND books/newspapers, etc, as well as simply just universal freedom of expression and communication has made not just culture, but humanity worse off.
The "positivity ration" claims it takes 3:1 good things to overcome a bad thing. I would argue though that the nature of the evil that the internet facilitates is not just many bad things, but they also taint all the other things. We are in effect moving into a dynamic that is related to the pre-printing press era, when the ruling class had total control over information and the dissemination of it.
If you interrogate that aspect of history, you will clearly see the thread of that impulse throughout especially European history, even after the advent of the printing press. It was the same before the internet when things like state radio/TV stations and rules controlled what could be said and how. The internet briefly breached that containment from about '90 to '10s, until the speech control and tone policing or even the constant change and shift of language to dominate people.
It is naive, childish, and underdeveloped to simply take all the positives of the internet and ignore that there are many turds floating in that punch bowl.
If this article resonates with you in even the smallest way, I urge you to read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business".
I am currently re-reading this book and am amazed by the apparent accuracy of his analysis, which is that the mediums in which we communicate or express information (print vs. TV vs. TikTok) have a massively understated role in the quality and type of communication we participate in. That is, as print lends itself naturally to logical argument and less to emotional knee-jerk reactions, the type of conversations taken place in long-form print will by nature be more logical and intellectual. Compare this to TV or short term videos, which captivate us using more primal forms of distraction (bright lights with moving images, fast talking, "Gotcha" type rhetoric, cool dances, sexual/romantic behaviour, or background subway surfers), and it is obvious that the nature of what we see is inherently less based around logic and reason.
And as a consequence, if we are what we consume, it is only natural to surmise that the quality of the mind follows the quality (and qualia) of our media.
People in computing like Alan Kay and Ted Nelson were reading people like Postman and Marshall McLuhan and worrying about this kind of thing decades ago. Unfortunately, instead we've got to the point where the computer industry has created TV on the computer from the visionary post-war manifesto Don't Create TV on the Computer. And while it was probably always the case that most people would end up mostly taking the path of least resistance through their lives, the state of the technology is actively funneling them there, because it usually makes it so bloody painful, and sometimes quite isolating, to do things which are more thoughtful or effortful, or even just to do the same things in a more thoughtful way.
(Probably the single thing that most needs to get fixed immediately, right away, is to get content-addressable networking—IPFS, a better iteration of IPFS, your favourite alternative to IPFS, have your pick—up to an adequate level of practical usability, support and actual adoption. This is a blocker or near-blocker for many things, sometimes in unobvious ways.)
All that said, the fact that that Postman book is from 1985, still pretty solidly in the pre-Internet mass-media world, illustrates that the cultural-decline issue probably isn't really, or mostly, a computer or even a consumer-Internet problem. Revolution in the Head is another book of the same kind of cultural pessimism, also from (basically) the pre-Web era.
Yes!
There are related works: The Medium is the Message and the television program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFwVCHkL-JU
"A medium is not something neutral. It does something to people."
and The Society of the Spectacle. When I reread this, I was alarmed at how applicable it is today.
Problems: We don't really have any remedy. We can see if we look, but what to do?
> The Society of the Spectacle. When I reread this, I was alarmed at how applicable it is today.
i read this too young and it set me up for a lifetime of hopeless depression. highly recommended. i just started 'simulacra and simulation' and the development on the ideas covered in 'spectacle' is even less optimistic.
When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?"
There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things.
The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
Yeah, I sometimes miss the way we socialized in the 80s and 90s. I was an early adopter of the Internet myself, and it was really awesome for a while. But what it has turned into now ... I can't shake the feeling that it is definitely a net negative, we would be better off forgetting it ever existed.
> But what it has turned into now
For me it's been the same as always, I'm able to connected with others that have the same niche interests as me, wherever they are in the world, and I'm eternally grateful for it existing.
