Internet 2.Shit

Is the Internet Becoming Unusable?

I remember the birth of the internet. It was originally made out of wood and leather. It had cogs that turned, bellows that pumped and hot steam that blew out in unexpected places. I had to go to the library to use it and then it turned up in study rooms at the University. It was useful and mostly came in the form of words. You might get a photograph once in a while, but it took so long and revealed itself line by line.

Every week it speeded up a little and then it speeded up a little. Suddenly, everything became free. Music could be downloaded; newspapers read; videos watched. It ate television whole. It invented new careers. Suddenly there was a democratic opening of access. Anyone could write their ideas down and get them out there. A lot of those ideas weren’t very good and were very badly written, but some of them were and the lack of control meant that there was the possibility of seeing a broad swathe of opinion. The Overton Window became the Overton French Windows, the Overton Panopticon. We got unfiltered opinion and learned why filters might not be a bad thing. Or subeditors for that matter.

A lot of people were willing to take things which didn’t belong to them and many people who had previously been paid for their work, no longer were. Newspapers and magazines lost customers and advertisers and many closed their presses for ever, either going on line, or just giving up the ghost entirely.

At this stage, social media in the form of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube all came into play. And there was this brief moment, this interregnum, during which the companies were being valued very highly but it was unclear how exactly they were going to make any money. So far, the internet had been good of stripping value from writers, artists, editors, musicians, photographers, but very bad at what was being called monetizing. All of these conversations were played out with much concentration focused on the top tier - in other words how were shareholders of legacy media going to suffer? And when would shareholders of social media begin to see some dosh?

Those lodged in the tower of song or at the coalface of creative endeavour were largely ignored. As Gillian Welch in “Everything is Free Now” sings:

“Everything is free now, that's what they say

Everything I ever done, gonna give it away

Someone hit the big score, they figured it out

That we're gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn't pay.”

Welch prophetically sees the future income stream of musicians: “I can get a tip jar,” she sings, or a day job: “Never minded working hard, it’s who I’m working for.” The song is sweet and melancholic and redefines the relationship between the artist and the audience with the sweetest sounding “fuck you” ever committed to tape:

“Every day I wake up, hummin' a song

But I don't need to run around, I just stay at home

And sing a little love song, my lover, myself

If there's something that you wanna hear, you can sing it yourself.”

Music is now something musicians will create for themselves. The people who figured out the essential truth (artists gonna art) have made the “Big Score” but will have none of the riches that the artist will have waking up in the morning, humming a song.

I have to add that I heard this song via an illegal torrent. And now it’s on my Spotify playlist for which Welch will be paid $0.003 per listen. Sometimes I put it on repeat all night while I sleep.

So far, so what we already know. There was a wild west period. Napster moved in. 4Chan/7Chan made free speech synonymous with racism. PornHub delivered hardcore porn to our phones which showed that Americans apparently kink about incest more than previously expected, and NSFW led to Jeremy Tobin jerking off during a work zoom call.

And now the monetizing took over. As Gillian sang: “They figured it out.”

The business model looks something like this:

Invent a service.

Add a huge monkey banging on a kettle drum.

Version with huge monkey banging on kettle drum: free.

Version without monkey $15 a month or $98 a year.

The free version of the internet is just monkeys banging kettle drums, and though you might be tempted to say that sounds like fun, it really fucking isn’t.

X - (what’s the point in calling it Twitter now? It’s X) is so hateful that I just got off it. Facebook is a messaging service tied to one of those free advertising weeklies you used to get stuffed through your mail box. It has as much intellectual value as a handout from Lidl. YouTube is unwatchable. If it isn’t the endless adverts insisting that I’m fat and stupid and can improve my life a million different ways by listening to one over confident individual who insists on addressing me like he knows me and is unimpressed, who speaks emphatically and is in dire need of a terminal disease, then it’s the fact that the algorithm means that because I once glanced at the back cover of a book by Jordan Peterson, apparently that’s who I want to hear from for the rest of my stupid male life. A man whose entire brain is made out of toenail.

Even the Streaming services have decided to become more like old TV used to be except without bothering to place their commercial breaks at the ends of sentences, or words. It’ll get to the point that when you add up all your subscriptions and fees, you’re paying more than you ever paid for your television and newspapers and radio combined, but now that money is not going to the creators, writers and artists, it’s just going to the Bros, who are spending it on popularizing fascism around the world or new skin cloning and blood rinsing, designed to make them live forever like the ghouls they so obviously are.

And this is all before we factor in AI which is going to be happening right now. Is happening now. This could easily have been written by AI. You don’t know. I’m not using any metaphysical juice to create this. It’s just the language that I’ve learned to organise in a way that expresses my essentially unoriginal thoughts. AI can look at my writing - of which there is over a decade’s worth available on the internet - and it can guess what the next word will scrape biscuit ladder elephant’s tongue fruit. Yeah. Fuck you AI.

So, what’s the answer?

Dune - the novel by Frank Herbert - saw a Butlerian War waged against the thinking machines, as did James Cameron in the Terminator series and The Matrix and all the rest. This is the fantasy that pretends to be the nightmare. We’d like a war like this because then we get to hang out in craters and shoot massive guns and clutch our bleeding sides and gasp “I’m hit” and not have to go to work or pick up the kids or boring shit like that.

But that’s not what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen is the vile capitalists who had such fun during the transatlantic slave trade are going to use AI to ravage the digital commons and steal our happiness and force us to pay money to get it back. They will employ the cleverest people in the world to work out how to take from you and then keep it.

What do we do? No Butlerian Jihad. But surely something?

We could just turn off our phones. Delete our accounts. We’re coming to that stage. If you go to the airport and go to the VIP lounge, they don’t have more stuff, they actually have less. Less people, less noise, less shops. Abundance isn’t a value in itself. How about a no-shit Sherlock approach? If x is making you unhappy, don’t do x, or X for that matter.

Some might say this is a retreat. But their use of a military metaphor is telling. When did I start fighting a war, and for whom?

“Every day I wake up, hummin' a song

But I don't need to run around, I just stay at home

And sing a little love song, my lover, myself

If there's something that you wanna hear, you can sing it yourself.”