Gay Eminem on 9/11

yeah when the verge interviewed us about cohost and "the dream of web 1.0" one of the things I had to keep myself from going off about is how all of the seeming anarchy of the geocities era (which I was a teenager during) in comparison to web 2.0 was a combination of an aesthetic cultivated by startups and zero money whatsoever riding on anything, and you can't wish the second half of that back into being

The Californian Ideology and its Consequences

It ain't magic, old man, they're just computers.

it has been at least 20 years since the first time I said "jesus christ i am sick of our society treating computers like they somehow change everything." for most of that time I believed this was a deficiency of being old - of course a supreme court justice doesn't understand that clicking on a webpage is just an accelerated form of in-person hucksterism, they were all born when we thought tetraethyl lead was safe to have little of, as a treat

but every year we get a new batch of people who have Definitely Been Around Computers Most Of Their Life, and every year they've spent more of their life around them, and it becomes apparent that, no, there's just a certain kind of personality that cannot understand that computers just do Human Things, Fast

the Fast is important - mostly because it enables scams that wouldn't be worthwhile to execute by hand - but in every other sense that matters, nothing has changed

it's worth going back to before the Internet was "going to change everything;" i spent a while looking at printouts from Community Memory in the early 70s, when it was a BBS only accessible from physical terminals in various places in the Bay Area

the very first one, running on the SDS-940 that previously hosted the Mother Of All Demoes, given to Project One, which seems like the very first attempt at a "computers will change our communities" type thing. it was mostly the equivalent of a bulletin board that was located in several places, or classified ads in a newspaper but faster and spat from an ASR-33.

looking through the printouts, though, you can see the nascent beginnings of various cultural aspects that carry through to today. there was one person who became known under a pseudonym. the very first poster

i'm too young to have been on the right side of eternal september but getting into the internet in the mid/late 90s at a very young age and eventually falling in with a similarly harder-edged group of people still lets me feel a lot of this very deeply

I'm too young to have been present for these kinds of things but whenever I hear people [who know what they're talking about] talk about crypto, they will mention how it has long ideological roots into this kind of shit. Seemingly a long lineage of insufferable adult children who can't keep recognising the damage they cause.

fuckin' a, dude.

It's hard not to compare this to crypto dipshits now, or what's left of them. There's always going to be gullible idiots looking to prey on even more gullible idiots that love to sit around huffing their own farts on these fleeting attempts at futurist ideology, cosplaying as a smoking room full of oil barons but it's technohippies and crypto bros getting high in shitty apartments.

But even when they talk about this "limitless untapped potential", they're always thinking purely of how much money they can theoretically siphon out of this thing before it fizzles out, but they talk about it in Utopian terminology, like it's a rising tide to lift all boats, because they need to justify both to themselves and to each other that what they're doing isn't morally reprehensible, or that they haven't fallen for a huge stupid scam, or that the emperor's new threads are fresh to death, actually. But even their utopian angles have their roots in aestheticizing fascism, it's the same shit the Italian Futurists were doing with public architecture after WWII, and they weren't the first, either. At the end of the day, they're excited about a future that explicitly benefits them, and they know it's not going to come to fruition, but they're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into reality before they admit it.

Like @vogon said already, you can't get the money out of the internet once the money is in the internet. But I'm glad there are at least some places like this being maintained and thriving in a sustainable sense, where people can just be. No one's tracking my shit for ad money here, no one's trying to do anything nefarious, but also no one's acting like it's some big global paradigm shift that's gonna totally change everything, trust me bro. You know, grifter talk. It is so satisfying to have a little digital bar where we can just dick around and hang out.

The internet's always going to be going through waves and changes and eras, and the biggest tech companies are going to have to face the fact that they too are impermanent, and it sucks ass that we're in a weird global transitional period where the Powers That Be are panicking to find a way forward so they're just throwing their arms up and going fuck it man, just exploit and extract more and more til there's nothing left, then hope we'll figure something else out, or just dive out in golden parachutes after we've destroyed everything. So everything smaller than 'impossibly large' is owned by investment conglomerates, and real people we know and care about in real life get fucking laid off no matter how excellent their work is, and it hurts.

I've been through some horrifying, disgusting layoffs myself. I'm so sick and tired of watching my friends go through it over and over, bouncing from Ziff to Gawker to Vice to Newscorp to CBSi or whatever every single year. Occasionally some of them are lucky enough to have picked up enough of an organic following along the way to be able to get out and do their own thing, something you saw the writing on the wall about long before there was even an infrastructure for most folks to be able to do that. I feel like what you guys built in '07-'08 proved a viability that no one else was really ready to take the risk on. I remember creating a Patreon account to support Drew and Danny when they went out on their own. But now I'm left wondering how many people are going to be able to do this, and for how long. Obviously you've been able to go that route now as well and have been free to just Build A New Thing on your own terms, which whips ass. But I can't help but feel like there's gotta be a zenith of some kind where people just run out of money to support with. That Patreon charge every month is gettin' pretty big, and people in general have less and less money as time goes on lately, so I get nervous about this shit. I desperately wish I had any notion of a solution, and maybe it'll be a while til we need one, and maybe the problem will somehow more or less sort itself out eventually, as these details get shaken through the sieve, as tends to be the case with social tech-related stuff on a long enough timeline. But man, I dunno. It stresses me out.

Anyway, whatever happened to the internet is an actual tragedy and a seemingly endless fount of real harm has come from it as a result, but it's not too late to take that shit back. For the culture. For the protoculture. We do this, of course, by shitposting about Pen Pen TriIcelon.