when i was still using tiktok, i remember this little saga of this all-woman punk rock band that was like immediately clocked as an industry plant. i'm talking like frame perfect - because if you were already into punk music or were familiar with the scene at all you could see right through the shallow lyrics and uninteresting composition of the song (not to say the girls in the band were entirely untalented, of course).

if i had to classify it in a particular way, it was trying to be provocative in a tongue-in-cheek sort of "we're girls saying dirty things, ooh we're sooo bad" kind of way that came off as being silly. generally, if i listen to an all-woman punk rock band i expect it to come off as more outwardly political and for lack of a better word - angry.

being able to detect industry plants in any subculture i think is a wildly important skill to have, especially if your particular subculture involves some kind of political ideology that is counter to whatever the ruling ideology is. i feel like generally it's easier to produce industry plants in the arts but then in turn it's also easier to spot them because i feel people who enjoy art are typically able to tell what is genuine expression and what is made for profit.

there is culture out there! and there are people who create spaces and care for that culture (places kinda like here!!). and there are people who see these industry plants, kill them in cold blood, and - in our modern day with the type of mindset gen z has - parade their corpses around.

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TBH, I'm hoping for the complete collapse of the media industry, including book publishing. Our culture has been monopolized by a few multinational megacorporations and government antitrust enforcement agencies like the FTC aren't fit for purpose. Nor is there political will to make them fit for purpose.

I dunno about that. The recent successes of WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and the UAW give me a little hope. There have been some small victories in unionizing the tech industry, though not unalloyed. For example, Grindr tried to unionize, and management got heavy-handed with their union-busting tactics.

What I'd like to see is the unionization of the big 4 consulting firms. They do a lot of software development without getting a lot of public attention relative to Silicon Valley. For example, if you've had to use a government website for anything, chances are it was built by firms like Deloitte or Accenture. They exploit the hell out of their employees by paying them a fixed salary while billing for every hour they work.

That's a classic from Andrew Tannenbaum, who created MINIX and taught Linus Torvalds (who created Linux).

Thanks.

This is why we need the Streisand Effect, but that only happens when a substantial portion of the public is aware that an attempt at censorship is happening. For example, the attempt by Twitter to bury the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop was so blatant that they played right into the right's hands and made whatever was on this asshole's laptop as big a deal as Hillary Clinton's emails.

Whereas this op-ed you mentioned probably wasn't even a blip on anybody's radar. You and I grew up hearing that the internet never forgets, but that's only true if everything is archived and the archive is accessible to everybody. Corporate censorship and adherence to unreasonable copyright restrictions (my first novel should be in the public domain now, for example; it's been ten fuckin' years since it was published) makes it harder to preserve information through wide dissemination.

And it tends to smell like Astroturf. What people using such tactics don't seem to understand is that once people start seeing payoffs everywhere they look, and wondering who they can trust when everybody looks like a crook, the smart ones stop trusting at all.

Unfortunately, knowing how I used to think doesn't stop me from wondering what the hell I had been smoking at the time. Decisions that seem sensible in the moment don't always withstand the scrutiny of hindsight. This is why I proposed to my wife twice. The first time, since we were in bed, was a post-coital and hormonally-driven impulse.

The second time, I wasn't all purry from having just gotten laid and was thus thinking straight and I still wanted to do it. So I proposed again.

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I figured that was just bro science. More specifically, bro psychology or "bropsyche".

I may well be ideologically blinded. There's a reason my sig on your forum says "caveat lector". It means "let the reader beware". Hopefully it isn't an authoritarian ideology that's clouding my vision.

It's currently 70 years after the author's death. If you want to know why our culture seems so thoroughly impoverished, the state of the public domain is a good place to start. Copyright in the US used to be 28 years at most. You registered for one fourteen-year copyright, and could renew your copyright once. After that, your work entered the public domain to enrich the common cultural pool from which you drew to create your own work in the first place. It was a compromise designed to encourage people to publish their creative works and ideas instead of sitting on them.

That wasn't good enough for some corporations, though, particularly Disney, since that meant that shit like the Disney Memorial Orgy could be made and distributed with impunity. Disney didn't want their trademarks becoming common property. The suits certainly didn't want depictions of a wholesome mascot like Mickey Mouse getting fucked by Minnie Mouse wearing a strapon while buttfucking Donald Duck and snorting coke off of Snow White's heart-shaped ass.

The thing about politicians, at least in a country that pretends to democracy, is that we can take some comfort in blaming ourselves. "They might be assholes, but they're our assholes. We fucking elected them." Who the fuck elected the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Mark Cuckerberg?

Thanks. That's a good one. I'll 100% put it to use. And again, your website is a thing of beauty. Bookmarked to see how it develops.

Young people have always been kinda brutal with this sort of thing. Maybe it's because they like to see their values personified in cultural figures? Whatever, definitely a tough crowd. :)

So true. Thanks for posting a reminder.

I'm definitely pleased when mediocre script writers, et cetera get slightly less screwed over. People can and should fight for these things. But I'm still going long on feudalism. It'll just take a while.

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You might be right. Not that I'm happy about it.

