honestly even though it's increasingly becoming clear that Content and the internet at large simply isn't profitable (at least not in a way that's remotely palatable to VC investors and the like), it's still crazy to think of All This, these websites and the whole truly world-spanning net culture that have been such an enormous part of our lives for the last 15 years, as potentially being just a blip in the historical record - just a gigantic money sink for cheap post-recession credit blasted into the economy by quantitative easing, or whatever. obviously the internet as a general concept isn't going anywhere, but it's like, what happens now, really?
like, social media is bad, don't get me wrong, but i don't necessarily relish the thought of what might, or might not, replace it. as grim as it's been, i think a lot of real good came of all this too. for my part at least, if it weren't for the apparatus of globalized internet culture, frictionless content sharing and video streaming, i wouldn't have discovered a fraction of the art, literature, political reading, theory and technical knowledge that have immensely enriched my life and expanded my ability since those things came into existence; and if it weren't for queer social media and the people i met through it, i don't think i would have continued to exist up to this point, period.
there is a certain frictionlessness to socializing in the modern net - the way you can easily enter and be a part of spaces and make friends without committing to one online "community" or other - some people see this as inherently a bad thing, but i think there is real merit here, not just alienation. i feel that frictionlessness made a lot of genuinely good and even necessary things possible for marginal people that weren't before, that there was a genuine social innovation in the transition from forums with their boards and topics to social media with its profiles, feeds, and curation, an innovation that truly did bring people a certain freedom to actualize themselves outside the confines of committing to one particular social space or another, and giving people room to foster healthier relationships with the social spaces they did engage. obviously that hasn't solved all our problems by a long shot, but whatever comes next, i hope there will continue to be room for a kind of sociality like that, one less beholden to the panopticon of internet strangers and the ravages of capital.
