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Notes -
The Closure of the Internet
I recently started reading Arctotherium’s almost encyclopedic article titled The Closure of the Internet documenting the change starting in the mid-2010s from the internet being a free-speech zone to its current state as a censored environment. I only started reading the article since it is so truly extensive in its documentation, and then I skimmed through and read the highlights of the main article and some of the footnotes.
I was having 2 conflicting reactions: (1) this is not news – as anyone here who remembers the departure of this forum from Reddit or slatestarcodex can attest and (2) this is likely “the most important social phenomenon of the late 2010s” (Arctotherium's words) since it changed the dynamic so completely of the place where most people spend most of their free time and I, and most others, have never thought of it that way. In fact, many young people aren't even aware that it happened.
Why is it both not news and unknown? I think the article contains the answer to this question, without seeming to understand its importance - it doesn't have a name:
So I propose that we all start calling it the name Arctotherium used: the closure of the internet.
As a second note, I want to push back on the “Did it Work?” section in the article, which argues that the closure of the internet did not work since it failed at its goal of preserving confidence in traditional institutions. The section is true, as far it goes, but it leaves out that the closure of the internet was effective (at least in my view) on its object-level issues. I would argue there is more immigration and there was more compliance during COVID than there would be if discussion of these issues had remained open, but after spending their political capital on, for example, COVID, they have lost the public trust they need to fight, for example, measles.
I feel like the "mid-2010s" is too late, by 2010 the internet was already mostly closed, at least compared to what it had been in the late 90s and early 00s.
I was talking about this in a reply to @SneedNibba last week and now I think I may just have to suck it up and rewrite my lost post on "Toxic Femineity and Cyberpunk".
I think we're using different definitions of "closed". Giant platforms gobbling up small web forums is unaesthetic, but survivable as long as they have the principles that pre-Pao Reddit had. Each subreddit really was its own community, and plenty of unique cultures survived and thrived there.
In contrast, the total abandonment of impartiality on every service from social media websites to ISPs was closure. The physical world's power structure got together and decided that the internet had to die. This was hardly cheap - the internet of 2012 was a major engine of American soft power, and was directly responsible for making Western liberalism aspirational in the eyes of countless second- and third-worlders - but it was the point at which the inevitability of cyberpunk freedom broke, and it became clear that, if information is to be free, it will be because agentic 'great men' made it so by fighting against the forces that would prevent it from being so.
Pre-Pao Reddit was not noticeably less censored than dial-up era Compuserve or AOL, and nobody thought they were the open internet (except in so far as people used them to access the open internet). The internet pioneers definitely thought that "open internet" meant "interpret censorship as damage and route around it", not "the corporate censor is in a generous mood today".
If you are talking about Musk buying Twitter, he isn't trying to open up the internet - the best case is that he is trying to ensure more ideological diversity in the range of curated walled gardens that exist. (The worst case is that he was being serious when he said that he wanted X to be a tool of totalitarian domination modelled on WeChat). X plays less well with the open internet than Dorsey's Twitter did - particularly in terms of suppressing tweets with links.
"Noticeably" is doing ALL the work here, and it's still not quite true. The noticing begin in August 2014 (with the Gamergate comment graveyards) and Pao wasn't appointed until November.
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