Somewhere in the depths of prehistory...
In the 1980s the Internet was...what? Unenet? Obscure proto-wikis by and for specialists? Physicists on opposite coasts playing modified chess on a screen over the course of five weeks? Above all it was slow, with still primitive graphics. Computers were the future, we heard at school, but in many ways the future seemed to be taking its sweet time.
As the centuries and millennia turned, the order began to change for real. High-speed internet and workable video dawned. And so everything started to go online, including things that had seemed entirely grounded in the physical world. Leftwing newsweeklies. Avid fan clubs. Underfunded museums of bizarre stuff. And why not? The 'net was open frontier. There was plenty of room for freaks and individualists.
Well, there was and then there wasn't. The Internet, once optimized, had the potential to be history's greatest sales medium. Eventually that potential was realized and a handful of giant businesses had established control. New rules were enacted, leaving a lot less room for spontaneity and eccentricity. But the really sad part was that the weirdos weren't driven out. With very few exceptions they just went along, becoming enforcers when a suitable occasion―pandemic, say―came along.
Sam Kriss gets at a lot of this in a penetrating essay I found through Twitter.
These days, the mantra of the good progressive types is not question everything, but in this house we believe. Believe the science, believe the experts, believe in our institutions, believe women. Liberals no longer think ordinary people should get to interrogate the big questions for themselves: your Google search is not the same as my medical degree. They don’t think corporate media is inherently propagandistic: it’s our last bulwark against online disinformation. They don’t even oppose the totalizing effect of mass culture: they just want culture-commodities to carry the right kind of didactic messaging. Along the way, an entire language has vanished, a whole stock of concepts has fallen out of use. Who, in 2022, bothers railing against conformity? Who wants to talk about alienation? Who is trying to shock us with their bold critiques of consumerism?
The immediate occasion for Kriss's piece is the release of a new Matrix movie. Now as to the original, I found Fight Club to be a more interesting distillation of end-of-millennium anomie. And since David Cronenberg was an old hand at spinning obscure critical theories into monster movies, eXistenZ had a certain home field advantage. Yet The Matrix had an undeniable impact, popularizing postmodern philosophy and a kind of tech savvy Gnosticism. But the party may be over now that another kind constantly runs in the background.
2 comments:
Yeah, the earliest internet was usenet as I remember. You may recall it was in the mid-80s that Jer got his first computer, an apple 2c, and a few years after that we had a phone modem hookup. You're right it was all very slow and the only way to connect back then was through university mainframes to get anywhere. It was slow and expensive to connect at the time since the phone companies charged by the minute, but it was also pretty exciting too.
The big change, of course, came in 1995 when html allowed the graduation to the web. That was even more exciting until it was monetized and we all know how things have gone since then. You're right about the weirdos having become enforcers and that's a sadder thing than they know or imagine (since they don't do much of that).
The article by Sam Kriss is good enough that I've bookmarked it so I can read some of his other essays. There still are very good aspects to the internet. What's unfortunate is that there are far too many unthinking people who simply weren't ready for the web and particularly not the smartphone.
One can only sigh when looking at the fashionistas..
Maybe the next time a civilization arises its people will be better prepared.
To an extent the Usenet days may have been exciting because an online connection was something you had to seek out. It was an active experience, not a passive consumer good. I mean I'm sort of guessing because at that early date I wasn't online myself. But even 10-20 years later there was a residual wildness to it.
Cyberspace is not the same thing as space and virtual real estate isn't the same as actual real estate. Out in the real world if a new owner takes over a building or block and mismanages it they'll eventually move out, probably. You just have to wait. With the web things get taken over, and in a real sense that space doesn't exist anymore.
Damaged in general seems to only update on rare occasions. Good quality, though. And Kriss seems specially good. I enjoyed his piece on Homer's Odyssey. You're right that if people are going to fight and show off their smarts on the net they should learns how to think first. But alas, tis not to be. And the smartphone is just a bad idea, it seems like.
Fashonistas are...well, what can you say.
Been reading John Michael Greer on how elites see ever-growing material gain and utter collapse as the only options. Seems a propos.
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