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An Ode To The Opinionated Committee Of Miserable Scolds And Ankle-Biters
A short treatise on individual vs. communal activities
Another year has passed, and I guess I'm getting all reflective. This doesn't happen so often anymore, but over the years we spent some time debating "old-Internet vs current-year-Internet". Typically when people talk about it, they bring up how "wild west" it used to be, free from shadowbanning, algorithmic manipulation, and cancel culture, and while it sure would be nice to again be free from Big-Tech shenanigans, recently I started feeling like that analysis is missing a piece. New- vs Old-Internet isn't just about deplatforming and smartphone-driven Eternal September, the advent of social media was a revolutionary change to the structure of the Internet itself. All of a sudden you, yes you, had some chance of becoming an Influencer, possessing the adoration of thousands, and would no longer be just another dude, forced to mingle with the plebeians on some shitty phpBB forum.
As an example of the shift, after the advent of social media, but before The Awokening was in full swing, it seemed like everbody and their dog had to have an "animated avatar ranting about feminism" Youtube channel, and later when they implemented livestreams and superchats, you could see everybody move to unstructured 4-hour streams. I suppose chasing trends is only natural, but at some point things started getting weird... or rather, depressingly ordinary. Suddenly content creators started talking about "branding", A/B testing their thumbnails, and probably deploying scores of other marketing tricks that I'm not even aware of. They have to churn out content at a regular and constant pace, because if you don't. you fall off and people will forget you exist. All the cool kids have spreadsheets now, it's probably less surprising that Kulak, in his quest to be a full-time writer is making extensive use of them, but apparently you can't even do prostitution without them these days.
A while back @DaseindustriesLtd asked if this place feels like home to others, my answer was horribly trite in retrospect, but it tried to get at the ability to speak my mind here, and the desolation of once dynamic and generative communities brought by the semi-recent cultural changes. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like there's something deeper about why this place feels more like "home". A long time ago, back when the crash of 2008 was still fresh in people's minds, I read Modern Political Economics by Yannis Varoufakis, the ex- finance minister of Greece. The final chapter, devoted to solutions to the crisis, had this little paragraph which, for some reason or another, has engraved itself in my brain:
Since this is a post-crash book, Varoufakis was trying to put forward some synthesis of all the economic memes floating around, from libertarianism to communism, trying to balance out planning vs. spontaneity, and individual freedom vs. collective interests. Setting the economics aside, there's something about this metaphor that I find quite fitting here. Ironically it was Dase himself who called us an "opinionated committee" that he doesn't want to justify his writing to, and prefers to write about important issues directly - a clear turn towards becoming a composer free to write whatever music he likes, and sink or swim on his own merit. While there's something to be said about not being so opinionated and set in our way, I'm more and more appreciative of being a part of an amorphous committee blob. I really enjoy that no one has any money to make, clout to chase, or anything to prove here, at least beyond the standard internet forum dick-waving. What's more the problem with the composer route is that you have to compose, compose, compose! As I mentioned above, in the world of Substack, Twitter or Youtube, it's churn or die. Meanwhile, back "home", I can pick up my instrument and join in when I have time and when the fancy strikes me, and when I get tired I can put it back down, confident that the music will still be there when I come back. My old libertarian self would probably spit on me, but there's something to be said about these sort of communal activities, where one does not have to fret about their relative status, or line going up.
I suppose all this is a long-winded and disjointed way to thank you all for keeping the lights on, and the music playing. For all the discontents dissing us, I think this is one of the very few places where the Dead Internet Theory, in it's AI or Human-NPC form, does not hold. Happy New Year to y'all!
No online communities feel like home to me anymore, and it's because they feel "Public" and "Official", and not like private spaces at all. I think this is because the separation is gone, anything I wrote on here could be traced back to me, and it could also be interpreted badly by people from outside of the community. A private space doesn't work like that.
Most "new" spaces which can be created are created inside of other spaces, and these spaces are hostile in a sense, or at least inhuman (part of 'the system' which has to enforce human behaviour in a top-down manner). So when you make a new sub-reddit you're still on Reddit, so the Subreddit is not yours. And if you make a new Discord server, you're still bound by Discords rules, so the Discord server is not yours. With old forums, you could make your own, since you just copied the code. You could own your own website in the past, and you can't anymore unless you make your own infrastructure.
Also, in the past, nothing I did in a community mattered outside of the community. It's borderline insane that this practice stopped. Imagine if your local shopping center had to refuse you entry because of an email you sent, and that it would be accused of enabling whatever behaviour you did in your own personal life otherwise. That's basically what we're starting to do with the internet.
Another thing which has changed is something I hinted at earlier: We're not expected to be human anymore. I think this is because we have lost the benefit of doubt. Any behaviour which is ambiguous is a "red flag", and you may be punished for it. So you have to internalize what you would look like from outside, and constantly monitor yourself, so that you are not misunderstood (this is rather harmful to our individuality, since it punishes worldviews and attitudes which diverge from the norm). Furthermore, mistakes are not really forgivable anymore. Things like racism, sexism and so on used to be negative traits, but nothing more than that. You could get away with having negative traits, they were just a tiny part of who you were and what mattered was your overall character. Finally, in order to really learn how things can be misunderstood, you have to learn about everything ugly in the world. You're forced to learn that you can't talk about the CP (combat power) of your Pokemon Go Pokemon without making the context clear, and you're forced to learn why. After all, innocence is punished (as it leads to be behaviour which can be misunderstood)
Sorry for hijacking your comment in order to vent, but I feel like I've understood some of the social changes quite well, and I hope that it makes the dynamics clearer for you (I'm adding these, I think the things you mentioned are factors as well). Happy new year!
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