I firmly thought the role of Twitter during the Arab Springs were the tipping point. For sure, I thought, now that the people can communicate with the people, we will finally come to peace.
Wild to think that such a hopeful moment would not only fail to lead to any lasting increase in freedom in Middle East, but instead devolve into a string of decade-long civil wars triggering refugee crises that the European right would leverage to sweep into power.
If you replace "the internet" with "drugs" you've basically explained how the 50s turned into the 60 turned into the 70s. (Middle-class, young, white) people really expected LSD to turn everything into a utopia.
I mean, the internet is very heavily gatekept rn, so?
I'd rather blame powerful with means and motive to make things shitty rather than just ho "oh, silly humans" about it.
Blaming yourself is what abusers want most
To be fair, the printing press, the telegraph, and every other step forward in information transmission has gotten the same "now, easier communication will bring about world peace" hype.
(Its darker twin is the equally-frequent "this new awful weapon will bring peace by making conflict unthinkable")
In 2021 we thought maybe panel 3 still had a chance, that the whole qanon/maga/neo-fascism thing was just a covid fever dream. Alas, the internet turned out to unequivocally be the enabler. The worst intentioned are more convinced of their righteousness than ever.
The lower left panel is painfully accurate except that it wasn't new to the 90s. There was a ton of "decentralized networks automatically save the world" stuff being preached in the 80s, even the 70s; big overlap between techie-libertarianism and Whole Earth Catalog-style counterculture.
What was new to the 90s IMO was just that a whole lot more people were suddenly talking & thinking about computers a lot in general, so that stuff seemed less fringe. You no longer had to know who John Perry Barlow was to have a received idea like that.
Anyway, this is all not to nitpick the cartoon, I'm just venting about an interesting but infuriating part of culture that I remember way too vividly. I was one of those guys for a while too.
Funny, I first posted this in 2021 and it kinda landed with a thud. Reposting it now and it seems to be hitting. Post-covid internet has really been a downhiller coaster.
In the early 2010s I was in a cohousing situation with some friends and we used to have regular debates about whether the net positive impact of the Internet was 100% or only 95%. About a year later GamerGate happened. I think that was the turning point.
Ezra Klein said something about this once that really hit for me. In short, he said he knows a lot of tech people and thinks they really care about journalism, the arts, etc. But, when push comes to shove, they care more about being the one who generates the most revenue.
The sad part is that I was in the Silicon Valley in the 00's, and everyone wanted to build open platforms that make things better. Even Google was embracing open standards and interoperability.
I first noticed things getting less functional when all of our happy local licences for industrial equipment (non destructive testing software in this case) suddenly all moved to cloud based subscriptions all at once. Circa 2018 or so. Then COVID, Oye...
I think covid was the cover for a lot of changes. In some cases this was probably good, but it also allowed for longterm negative trends to be accelerated
I think a lot of that is driven by the fact that social media sites are so network-effect-driven that being anything but the top couple sites in your niche makes you completely irrelevant.
There are a lot of people who don't go in trying to get the most users, but everyone eventually figures out that "getting the most users" and "having any community at all" are different names for the same concept.
I think pre-covid, some people still clung to the belief that it wouls somehow sort itself out, and that atvworst we were just seeing "awkward growing pains" that wpuld lead us to a brighter future of an enlightened decentralized internet community. Those poor naive bastarda.
It's the third panel.
Fashion trends are so fast now, everyone lost track.
Grunge, sure, whatever, nevermind.
Tamagotchis (spelling?) were a thing in the 80s.
So back to how that 3rd panel hurts like getting hairspray in your eyes. Because it does. More each year.
There's some nostalgia! I read Scott's work for a college course I took at UC Davis on graphic novels, then interviewed Zach for that same class. (Thanks again Zach!)
Guilty. In the 90's I showed the internet to my elderly aunt in Germany who grew up under the Nazi's. She basically said "So any dumbf#$ck can post to the world now?" Mein Gott!
Are you considering an update? If just a historical reference, then a link to the context would help, so we could see what was before and after.
"Now" is a funny thing. Physics textbook: "now" like forever. Novel: virtual pointer. AI: training date. Us: Continuous function linking past to future.
Maybe if we had kept the internet out of our pockets, it could have remained awesome. Back when the internet was something you accessed from an office, library, or gaming PC, there were a lot less idiots and people used the word "netiquette."
also the argument the minute the gatekeepers got their own websites that hey would find a way to gatekeep kowledge on the internet.
People: That wasn't supposed to happen!
Me: Oh sorry when you said everyone you didn't mean everyone?
Comments
M'lord: *encloses it*
Me: 😐
M'lord: *provides me universal access to tend his land*
So naive.
...ugh.
https://bsky.app/profile/logatex.bsky.social/post/3liheyc4fyk2u
I'd rather blame powerful with means and motive to make things shitty rather than just ho "oh, silly humans" about it.
Blaming yourself is what abusers want most
(Its darker twin is the equally-frequent "this new awful weapon will bring peace by making conflict unthinkable")
... But seriously, I miss the early Internet, before people realised "engagement" was where all the money was.
Look at what's happening with pot.
A) Trying to build a platform that makes things better
B) Winning the battle for the largest network, and keeping all traffic on that network
Guess which gets you higher status at a conference?
Now the assholes have won.
Fashion trends are so fast now, everyone lost track.
Grunge, sure, whatever, nevermind.
Tamagotchis (spelling?) were a thing in the 80s.
So back to how that 3rd panel hurts like getting hairspray in your eyes. Because it does. More each year.
And before, also.
Hideo Kojima tried to warn us, but we weren't ready, we couldn't hear him.
"Now" is a funny thing. Physics textbook: "now" like forever. Novel: virtual pointer. AI: training date. Us: Continuous function linking past to future.
People: That wasn't supposed to happen!
Me: Oh sorry when you said everyone you didn't mean everyone?
He was a trans-hybrid just like Neo.
He wanted to get laid at Zion just as badly as he did .
Unfortunately, he was confused about what human sex actually was.
I do not blame him. All of that sexual tension between him and Morpheus was weird.