Everything new always end up being "less useful" or "actively harmful" to some people once it's exposed to the real world, but that doesn't mean there is a large part of us that benefit from it many ways it regardless. I grew up in a rural place where no one cared about the same things as me, and once we got the internet for the first time, it was like a whole new world opened up. I still feel like this today.
But even so, others get pulled into it, or spit out of it, and they get harmed. And it sucks, ideally nothing should harm others. But it seems unavoidable that it does, even the bestest of tools with the bestest intentions will be misused by people, to harm themselves or to harm others. Maybe human nature just sucks.
The good: The internet enabled access to a wider diversity of cultures.
The bad (I think?): Culture decoupled from geography, which makes it harder to connect with local community.
The ugly: The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting, with a second order consequence of biasing culture to perceive everything in upsetting ways, even when it doesn't need to or benefit from that perspective. So culture as a whole has been biased towards pessimistic rituals and values.
> The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting
Upsetting some people has been part of art at least since the épater le bourgeois attitude of early twentieth-century modernism. One of the reasons that culture feels stagnant, is that the attention economy optimizes only such such upsetting that is conducive to maximizing engagement and selling advertising. This has resulted in a lot of stoking of outrage about the social and political contexts around art, while there is much less discussion of anything upsetting in the actual content of the art (the melodies, harmonies and rhythms that a music uses, the linguistic resources used in fiction or drama, etc.)
at least where it's active, i find meetup.com to be a good antidote to the "local" part of the situation. Meetup, in person, about the things that interest you :)
That's a good point of positivity and I welcome it :)
When the world was smaller, it was harder for people to get together with their common interests. There wasn't anyone around the coffee pot or water cooler who I could talk to about the shows or music I liked.
Thankfully, nowadays I can find people from all around the world who listen and watch the same things as me.
The net effect is...Such a relief.
When the world was smaller, it was harder for people to get together with their common interests. There wasn't anyone around the coffee pot or water cooler who I could talk to about the shows or music I liked.
That was a feature, not a bug. You broadened your knowledge, and did the same for the people you talked with.
Compulsive navel-gazing is not healthy, individually, or for society.
This would be the case if the people who liked the most poopular things ever tried things outside of that, and there was a shared swapping of preferences, and openness on all sides.
But there never is. If you like things that are niche then you don't get a "Oh, that's not something I've heard of, tell me about it!" - and I agree that the world would be a better place if you did.
I dunno. I am on a discord server with a bunch of people who share theories and lament the cancellation of Raised By Wolves.
Expecting people in the office to be able to talk about that show is too much to expect. Also, I no longer go to an office anyways.
Things are different than say 20 years ago.
It's very different to discuss interests online rather than in person. Especially for people who didn't grow up online. This is part of the question about culture I think. Is shifting culture to the internet making things worse?
I don't know, but I can see why some people might think so.
> Also, I no longer go to an office anyways.
Did you consider if their observation could transfer to physical non work settings, non physical work settings, or non physical non work settings?
I think this is a salient counterpoint. While I value online interactions, I also don’t want them to be my predominant form of socialization. That works well for some people, less well for others, but it’s increasingly becoming the de facto mode of bonding with people over common interests. Because, you know, you can find that group of people really into the same thing you are. I also work from home full time and it requires a lot of continual work on my part to get my social needs met - sometimes impossible if I’m tired from working a full week.
Surely there is some middle ground. When we don’t have anything in common with our real life counterparts, there’s an issue. Likewise if we are forced to exclusively socialize with people we have nothing in common with. I feel like we’re on a pendulum swing where online interactions are taking over everything, and I’m hoping that swings back to some extent, but not to the thing we had before.
I think there's a bit of a swing taking place, at least among my age group.
I finally found out there's a "Friends only feed" on Facebook which is newish. None of my friends hardly are posting - over the last 7 days, just 5 people had posts.
Seems like the engagement beast has really driven people away, is my take.
Exactly: there's still great culture being created, somewhere out there; it's just unable to find its audience amongst the noise.