That definitely got laid bare to me at the start of the ongoing pandemic. "Trust the science," when every authority is blatantly changing the science to fit the narrative of capital. Stay home for 10 days when you have COVID (reasonable), then the CEO of Delta Airlines cried to the US CDC about it, and magically it's now only 5 days.

At this point there's no stopping the train, it's not great now, but you can at least enjoy things before it gets much worse and the man made horrors beyond our comprehension become too blatant to ignore..

There's a song about this approach.

Hell is only half full Room for you and me Looking for a new fool Who's it gonna be? It's the Dance of Shiva It's the Debutantes ball And everyone will be there Who's anyone at all

Monkey wash donkey rinse Going to a party in the centre of the earth Monkey wash donkey rinse Honey, don't you want to go?

Left eye, right eye Take a look around Everybody's heading For a hole in the ground And it's the Dance of Shiva It's the Twilight of the Gods Thunder and lightning 'Til the break of dawn

Monkey wash donkey rinse Going to a party in the centre of the earth Monkey wash donkey rinse Honey, don't you want to go?

Yahoooooo!

I know I can't avoid seeing reality through a grid. That's why I've tried to be conscious about which grids, or -isms, I use. It is also why I am determined to use ideology instead of letting ideology use me. The one thing all these -isms have in common is that they are fundamentally parasitic in nature. What each of them want is for individuals to adopt them, let them live rent-free in their heads, and grow enthusiastic in service to the fixed ideas they adopted or had inculcated in them by their families and culture.

If you meet the Buddha, kill him. Likewise the state, the economy, the science, and society itself.

I'll admit I'm guilty of lurking a lot more than I actually post. IRL I tend not to speak up too much in large group settings, and I think that carries over to my online interactions a bit. Quiet types gravitate more towards the internet as well, and so lurkers are likely over represented here.

I don't think this is a phenomenon unique to personal websites though. I mean, compare the views to the likes to the comments on literally any youtube video. Way more people read/watch content than actually click the "like" button, and way more people click a button than type out a response. Part of that might be the aversion to just typing "this" or some other similarly vacuous reply. If I read something, and find it interesting, I might not necessarily have any response, especially if I agree with it. That's why, although it's a bit contentious, I actually do like reaction buttons. It lets you tell the original poster you liked it, without wasting anyone's time by making them scroll past "this" comments. Kind of like nodding when talking to someone IRL.

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This is a good thread. I have always lamented the death of the Forum.

It's a fool's errand to try and mimic exactly what it was like "back in the good ol' days" or whatever. The culture was entirely different, people were entirely different, the approach to the internet was different. Yet there are still "principles" that the Old Web was based on that are timeless and can be preserved despite the technology. Here are some just off the dome:

Principle of Limit

This refers to the concept of treating the internet has an interesting hole to peek your head through, rather than a realm to live most of your life in. What a lot of people (in my age bracket especially) suffer from is the inability to separate life IRL and life online. An old attitude on 4chan as I understand it was to never talk about the site outside of its walls. The idea is to preserve the "integrity" of the site by limiting its reach. In a similar way, keeping your internet activity to a limited time period in a given day can help restore how people used to treat the internet (or at least how I did). You'll end up getting more bang for your buck (so to speak) and it'll make your internet time feel special again.

What I've done personally is limit my phoneposting to an absolute minimum and keep things on the desktop. The desktop is my Portal. The less convenient it is to access when I don't have a specific, intended use for the Portal, the better.

Principle of Innovation

No doubt one of the key contributors to the greatness of the Early Web is simply the fact that it attracted trailblazers. It was a new technology and a new world to explore, so people were constantly innovating and getting creative with the material they produced and how they produced it. I'm a ham radio operator and I can say that there are plenty of new technologies, protocols, and networks being developed as we speak that in a very real way mimic what I remember it being like to explore various BBSs, forums, and IRC channels. The same spiritual essence seems to have been preserved. I'm not saying that the technology has to constantly change (although it does make this bit easier) but rather keep the innovation and creativity going.

What I see too often is rehash. Everyone dresses like it's another decade, but no one has bothered to make a look for the 20s. People aren't creating, but rather consuming or remembering. When """content""" becomes so incredibly easy to make and consume, the quietness and boredom that fuel creative ideas gets snuffed out. It gets replaced by this low-level droning hum that numbs the mind, which the pervasiveness of the corporate internet has ensured reigns supreme. On a large scale, people have become either unwilling or incapable to produce compelling, new things. (I should say that it was always a minority of the population that actually contributed creatively, but that number has surely been decimated.)

I'm sure there are more of these "principles" but right now I can't think of anything else that isn't time/technology-dependent. Maybe there's a generalized maximal-customization ethic that can be fitted in the list somehow, but I'll have to sit on it for a while.

This is why I think the shift away from dialup to always-on broadband connections was a mistake. Back when I was on dialup, if I wanted to get online it meant tying up my phone line and being unreachable to anybody who just wanted to call me on the phone and talk. I had to choose to fire up my modem, put up with the handshaking tones, and be selective about what I accessed because even a plain HTML page with no images could take a minute to download and render.

