The Internet Is Made of Demons
damagemag.comTo me it seems simpler. Up to 50 years ago you could not have a conversation with more than say 10 people maximum. Most people don't have the patience to only speak 1/10 of the time. More than that it would be one or two addressing a group.
The internet has made possible conversations with unlimited participants, and no one has to wait to get their own point across.
The horribleness in people was always there. It just didn't spread like measles.
The observation was made about TV, too. Profoundly. It's even more true about the internet.
And in the naked light I saw
ten thousand people maybe more
people talking without speaking
people hearing without listening
people writing songs that voices never share / no one dared disturb the sound of silence
[...]
and the people bowed and prayed
to the neon god they'd made
and the sign flashed its warning
in the words that it was forming
and the sign said the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and the tenement halls...
[edit] I hadn't read this whole thing yet. I really wish I had more than my one vote to give it. For all the allegorical talk about demons, this is a fantastically well-articulated take that contains at least a few new ideas. Sometimes it is useful to externalize our own worst impulses into the supernatural, as a way of considering them objectively. That's what Greek mythology was all about. What's a bit novel here is that we might be just beginning to approach this dangerous technology in a moral way, starting with folk stories about demons if we have to.
It's amazing how much I enjoy the set up but immediately disdain most of the argumentation. If the internet is made of daemons, it's absolutely not the other people, not the memes, not the tiktok, not the reward systems/stats. These things are hardly relevant, are minor factors, small hazards like someone enjoying bars or drinking; there's potential for danger, some people ensnare themselves, but the things themselves are so far from bad.
The internet is made of demons because technology is out of our control, because we can't see it work, can't make our own decisions. We're beholden to vast online sites and have few genuine & honest options available to us, few authentic means to own our own communication channels. Modern tech happens deep inside fire walls, in phones that lock us out of features if they detect we've crossed the SafetyTripwire the OS taddles on us to the apps about. We're little blips of small data in a sea of big data, & there are far off masters inside corporate towers with access to that data, and advertisers & marketters buying sniffs of that data, but we ourselves are still beholden to the powers that be to browse, to surf, to get what comes to us.
What we have is deeply inauthentic, mediated deeply by archaic esoteric & far away systems. The danger of taking it seriously is, in my view, largley made up, overblown. That we have callous shallow interactions with one another is actually not a big problem, that we rebuff & spin off one another. This intellectual sphere is a fine realm for this, is low hazard. The middle-ground between writing & speech is reasonably effective, a direct discourse, not always proper & well cut but earnest & usually imminently correctable, if not person to person in aggregate. The stakes are low & we will have countless other varying encounters to ongoingly shape ourselves & each other across. I see the challenge as building better frameworks to aggregate opinion, annotations to help us support & detract, to underline or cross-out. Truth is ongoing, realtime, and that's fine, we're hashing it out, exploring in many directions at once. The messiness of it is ok.
This is all such fun framing. I think the outline of problems, the thesis of demons is an interesting framing we could use. I very much love critiques of what's happening online, but again I don't feel sated, don't feel aligned to this set of complaints, much more than I feel aligned to most set of complaints. What we have is, to me, not that important, because there's higher potentials that happen, better democratic exchanges waiting just around the corner, that the current tech is actually good enough for, but which we all just need more time to explore & play around with & let emerge: the web has huge potential still within it, ways to let us start alloying the produced consumer sites with additional more personal & distinctly us channels. Tech that genuinely favors us, that is here to be good technology for us, not merely advanced product, slowly emerges, trickles out, and we learn: this scale, of what kind of tooluser humankind is, shapes what the internet is, and it's slow growth but it is happening, and I love it & cherish it, and it's so much more important & such vastly bigger potential than the happenstance of now, than the particulars of what mass culture has gotten itself up to & what it's made of the net at this moment.
In general, the perspective of fear that courses through this article is highly offputing to me. There are problems, but these seem like superficialities, of what culture is, not of the technics & depth of the system. I think there are far worse demons that genuinely hold us back than the petty social fears this tries to drum up. These critiques feel so modern, so trendy, vast orders of social media refusenik'ing lining up, but they lack any real appreciation or perspective on what the internet is: they are atechnical to a fault, unable to see & grasp at what really happens, unable to understand the frontiers & settlements are being put down outside the mass corporate-run social playgrounds, which are, imo, mostly harmless, rancorous & brimming with not-good, but an effective offgas for society, an earnest reflection more of us than the sites, and something we'd seek to change mostly because we are afraid of seeing ourselves, more than the sites/internet. There are far better programmes of de-infernalization we can get up to.
>> The messiness of it is ok.