I agree, there is plenty of good stuff still being created. But it has to compete with a firehose of sewage, so the ratio is way off.
Exactly. And the noise, in all forms, has been exponentially increasing. In every medium there is “good” - even in like the “TikTok and its clones” category… but it competes with idiotic rage bait and engagement bait like the “life hacks” that intentionally make no sense, uncreative political BS, advertisements for only fans models, and of course, AI-generated everything that masquerades as content but is actually devoid of meaning or usefulness.
I blame the ad-supported model for everything.
Ad-supported is what made the Internet’s adolescence, in the early 00s, so impactful, because it paid the bills, or at least promised a path to profitability to VCs who paid the bills.
But once the adtech got good enough and everything went mobile, ad revenue became the ultimate bad incentive driver for everyone. Nobody at NBC in 1950 could dream of getting viewers to spend 8 hours a day watching TV, but that kind of watch time is 100% possible today and the TikToks, IG and YouTubes of the world won’t rest unless average watch time reaches 24.00 hours per day.
there are some small sub reddits and forums dedicated to niche topics.
stumbling into great forums and blogs while searching for something is a rare thing now.
I don't even think it mattered WHAT we watched. The A-Team and Dallas were pretty awful, but at least we were watching the same things and had some common ground, could see the humanity in the people we see every day. Now it's just "I hate everyone, no one even likes my niche anime about feet and fungi". I mean someone does, but it's some tiny group on the internet and then the tribalism and us against the world starts. The feeling of loneliness just gets worse and worse because you need to see people in your real life that you enjoy.
If I was still watching reruns of The Office and Parks & Rec, they'd have put me on SSRIs by now.
The internet is making everyone feel like what most of us nerds used to feel like. Good riddance, I’d say
As another nerd who grew up on the rural side of my country, the internet was a huge blessing and once we first got our first modem in our house I finally got to experience how it felt to talk to people who cared about the same things as me.
I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
> I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
not even an in-person community of people with similar interests?
That would be a small slice of the section of people you'd be able to speak through the internet. I've probably, since starting to use the internet, spoken with more people in my lifetime than my whole linage before me, by just conversing on internet forums and emailing lists for decades (not that it's a leaderboard or anything, just illustrating the point).
Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same people always, new perspectives are always refreshing regardless of how much I disagree with them :)
> That would be a small slice of the section of people you'd be able to speak through the internet
i mean, you did say "anything in the world" :) that could include a large community, if we decided to get offline more often.
> Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same people always, new perspectives are always refreshing regardless of how much I disagree with them :)
how is that different from being offline?
* i'm probably coming across more accusatory than i feel - i'm interrogating my own feelings on this subject and i've found that i tend to feel like being online has been a net negative for me in pretty much every aspect of my life.
Overall it seems to me like different living situations, different geographical locations and different cultures end up creating people with vastly different perspectives. Put all of these people in the same location and after a while they think a bit alike, or at least "a bit alike" within a spectrum which gets smaller, and very uncommon to find those "outside of the spectrum" when you're actually in a physical space, limited to talking person by person.
I feel like the pervasiveness of the internet makes it much easier to find those perspectives that exists outside the norm, and I guess those are more interesting to me as I don't find those around me always, only under certain circumstances or even just happenstance.
So I guess my mind didn't go to "large community around me where I am" because I'd fear they still wouldn't posses, even less gain, those "fresh" perspectives that I seek.
I didn't feel you being accusatory FWIW, and always appreciate when people think about and question what I think, so thank you.
I think what you're describing is that we used to have more common experiences.
When Seinfeld was on, there were far fewer video options, and very few high quality ones.
Just like how before there were hundreds of thousands of radio stations, most were "full service," so you were exposed to things you didn't necessarily like or want (farm news, blues, morning chat shows). But you were aware that they existed and shared an experience with people who did like them.
Even when radio started fragmenting, I think of the 80's, we all listened to each other's music. If you listen to reruns of American Top 40 on Sirius, you'll hear a disco song followed by an R&B song, followed by a rock song followed by an oldies song followed by a soul song followed by a folk song.
