On the Future of the Internet

or, we're all minotaurs renting space in an owned labyrinth; or, what if the 90s but every single person is also a product also being exploited?

i am iron man

As I’ve often said, the internet is full of freaks with loud opinions and all of them are wrong. Most recently, the freaks are debating whether Elon Musk owning twitter is good or bad. They either catastrophize this or paint it in heroic terms.

Both versions are embarrassing, though I’d say it is infinitely more embarrassing to be a member of a fandom¹ devoted to the richest man on the planet. Really, people elevating a union-busting, would-be monopolist, to the savior of humanity is just so cringe inducing that I might develop epilepsy.

Also, the idea that Musk cares about the First Amendment more than other tech billionaires is hilarious. The aforementioned Roland told me this was why he thinks it’s great. To Roland, and people like him (who now apparently include Glenn Greenwald, for some reason), wealth is virtue and when they wade into the Culture War, their public statements matter more than their actual actions relating to the topic at hand.

But the wealthiest person in the world owning the most culturally and politically influential social media platform is not great. It’s not great when billionaires like Jeff Bezos buy newspapers and I’d argue this is in the same vein but potentially much, much worse.

Of course, the idea that twitter has to be so culturally and politically important is not questioned by people who have made twitter their entire personality. Perhaps funniest are the people who tweeted so bravely that they will not abandon twitter and leave it to the right wing cranks. No, they will remain and it will be brave instead of humiliating somehow.

My opinion? Musk buying twitter will be a very good thing if it destroys twitter. If people on the left abandon twitter and leave it to conservatives, it will lose its cultural status the same way facebook has. If the left and right abandon it, even better.

Media consolidation is bad. It’s bad when most of the people who shape entertainment and politics are all on the same platform that is used almost exclusively by people of those classes. And this is the truth about twitter. Most people simply don’t have an account. Of those who do, most people never post.

But, of the small subset of people on twitter, almost all the tweets posted per day are produced by just 10% of users. These users are journalists, pundits, media personalities, politicians, and influencers. And so elite culture is brewed on twitter and disseminated to the rest of the country. This culture is largely insulated from regular people through optional tools given to users with specific credentials (the blue checkmark grants you magic).

My ideal next step for twitter is for it to collapse and dissolve. Ideally, this would lead to a fracturing of platforms. In truth, I’d prefer for the internet to return to the days of forums designed around specific subcultures. Of course, this is one of the least likely things to happen.

Because by all accounts, the next step of the internet is one of monetization, consolidation, bunk cryptotechnology, and increasingly sophisticated AI designed to spy on you and then deliver advertisements specially calibrated for you.

Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day is one of the best places to see the changing shape of the internet and its bleak future. His substack is often hilarious and also full of dumb stuff to make you laugh, but there’s a lot of insight into what web 3.0 will look like according to the people designing it.

I could link to dozens of his posts here, but the gist of it is that the new version of the internet is intended to be one where scams and currencies are indistinguishable, where users will be literal products in a marketplace, and where massive tech companies will own everything like feudal lords overseeing increasingly siloed plantations.

A good quote about the metaverse:

“Look, here’s the thing, the metaverse will probably happen at this point, but it won’t look like anything in Zuckerberg’s stupid Connect video. It will be weird and janky and people will use it to have sex with cartoon characters and hide video game achievements in parks and interact with their favorite influencers, who may or may not be real. The metaverse may have some VR flourishes, but more likely it will look like the way things look now — a mix of mobile internet technology, cameras, geodata, and streaming video. It will involve big events that simultaneously happen online and offline, which can be consumed live or as a data trail of clips and memes afterwards. The world will feel like a Gorillaz concert. Going outside will feel like flash mob at a Comic Con.”

Some of the worst ideas about web 3.0 already exist in companies like facebook, google, fortnite, and Roblox.

Really, the above video is worth looking at because it really is the model so many companies have planned for the future of the internet.

We’ve long understood that internet companies without a product use their users as the product, but the next step is to make social media basically a marketplace where people’s content—whether that’s their tweets, blog, videos, or whatever—is paid for by companies or bought by other users the same way they might subscribe to a youtube feed or whatever.

This may not seem like such a big deal or even a big transition from life on the internet now, but I find it profoundly bleak. If social media is meant to be a town hall or replicate cafe culture in old Europe, I find it just insanely depressing that the goal for the next version of this is for all human interaction to be monetized. That seems so obscenely destructive to the human animal that we may become alien to ourselves if this ever does take off.

That the internet has largely been designed by autistics in Silicon Valley who read Snow Crash in college and were so immune to satire and social and cultural critique that they thought they were just reading something awesome and so, twenty years later, they decided to make that dystopia real and call it utopic.

Fortunately, it seems that people are largely rejecting this stuff. But with enough capital behind it, I see this a bit unavoidable. And there is a lot of capital being invested to turn all human interaction into monetary transactions where the hosting platform gets a cut of every transaction.

Imagine if life was a casino where you made money for just standing still and other people lost money because enough people were watching you instead of them.

This all ties into an essay that will be coming on Friday or maybe next week about humiliation and shame and how life simply was better when it was more inconvenient, but I do think that as society becomes slipperier, it becomes more antihuman.

This may be controversial, but I think shame and humiliation and friction are good and possibly even necessary until we evolve into some different species. Of course, some kinds of shame and humiliation are not good and sustained versions of either are generally pretty bad.

One other element to the future of the internet is, I think, that this technology will become increasingly inseparable from our lives. I mean, we’re already there. And while Google Glass failed and most people will remain forever leery of implantable technologies, I do think the general philosophical thrust behind those ideas will be vindicated.

We don’t want the technology in our skin or even constantly in front of our eyes, but we do want it constantly at hand and probably wearable. I think we as humans like the tactile elements to technology, which is why smart watches picked up and are now owned by a lot of middle class on up people.

While Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel isn’t especially good, I do think he also captured another element to the future. That being that everyone of a certain class on up will have private AIs that function somewhere between friend, butler, and inescapable marketing trap. It’s very unlikely that we’ll have a Kurzweilian AI that functions as a god or demiurge, but I do think the many algorithms that already push and pull all of our lives in this or that direction will become increasingly woven into every day life of normal people in ways large and small. The parasocial relationships already turning corners of the internet into weird pits of despair will extend to our personal AIs, whether pocketsized or humanoid.

The real question is does it have to be this way?

Absolutely not! But I think for that to happen, we’d need some sort of mass disengagement. This is unlikely to happen spontaneously and so the next best solution is antitrust laws against the massive tech companies that would splinter this consolidation. It would also disincentivize spying on people.

Argentina has a version of Amazon that’s operated by the postal service, for example. We could nationalize things like twitter or facebook, which would remove the need of an algorithm attempting to manipulate your behavior to keep people constantly engaged because the government does not run on ad money. Of course, we’d need robust protection on such a platform to ensure law enforcement and other governmental entities don’t abuse the information acquired there.

Basically what I’m saying is the world doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not even that complicated to fix. There are millions of versions of the present where a handful of companies don’t own and operate all media, whether it’s books, TV, music, or film. We don’t need to live in a world where finance reigns and people are made into products to the extent that people dream of better ways to make individuals into products. Turning the human animal from a social being to a transactional being.

If cyberpunk got anything right about the future, it was that Capital is inescapable and Capitalism commodifies everything, including counter culture art movements.

But there are better worlds than this. And we can make them real.

1. If there’s one true evil in the world, it’s fandoms. I will explain this some day in a tedious way that will make me laugh a whole lot.