Is the Internet Dying?

Posts and videos like this one are quite common now.

https://youtu.be/3dstGVhEshU?si=ftytETA4smpZ55sh

Beneath it this morning, I wrote,

Data is currency, and only the rich have vaults. The more data you have, the better you can target the user, predict and manipulate their behaviour. But you can't collect data at scale without already being big; so indie creators, small platforms or emergent voices can't compete. Impressions are rationed, not distributed by value but on metrics that favour those already embedded into the system. Brand recognition, click-through history, budget... these things assure that if you're not able to pay for more, or optimised for visibility, you're preset to be ignored, discarded and not allowed at the table.

This inevitably leads to content that is designed to appeal to the lowest, least-offensive common denominator, driven by an algorithm that culls out everything except precisely this. Still, this doesn't describe the "internet"... but the tools that have been built so far that use the internet to drive unimaginative people into cattle runs precisely as they'll allow. The "internet," however, isn't to blame. The dullness of the average person, who still possesses a disposable income, is simply being given precedence over those capable of seeing what's happening. This comment will be ignored, and not receive likes, because it's NOT familiar, simple, emotionally easy or outrage-inducing. It's too complex, and therefore has no value on the internet that has been built, that allows a comment like this but won't sustain or support it.

I'd like to unpack that, because I have a platform here, on a blog that suffers from the precise same issue.

This shouldn't come as news to anyone who isn't self-aware, but since the messaging is never, "Are the familiar platforms on the internet dying?"... because this isn't the click-baity title I stole for this post... it's worth taking a moment and clarifying the following:

The internet is a decentralized communication protocol — a neutral infrastructure designed to connect devices, people, and ideas across distance, without requiring permission from any central authority. It is, at its root, a system of open standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS and others. These allow anyone, anywhere, to publish, to share, to access, and to build.

Yet although the internet was designed to be open, those companies that control the physical infrastructure, its discovery mechanisms, and its distribution platforms are free to decide what can be seen: not based on public or personal need, but on profitability.  Those gatekeepers throttle traffic, they impose data caps, they charge premiums for speed, they create artificial scarcity and they control what platforms can be found through shortcuts not related to actually typing out a site's url.

As I say, for anyone paying attention, this is dead obvious. Yet a video like the one above says nothing about this. The framing of the above video, and others like it, is the usual: the internet as a decaying cultural and technological entity, collapsing due to algorithmic cycling. The conspiratorial tone makes good content, while platform "artificiality" is suitably disturbing for the masses. For those who perceive the present culture as their "identity" — divorced, obviously from the culture of their immediate experience — this collapse is deeply unsettling. What will they do when they get up in the morning and the "internet" as they know it is gone?

I hope they remember how to continue eating food and using the speech-ear language model that's survived for thousands of years.

Yet this is not one of those discussions about how people should get sign off and develop a sense of self away from their computer.  This is simply an attempt to cut away the fat.

In reality, speaking as someone who was not raised with it, the internet has largely been... let me see, what are the words the girl used:

"If you search for anything online now, you just become buried and bombarded with garbage. Honestly, recycled blog posts, SEO bait, faceless robotic Youtube videos."

Yes exactly.  That would be an accurate description of most platforms post-2005.  Lest people forget, this video, when it dropped, was the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen... though, obviously, it does not remotely compare with television or film.  It's cheap, a lot of the moves are clumsy (though granted they rehearsed)... and it's not stage-quality work in a first-class theatre.  But sure, for the internet, it was unexpected.  But no one rushed forward to give them a movie deal or anything.  They're not the Beatles.  Hell, they're not even Lizzo.

This, though, has been the defining element of the internet since its inception.  The internet is a landfill of mediocrity, available in staggering abundance because it's cheap to make and cheap to see.  It is not a revolution in great thought (all of which takes place elsewhere) or a renaissance of creativity. The really "good" stuff — such as it is, though I'm much harder to impress than I was when I was this young woman's age — is still done with lots of money on film, in studios and through old fashioned printing.  The internet is the world of low expectations... which makes it all the more interesting when we're told to worry because the expectations lately have supposedly gotten lower.  Well, you get what you pay for, yes?

I don't know precisely what else there might be to say.  We're not going through the "bronze age" of the internet, nor the "silver age" either... because there never has yet been a golden age.  We're in the stone age of the internet, and we have been since it's inception somewhere in the far off 60s.  Those decrying the "end" of the internet are merely those with so little life experience, and with such short lives, that they can barely comprehend something beyond the narrow, flat dimensionality of their worlds.

Yesterday, I stumbled across this video.  Oh how I laughed.