Today, very often people silo themselves into a single genre, or even subgenre, of music, and anything else is "other" and bad.
The internet enables the hyper-optimization of media (music, video, games, sports, politics), which drives us apart, rather than brings us together. And big tech companies are happy to carve out personalized echo chambers for each of us to wallow in.
> Today, very often people silo themselves into a single genre, or even subgenre, of music, and anything else is "other" and bad.
I heard many people who grew up before 2000 say their children, grandchildren, students, or so listened to more varied music than they did at the same ages. I heard none say the opposite.
One thing I noticed while I was reading NASA engineer Allan MacDonald's book about the Challenger accident he tried and failed to prevent was that every time he came into contact with a member of the news media, there was a sense of skilled elitism about the practice of their craft. I started looking back on other nonfiction depictions of the times before the 1990s, and I was struck not only by the amount of elitism displayed by people working in the creative industries, but by how many "sellout creatives" (that were making a living selling advertisements or hosting news segments or whatever) had huge exposure to and experience in past creative culture. It's like every media/art worker at that time had had a goal as a young person to create the next Great Work, and over time they flamed out and settled for sticking niche literary references in the Simpsons or taking pictures for development companies or writing sports magazine articles or teaching or some other lesser-than creative career than being the next Dostoevsky.
By contrast, I don't get that sense at all from people working in "culture" today, neither by the people still staffing "legacy media" or in their influencer replacements.
One of the things I remember about myself and others as young people emerging in the years around Y2K, was that we were taught presumption at every opportunity. Pat answers from the elite circles were to be found for everything, and the referential aspects of pop culture were built on that; they could critique it, make satire, but they couldn't imagine a world without it, and therefore the conversation had a gravity of the inevitable and inescapable. Piece by piece, that has been torn down in tandem with the monoculture. A lot of it has been subsequently called out as something toxic or an -ism or otherwise diminishing.
Every influencer now has this dance they do with intellectual statements where, unless they intentionally aim to create rhetorical bait, they don't make bold context-free claims. They hedge and address all sorts of preliminaries.
At the same time, the entry points to culture have shifted. There's a very sharp divide now, for example, between online posting of fine art, decorative art, commercial art, and "the online art community" - influencer-first artists, posting primarily digital character illustrations on social media. The first three are the legacy forms(and the decorative arts are probably the least impacted by any of this), but the last invokes a younger voice that is oblivious to history - they publish now and learn later, so their artistic conversation tends to be more immature, but comes with a sense of identity that mimicks the influencer space, generally. Are they making art or content? That's the part that seems to be the foundational struggle.
This is interesting, but can you expound on this thesis a little? What are the reasons you suspect and what are the implications of this shift?
I tried to in my initial comment draft, but I couldn't really come to a satisfactory answer so I thought I'd just post the observation.
I believe the average person today is far more apathetic about the parts of their own civilization that aren't explicitly political than ever before. Morality, cultural expression, architectural aesthetics, manners, fashion, product design, whatever. I think this slide into apathy predates the Internet and has something to do with copyright law, mega-corporate capture of the supply chain (and it's subsequent off shoring), excessive focus on cultural and behavioral neutrality in education, lawsuit culture, and endless video evidence of everything, but I can't spin that into a coherent narrative.
I'm not entirely sure what this implies, but I definitely don't think the introduction of LLMs is going to move the needle back toward widespread elitism and highly motivated creative industries. I wish I had a better answer to your question, which I appreciate you asking.
I can't help but feel the shift to apathy is in part due to a cultural shift from a sense of building society together to a more exploitative view where people have to get what they can while they still can get it. The lack of motivation to produce Great Works feels related to the disconnect from a greater purpose/community.
It all feels related in some way to the dearth of great statesmen. At least the Rockefellers of the past contributed back in the form of great works dedicated to public use.