Do you still leave your desktop connected when you don't intend to get online, though? I need to be better about doing that myself.

I can get behind this, but I want to do more with less. For example, if I were to make a web application, I would not use the JavaScript framework du jour, or dick around with server-side JS. I would instead try to use the oldest and most minimal viable tech for my project. If I could get away with it, the back-end would probably be a C program with a SQLite database connected to the web via CGI, and the front end would be basic HTML5 and CSS3 with no JavaScript whatsofuckinever using standard HTML5 forms and communicating with the server using basic HTTP GET and POST calls.

Actually, fuck web applications. Applications do not belong on the web. They belong on the PC. If they need to be networked, the server should not be on ports 80 or 443. Actually going back to basics and emphasising performance and efficiency over "developer experience" would be innovative nowadays.

Then again, I build my personal website with shell scripts and a makefile.

I'm not convinced we actually need a "look" for this decade, but I'm a middle-aged, long-haired metalhead content with jeans, a band t-shirt, and a pair of Chuck Taylors or Doc Martins. Yes, it's a look straight out of the 1970s. No, I don't really care. Besides, whatever turns out to be the look for the 2020s (or the 2030s) probably won't look good on a man my age anyway.

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Right, that need to be selective is a huge part of my point. Imagine how much better the average person's internet usage would become if they were forced to wait 20x longer for stuff to load.

I don't anymore, unfortunately. Let's hold each other accountable for it :D Though, I will say that I feel like my ideal "attitude" towards internet usage has been mostly preserved in my current approach. I've been doing an OK job staying away from time sinks like social media (including any of the chans) and squeezing about as much value out of my online time as possible.

Based. "Web 2.0" was fun just because of the novelty of being able to stitch together different (BASIC) webapps really easily (ref). But the web has become far over-reliant on applications. Part of my point on creativity when it came to ham radio networking protocols is that there isn't any choice but to be minimal. You have got to know well the tools that you're using so that you can optimize what you need to send using what little bandwidth is allowed. It's to the point where I could hardly say I'm on the "internet" anymore, since the vast majority of my time online is on the "web" specifically. (I know the web is a subsection of the internet, but it is now such a vastly minuscule portion of it.) Maybe there ought to be a movement to emphasize the usage of "the Web," especially for those neocities types.

I'm no fashionista myself by any stretch (my closet consists of plain shorts, hoodies, and hats) but my main point was to highlight a symptom of the greater problem of the lack of the creative spirit. I guess music could be another example.

All in all, sometimes I really wish Paul Krugman was right. The internet should've been kept to the spheres of Academia, engineers, and tech hobbyists. Eternal September was a type of what was to come.

:)

I think this is probably a huge part of most people's frustrations with social media.

I've said this mostly in the context of games before, but nothing is fun for 1,000 hours. Your favorite childhood mmo isn't fun anymore not just because the game changed, but because you've already done it for thousands of hours. Of course it's boring. When you were a kid, and you started writing a book, or drawing a comic or something, it was really fun. Eventually, everyone gives up though, because it just becomes tedious after you've been spending hours and hours working on it day after day.

Posting things on the internet / using social media probably follows a similar rule. We get no joy from it anymore partly because the internet has changed, but also partly just because we're desensitized after doing it every day for decades.

I hope all of human experience doesn't have to follow this pattern of diminishing returns. Even if it does though, you can mitigate it by being intentional about your time instead of following a routine on autopilot. Do you actually want to doomscroll Twitter, or is it just easier to do that than to actually think about what you want to do?

If your 1,000 hour theory is true then the only solution is to vary what you do as much as possible and not rely on one thing for entertainment or fulfillment or what have you. I'm typically in the habit of hopping between interests every few months (or even years if I'm lucky) which is frustrating but I don't try to juggle multiple things at a time. Maybe spreading myself out over multiple things is the antidote.

I think "doomscroll" is a great word for it. Anyone that stumbles into one of the large platforms will eventually be sucked into a doomscroll spiral unless they consciously break the cycle. YouTube is the only one of these platforms I've bothered tolerating long-term but their insistence on shoving Shorts into every crevice of the site is testing my patience. If you find yourself doomscrolling, it can serve as a reminder to stop whatever you're doing and start being intentional with your time, like you said. Boredom is very undervalued.

Part of my reasoning to identify principles to what we all like(d) about the internet was to determine what could stand the test of time. I've been on the internet for decades and I'd say that principally my usage of it has been the same. My enjoyment of it relied on (at least) the following: (1) limiting its use and (2) finding new/creative/innovative stuff.

For (2), that same frontier spirit still exists online as it always has. The difference now is that most of it has been relegated to oases separated by vast stretches of desert. I call myself a web nomad because I feel like I have to traverse these long distances to find these few-and-far-in-between respites from the droning hum.

Time itself makes this tricky. I know plenty of people who got bored of maintaining their personal sites (be it geocities, tripod, angelfire, or other) and wanted to hop on the social media train and make accounts for all these new sites popping up. Now there's a huge amount of people who are rebounding. Was it the "1,000 hours" that brought us here, or is this truly something timeless?