Up with the walls?
Sep. 2nd, 2018 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteWhen I began putting things on the Internet over 30 years ago I made a promise with myself. I would not put anything online that was meant to be limited to specific people or a specific audience. I approached it like this: Either everyone in the world should see it, or no one. When I started a blog on LiveJournal 20 years ago I made the same deal. LiveJournal (now Dreamwidth) has a feature where you can make a post that is only readable by those on your friends list. I have not used this feature at all, and I never will.
There are a few things in the long tail of my internet presence, mostly from the 90’s when I was a teenager, that seem overly dramatic or petty to my middle aged eye. Also a few things that seem deranged and sexist, but have value in context. I could take them down if I wanted. They are on personally hosted websites, and I could press the big red "off' switch any time. And year by year I feel more convinced that I eventually will. Especially one website in particular:
20 years ago, as a joke, my friends and I formed an industrial plunderphonics band in a garage in the Lee Vining desert, and have been irregularly posting "albums" freely online. I'm proud of them and they were great fun to make and brilliant in places, but they are also loud, profane, absurd, and mostly terrible, and I have made sure to never mention them to anyone I work with. Of course, thanks to the insidious efficiency of Google, the band website comes up when you enter my name in their search engine. Cat's out of the bag. Technically all that crap is just a Google away from anyone who wants to learn about my awful creativity. As far as I know, no one I work with has. (Though how would I know?)
And what would happen if they did? What if they then found it offensive, and then splashed it all over social media, drawing the ire of a million anonymous trolls?
Well, I guess I would have to just shrug, and take it down. I certainly know better than to argue back.
I feel like it's inevitable. To tell you the truth, I feel like there is now an anonymous army of people connected to social media, who consider it their daily entertainment to be handed a clear-cut piece of offensive material and a source, so they can immolate the source, and it's only a matter of time before I get roasted alive.
(I’ve written about this before. The only way to win is not to play.)
But my point here is, I know why this is happening. And it is not a subversion of the internet itself, or an inevitable decline in society. It is a direct consequence of "growth at all costs" capitalism.
Let me put it bluntly: The Internet used to be the domain of the middle class.
You needed a middle-class income or university admission just to get on it. So, whatever you put there was visible to everyone -- in the middle class. And they were generally accepting and quietly liberal-minded. (Some of the very first stuff to drift out across the internet was hardcore erotic fan fiction, spicy enough to obliterate careers it if was linked to its authors today.) For years after that you at least needed to have a passing interest in your local library and a willingness to type. Then the barrier to entry was a monthly fee on top of your phone and cable service, and enough space in your house for a cheap computer.
That is all way, way over, as it should be. Today's barrier to entry is 25 bucks for a used cell phone or tablet, and proximity to a McDonald’s. It's a wonderful thing.
But it also means that the internet is now bursting with people who are extremely cost conscious. The working-class and poor are able to get online cheaply, and now they need services that are cheap - or free - to form their online experience. And how do you offer a service for free? You don't. You pick a different paying customer: Advertisers.
So you form a company around some service designed to extract attention and labor from the working-class and the poor, then sell it to advertisers. The more people you attract, the more money you make. Competition goes up, margins go down, and social media companies must grow or they get eaten. And the quietly liberal and egalitarian middle class is thoroughly buried and scattered amongst a horde of people connected to the internet who are being exploited: They get communication tools and entertainment "for free", and as part of the bargain they are drip-fed a constant, addictive stream of paranoia, shame, and rage. And rage needs targets.
Social media companies are not the internet, but they have a presence on it like a kaiju stomping through a city, and woe unto you if you're in the way.
So today, if I put anything online without a filter, I am now cannon fodder for the entities that feed and manipulate that horde of newcomers. When I put something online, it potentially reaches everyone, but most likely, it remains totally buried in the flood of other stuff until an algorithm plucks it out of the current and decides to show it to thousands, then millions, of people I have no interest in reaching. And they will feel upset, offended, and vengeful, because that's what algorithm is designed to evoke. Conflict sells ads. And, there's no better distraction to cover your skullduggery than dropping a turd in the public pool.
If explosive growth wasn't a necessity, we would not be here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what people mean when they use the term "late-stage capitalism."