I think adjacent to this is an element of reduced risk taking from younger people because the stakes are much higher (or at least feel much higher). I've worked with so many smart and talented grads who have seemingly planned their lives/career to the nth degree, in a way that was certainly not that common in my broad circles when I was a similar age.
From conversations with them, it all stems from the view of you can't afford any mistakes/missteps if you want a relatively benign type of comfortable middle class life, in terms of things like housing in particular. If that'd your starting point, you're looking to ge a guaranteedish success at anything you're trying to do and that inherently puts a lid on how much you want to deviate or be creative from the norm. More so than ever, I think, people are more aware of optimising monetisation in all aspects of their lives, and that sort of results in more things being the same or only having minor deviation from what "works".
Culture isn't getting worse, it's getting further and further towards what the masses want. Throughout history very few people got a voice about what culture was created or offered.
In the 1700s, the culture that was created targeted the people who could pay for it: the aristocracy and the very richest of wealthy merchants (people who could afford to be patrons). Culture targeted them.
In the early 1900s, the people who paid for culture were the upper middle class, because they were the people that advertisers wanted to reach. Culture targeted them and appealed to people with college educations (the types who enjoy cultural criticism).
Today, the culture that gets clicks and views is the culture that appeals to the broad masses. The broad masses do not appreciate the cultural criticism of the (college educated) upper middle class. If you want to know what they enjoy, go browse reddit's /r/all. It's not the village voice.
This is a really insightful observation. I hadn’t looked at it through this lens before.
Follow power. Follow money. There you will find elite culture.
Mass culture is a giant boiling pot of angry or silly experiments and obsessions.
I've observed a trend, both across my own life, and also seems to pattern match elsewhere. It's the idea that the dearer something is, the more carefully it's used, or inversely the cheaper something is the more we waste it. I've noticed it in the sense of money, "environmentalism" (green washed products get consumed more, despite using less being the better response), computing resources, publishing/printing books etc.
I am noticing that the internet makes discourse/arguments essentially "free" and seem to mostly contain garbage takes.
I also am wondering about this same trend with human lives as we break 8B and folks seem to be flippant even with lives.
The advertising/panopticon funding model is turning this timeline into a dystopia worthy of George Orwell. Because of algorithmic tuning to optimize "engagement", the promise of the internet has been turned into a dark pattern instead.
We can run our own servers, curate our own sources of information, and build reputation networks, in spite of the overall trends. The key difference is to do it for any reason other than profit.
Another weakness of the evolved systems is the whole "Up/Down" voting system that happens everywhere. When you force everything into that single dimension, you waste almost all information that can be gleaned from someone who has just spent their attention on something. I think that we need to have systems that can vote with vectors. Something can be funny, technically wrong, and insightful all at the same time... wouldn't it be nice to be able to learn those things?
Also, a pet peeve - HTML doesn't allow the Markup of Hypertext. It actively works against the idea of a Memex, a thing we still don't have 80 years later. 8(
Re: the alternative of the Up/Down system, the only big one I have seen succeed is the Steam reviews community. There is a Helpful vote and a Funny vote, this system seems mostly to work to be able to quickly filter out all the low effort and joke reviews. I wish they would add this to a platform like Letterboxd too, because there you need to scroll through so many jokes before you find an actual insightful review someone shared.
Yes, but that is either what the people want, OR, our bubbles are mini torture chambers. It's one of those two, I'm leaning towards the ladder right now.
The internet compresses culture from analog beginnings to symbolic interchange, whether voice image or text. Of course culture is worse, the internet renders it maladaptive in every dimension possible with only a few exceptions.
I would say culture warriors are making the internet worse :\
I enjoyed this. I find it somewhat telling though that while the title is about "the internet", the actual discussion about what's changed focuses a lot on money. You can argue that the internet changed how money is made, but I think it's a mistake to conflate technology with our societal response to and management of it. As gun-control advocates love to point out, firearms have been around for centuries but that doesn't mean people everywhere are shooting each other constantly. We have things like laws to contain the effects of technology. I think a major component of the culutral changes described in the article is a lack of political will to ensure, by force if necessary, that the economic gains of technology are spread widely.
