As I have recently come to expect from Sam Kriss, this is a witty and well-written piece. And some of the ideas that are contained herein are things I had been thinking about for a bit.
You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there online. All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world. ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.’ Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves; that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world. It’s a parcel of time you give over to the machine.
I've thought for a while that to the extent the web had any vitality to it was because it was inefficient and disorganized. No one had really taken charge, so the talking was done by people who felt like talking. The fact that it all seems to be running on a script now probably has pushed some people away, never to come back.
One might ask what we'll do when the Internet is no longer around to connect us. All I can say is I have severe doubts that that is what it's been doing.
1 comment:
I thought it was a pretty hopeful sign when I read that Zuckerberg's fortune had dropped by $70 billion in recent months. Jer told me this afternoon that NFTs have lost 85% of their value - meaning, I suppose, the people who bought them thinking to make a profit have just 15% of that money left. Internet companies that have a physical presence are also losing value - AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, weWork, and Zillow among others. Companies that stopped advertising on the internet never even noticed a change in customer spending - ie, PandG. This is all good.
I liked Kriss''s remark about targeted advertising being a lie:
'it’s now impossible to ignore that the promise propping up the entire networked economy—that user data could power a system of terrifyingly precise targeted advertising—was a lie. It simply does not work. ‘It sees that you bought a ticket to Budapest, so you get more tickets to Budapest…All they really know about you is your shopping.’
Among the many nasty things we've learned about smart phones and apps is that you're not the only one who can control them. How about the governments in Europe who can monitor how warm your place is so they can turn your thermostat down. What can be done to people's bank accounts is worse.
It's a great article in which he managed to hit all the high and low spots. Inefficient and disorganized was the internet before the Web and before total monetization and it was also a lot more fun back then. You're right to doubt that it connects us. I wish people would get bored enough to drop their smartphones but the addiction we've noted runs pretty deep. What's more likely to happen is that it collapses from some as yet unknown cause - like in E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops.
This guy makes short work of the situation as it is.
Post a Comment