I like this optimism. I like that it's expressed in a long form post that's well thought out. I like that HN exists. But HN is a conversation among passengers in first class on the Concorde. Most of the internet is traveling 4th class steerage with the water buffalo. As an elitist classist jerk, I have no problem arguing that they should never have gotten on this boat at all, and I can easily see that Mark Zuckerberg feels the same way - the difference being that he's happy to profit from their misery.
Thanks for the nice words, & thanks for the words at all. It's great just hearing back from anyone.
A lot of my post is about unchaining ourselves from the wall, getting out of this underground, & seeing the world a little more.
Right now there's a lot of privilege & skill & dedication it takes to escape the produced, to go beyond the commercial application experiences. But I do think change has a certain inevitability to it. Networks as a product have somewhat reached their zenith, that we're in a long slowly shifting holding pattern until time is released from these confines. This is highly-networked but deeply anti-personal computing, is as massified in extreme as it comes. I'm not a refusenik, I believe in connectivity & communication & in technical progress (the way out isn't backwards), but making technology owned, personal, malleable: there's a feeling of predestination, not that I know what comes next, but that nothing is possible under these preconditions, that a shift to a more flexible, changable, evolvable model, where more actors have a real stake in how technology works & what we do with it: that's how inevitability begins. Re-personalization, re-introducing choice.
I don't have a great crystal ball that tells me exactly how the world is going to start becoming more interested. I don't have models of the on-ramps to the better future (truth be told I do have some in-progress starting-point guesses). But judging us by what we are and what we see, taking the current situation & projecting it endlessly forwards forever & ever: I think society is really really trapped seeing itself trapped in atemporality forever, is hideously unable to think of slow, shifting change, at the edges, and the pressures that ultimately creates. The trend of cool, of something better & empowering to come along & reinforce itself, to create strong communities: that gets things going. Sometimes we never build the adoption curve, never figure out what on-ramps look like, don't kind enough value for the thing to really survive (Concorde?), or to stay in a niche forever. But for things of value, big real sincere value: eventually the people who know they are doing it right get seen, eventually others want on, eventually we start thinking about delivery & easing & adoptability.
I can't claim to be completely free of the masses, their chaotic ways & how weakly so many seem anchored to & perceptive of our shared gaian spacecraft. But overall I rate the importance of the current times pretty low, at most points. The interesting bits of history happen when there's something for people to chip-in to, when there are hooks for engagement, and right now those equations are all woefully lopsided; we ask for your content and we give you a platform, but the experience is not yours, you and your audience have no control, no volition in the social media networks of the world. This tyranny of far off machines & fixed platforms, it will not last forever. For their existence is only possible by trading off genuine engagement & possibility, and the dam of what they hold back keeps filling ever higher with water.
Some reports from a new, emerging outside world will eventually make it back into pop culture. Different styles, different possibilities are still so young, but emerging. Right now I look mainly to those who are interested in shaping some kind of future for themselves, who want to be new seeds upon earth, who help beget new human futures we can freely develop. Those shifting assemblages are very small now, and most wont make it, but the overall alignment, of getting out of massified, controlled, dictated experiences, of being chained to the wall, will not last forever, and I'm not afraid of it (and I don't think it's particularly effective trying to work to hard to shape or reform or alter it).
I nodded to the Concorde because HN feels anachronistic in that it's still trying to maintain modes of dialog that are no longer widely understood. I'm not saying there isn't going to always be somewhere like that, at the edges; and as long as there is, I suppose there's hope. But to me, it's terrifying to see what's happening to society. If it was just the subjects or the windows of dialog that had shifted, I'd agree that this was an interim step, or a pendulum swing. My main concern is that the capacity for moving the window back toward comity, humanity, mutual understanding and dialog is being damaged to the point that we'll need to start much, much further back in time. That we may need to re-invent the Enlightenment over many generations when this system collapses. Because the framework for intellectual curiosity and logic in interpersonal relationships is now being hijacked by systems beyond most people's comprehension - which may now be beyond the control of even the people who created those systems.
I do like your optimism. But I grew up in the America that embodied the outside culture which managed to penetrate the closed, totalitarian societies which without outside influence might well have entered a permanent state of "1984". Who will be that for us? I'm pessimistic not because I assume that these systems will continue to evolve as fixed & far away masters forever, but because they don't need to. Like Uber; once they control the market (in this case of thought), they can drive every alternative out. Here, their functionality is distorting the aspirations and dialog of whole generations of humans who will have to rediscover how to think and speak for themselves, if that's possible. And they've so embedded themselves in governance that alternatives might as well be illegal in many places.