decay

The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.

A billionaire got mad, bought your favourite social media site and ran it into the ground. A different billionaire got mad, bought the magazine site you liked to read on your lunchbreak and shut it down completely. A third billionaire did what they do best, bought the app you use for networking and sold it off for parts.

I had just switched from Google Drive, and instead of making a new email address, I used an ancient Hotmail account that’s been tied to my Xbox account for over a decade. If you had told me I had photos in that email’s cloud storage, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d swear up and down I never used cloud storage under that email address. Yet, a day after I updated my subscription, an “On this day” memories alert popped up.

I clicked on it — and, oh my, was that a mistake. Microsoft OneDrive wanted me to remember one of the darkest times of my life by shoving photos of an abusive ex in my face — photos I had forgotten existed.

An up close an personal look into why we should be extremely careful when sharing about ourselves online, no matter how shiny an app or network might be.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Pitchfork exploded as the music industry changed, then was cut down to size by another wave of technological change. Was that it?

…Cal Newport argues that we need to recognize the harms that technology has on us and our minds, and that it might be time to more aggressively curate the tools we allow in our lives.

Scott Nesbitt

“Don’t even bother,” the upholsterer told me. I was on the phone, asking for a theoretical quote to reupholster a five-year-old or so midrange sofa, which cost more than $1,000 when new. That task, the upholsterer told me, would run me several times more than the couch was originally worth, and, owing to its construction, it was now worth nowhere near its sale price. The upholsterer proceeded to lecture me, in a helpful, passionate, and sometimes kindly manner, about how sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage, constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue, simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples.

A vague dread grips you. Why is everything a little bit different now? The smallest details are wrong. Your favorite posters have vanished from all platforms. There haven’t been any new memes for some time, only recycled iterations of old ones. Influencers are coordinated in their talking points like puppets being pulled by the same strings. Your favorite niche YouTuber has only recently been posting new content with any regularity. Is this a message? Is this what schizophrenia is like?

We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.

Yet what’s happening to the web is far more sinister than simple greed, but the destruction of the user-generated internet, where executives think they’ve found a way to replace human beings making cool things with generative monstrosities trained on datasets controlled and monetized by trillion-dollar firms.

Their ideal situation isn’t one where you visit distinct websites with content created by human beings, but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies, with results generated based on datasets that are increasingly poisoned by generative content built to fill space rather than be consumed by a customer.

For the umpteenth time, my son, with an Ikea stuffed ball he has had since infancy, is playing football in the living room. He is joined by one of his best friends, an equally football-obsessed 10-year-old who, before slide-tackling in what can only be described as a deliberate attempt to knock my son’s legs off, shouts: “Brexit means Brexit!” Confused, I pass it off as an example of tweenage precocity: which 10-year-old is happy to quote Theresa May while playing football?

Over the next year, however, I will hear the term used again and again when my son plays football at the local park. He turns 11 and is off to secondary school. There, too, the phrase seems to have become a “thing”. One evening, as he recounts the details of how he got a painful-looking graze on his shin, he quotes the attacking player’s prelude to clattering into him: “Brexit means Brexit!” I ask, finally, why people are saying this. Nonchalantly, as he practises “skills” with the same softball, he explains that the Brexit tackle “is a tackle that doesn’t get the ball, only takes out the player”. Urban Dictionary concurs, stating it is, among other things, “when somebody hits a massive slide tackle and usually sends them flying and it hurts them servely [sic]”.

These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring.

A friend of mine manages an event place in Scotland, and they’ve banned 50ths. Hen nights, stag dos, 40ths, no problem: but some combination of the manic nihilism that sweeps over people and the middle-aged mal-coordination that crept up on them leads to a wild amount of breakage. Whatever the party anxiety is, and however overwhelming it feels, it’s useful as a displacement emotion. The proximal moment of becoming 50 is, in the end, a lot less terrifying than the point it marks in your life, a whole half-century lived, probably somewhat less than that to come.