Another caveat to the title is that the article seems mostly to be talking about the "web 2.0" or post-social-media internet. I'd say that earlier stages of the internet, particularly what some people now see as the "golden age" from the late 1990s to around 2010, actually involved a remarkable flowering of culture. Blogs proliferated, traditional media started making websites with substantial content, and there were valuable achievements in new media like Flash games. The article says:
> The internet has made it easy to evaluate all content — including criticism — against three key metrics: views, likes, and shares.
And that's true, but it's not "the internet" that did that, it's the specific subset of the internet that we allowed to run amok. Blaming that on the internet is like looking at a street full of obnoxious advertising signs and saying that paint ruined this town; maybe that's a factor, but another one is a lack of signage laws.
The part of the internet that has destroyed and continues to destroy culture is the part that's built on pandering and profiteering, which, not coincidentally, is the same part of other industries that has destroyed beautiful and promising things in the past.
That said, the article makes a lot of good points. This one in particular:
> What happened to journalism in the 21st century is, in many ways, the story of the conflict between two utopian values: Information wants to be free and Writers should be paid.
There's no denying that technology played in role in the creation of this dilemma. It's not just about journalism, of course. It has to do with the fact that computers enable the essentially resource-free copying of information, and that's affected many industries (perhaps most notably the artistic ones like movies and music that the article discusses in other contexts). But just because technology brings us new problems doesn't mean we can't address those problems by updating our expectations and standards of behavior.
The worse thing about the Internet is that it enabled all the socially maladjusted & anti-establishment types to find each other since the cost of discoverability & distribution of information plummeted.
Before the internet we mostly talked to friends. With the internet we mostly talk to strangers.
We used to have conversations. Now we have fights.
I was very idealistic when I first came to social media. Very kind. Since then I have picked up some bad habits.
It's something I'm passing through. I see an end.
This is probably a familiar story.
> It's something I'm passing through. I see an end.
More than once I've said that when I retire I'm removing all computers from my life, and I'm not always kidding when I say it.
> The 20th century, apparently, was the last time we had great art, literature, or music.
this is totally absurd. I'm in middle age and the golden era of music for me is the late aughts, mostly bedroom recordings that never would have seen the light of day in the age of MTV.
I might agree with the thesis of the piece overall but it's hard to continue after such an obviously asinine statement
That first paragraph also seemed a bit over-the-top to me, but keep in mind it's immediately followed by:
> That’s the argument, at least, of W. David Marx...
A rare violation of Betteridge's law of headlines
Yes. Considering you cannot even say write/speak things without vindictive people using various methods like down voting or abusive language to stifle conversation and discussion and that has metastasized into things like "moderator" censorship and evil like shadow banning, hiding conversations ... not from being said, but controlling what adult humans are allowed to see ... all of which are directly and inherently treasonous for Americans to engage in due to their responsibility to uphold and defend the Constitution and the universal human right to free speech; then yes, it seems clear the internet, as the replacement of the public square AND books/newspapers, etc, as well as simply just universal freedom of expression and communication has made not just culture, but humanity worse off.
The "positivity ration" claims it takes 3:1 good things to overcome a bad thing. I would argue though that the nature of the evil that the internet facilitates is not just many bad things, but they also taint all the other things. We are in effect moving into a dynamic that is related to the pre-printing press era, when the ruling class had total control over information and the dissemination of it.
If you interrogate that aspect of history, you will clearly see the thread of that impulse throughout especially European history, even after the advent of the printing press. It was the same before the internet when things like state radio/TV stations and rules controlled what could be said and how. The internet briefly breached that containment from about '90 to '10s, until the speech control and tone policing or even the constant change and shift of language to dominate people.
It is naive, childish, and underdeveloped to simply take all the positives of the internet and ignore that there are many turds floating in that punch bowl.