So what are we all going to do? Same thing we do every time, Pinky. Try to put up some walls to keep the algorithms out. The days of erecting a webpage visible to the whole world are rapidly ending. Why would you do that? It's just free material for algorithms to use against you. Up with the filter barriers, up with the credentials and the tests.
And there's no shame in it ... only regret.
There are a few things in the long tail of my internet presence, mostly from the 90’s when I was a teenager, that seem overly dramatic or petty to my middle aged eye. Also a few things that seem deranged and sexist, but have value in context. I could take them down if I wanted. They are on personally hosted websites, and I could press the big red "off' switch any time. And year by year I feel more convinced that I eventually will. Especially one website in particular:
20 years ago, as a joke, my friends and I formed an industrial plunderphonics band in a garage in the Lee Vining desert, and have been irregularly posting "albums" freely online. I'm proud of them and they were great fun to make and brilliant in places, but they are also loud, profane, absurd, and mostly terrible, and I have made sure to never mention them to anyone I work with. Of course, thanks to the insidious efficiency of Google, the band website comes up when you enter my name in their search engine. Cat's out of the bag. Technically all that crap is just a Google away from anyone who wants to learn about my awful creativity. As far as I know, no one I work with has. (Though how would I know?)And what would happen if they did? What if they then found it offensive, and then splashed it all over social media, drawing the ire of a million anonymous trolls?
Well, I guess I would have to just shrug, and take it down. I certainly know better than to argue back.
I feel like it's inevitable. To tell you the truth, I feel like there is now an anonymous army of people connected to social media, who consider it their daily entertainment to be handed a clear-cut piece of offensive material and a source, so they can immolate the source, and it's only a matter of time before I get roasted alive.
(I’ve written about this before. The only way to win is not to play.)
But my point here is, I know why this is happening. And it is not a subversion of the internet itself, or an inevitable decline in society. It is a direct consequence of "growth at all costs" capitalism.
Let me put it bluntly: The Internet used to be the domain of the middle class.
You needed a middle-class income or university admission just to get on it. So, whatever you put there was visible to everyone -- in the middle class. And they were generally accepting and quietly liberal-minded. (Some of the very first stuff to drift out across the internet was hardcore erotic fan fiction, spicy enough to obliterate careers it if was linked to its authors today.) For years after that you at least needed to have a passing interest in your local library and a willingness to type. Then the barrier to entry was a monthly fee on top of your phone and cable service, and enough space in your house for a cheap computer.
That is all way, way over, as it should be. Today's barrier to entry is 25 bucks for a used cell phone or tablet, and proximity to a McDonald’s. It's a wonderful thing.
But it also means that the internet is now bursting with people who are extremely cost conscious. The working-class and poor are able to get online cheaply, and now they need services that are cheap - or free - to form their online experience. And how do you offer a service for free? You don't. You pick a different paying customer: Advertisers.
So you form a company around some service designed to extract attention and labor from the working-class and the poor, then sell it to advertisers. The more people you attract, the more money you make. Competition goes up, margins go down, and social media companies must grow or they get eaten. And the quietly liberal and egalitarian middle class is thoroughly buried and scattered amongst a horde of people connected to the internet who are being exploited: They get communication tools and entertainment "for free", and as part of the bargain they are drip-fed a constant, addictive stream of paranoia, shame, and rage. And rage needs targets.
Social media companies are not the internet, but they have a presence on it like a kaiju stomping through a city, and woe unto you if you're in the way.
So today, if I put anything online without a filter, I am now cannon fodder for the entities that feed and manipulate that horde of newcomers. When I put something online, it potentially reaches everyone, but most likely, it remains totally buried in the flood of other stuff until an algorithm plucks it out of the current and decides to show it to thousands, then millions, of people I have no interest in reaching. And they will feel upset, offended, and vengeful, because that's what algorithm is designed to evoke. Conflict sells ads. And, there's no better distraction to cover your skullduggery than dropping a turd in the public pool.If explosive growth wasn't a necessity, we would not be here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what people mean when they use the term "late-stage capitalism."
So what are we all going to do? Same thing we do every time, Pinky. Try to put up some walls to keep the algorithms out. The days of erecting a webpage visible to the whole world are rapidly ending. Why would you do that? It's just free material for algorithms to use against you. Up with the filter barriers, up with the credentials and the tests.
And there's no shame in it ... only regret.
