I hope he’s right. I’m so tired of this shit.
From time to time, I sit up and remember how scrolling reddit or YT was just how I spent my downtime waiting for an email from my employer or to wait out my partner’s taste in TV and I wonder what I am waiting for now?
For me, it’s memes and video games which leave me wondering at the end of the weekend: what did I spend my time doing? What did that give me? Literally just close my eyes and 2 days pass until I get to objectify more of my labor power
It’s because just the act of going outside costs $29.99 minimum and any participation in social activity is $7.89/hr or more.
Even the outdoors is heavily commodified, if you’re in a city it’s blatant, but even the smaller towns and suburbs, the parks and natural areas are only accessible by car, or you need a permit, or you have to purchase new shoes or a backpack, or supplies.
The Main Street areas are patrolled by police that will tell you too move along if you spend too much time in the public space without buying anything, every other block is plauged with chain stores that all look the same with the interspersed boutiques now all selling the same kitch they found online.
The Internet is just the elevated form of reality, a distilled version of the hyper normalized commodity fetishism of the real world.
I’ve long since lost any interest in travel, especially within the US, because any unique character that distinguished one part of the country is either gone, or horrible. The same stores, chains, and products are available everywhere, with maybe a handful of regional variations that have been getting smaller every year. Every city has the same kinds of daring cultural fusion restaurants, the same theaters I can’t afford, and the same shitty pop-punk-folk anarchist music scene. Unless it doesn’t, and there just isn’t a local music scene. It’s all completely homogenous now. Everyone watches the same TV shows, everyone works the same shitty jobs, everyone lives in either the same shitty little apartment, the same overpriced luxury yuppie box, or the same alienating and horrible suburban tract house.
I’ve long since lost any interest in travel, especially within the US, because any unique character that distinguished one part of the country is either gone, or horrible.
“Prestige cities” are a very real and ruinous phenomenon and they’re found worldwide. The world’s being made more bland every year by chasing techbro-approved glass and steel aesthetics.
Hell yeah, i like this guy’s style. Overly wordy and deeply weird prose is my weakness
Things will survive in proportion to how well they’ve managed to insulate themselves from the internet and its demands. The Financial Times will outlive the Guardian. Paintings will outlive NFTs. Print magazines will outlive Substack. You will, if you play your cards right, outlive me. If anything interesting ever happens again, it will not be online. You will not get it delivered to your inbox. It will not have a podcast. This machine has never produced anything of note, and it never will.
This really hit home for me. I’m not sure capitalism can remotely create anything of worth and our modern internet is built from the ground up to serve and benefit capital.
VOICES HAVE REVEALED TO ME THAT YOUR MAILMAN IS A DEMONIC ARCHON SPAT FROM BABYLON’S SPINNING PIGMOUTH, GOD WANTS YOU TO KILL HIM WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER
Archon or not I stand with the postal union :stalin-gun-1::stalin-gun-2:
Belphlegor, a Duke of Hell, who commands 40 legions of postmen.
Shit, no internet means no place to share the games I make
They’re killing the post office, too, so you won’t be able to write your games to physical media and mail them, either. It’s semaphores or sneakernets.
Gonna have to start Nintendo Power mag back up, sell floppies on the back cover maybe
Who is this guy? I want to read more bangers.
He was a minor online British left figure back in the first Bernie era, and used to be in the Chaposphere. He even had a spin-off podcast with Amber, until he was cancelled for sexual harassment.
The fact that he was canceled for sexual harassment certainly puts this section in a new light:
Occasionally, online social movements do make something happen. A hand emerges from out of the cloud to squish some minor individual. Let’s get her friends to denounce her! Let’s find out where she lives! You can have your sadistic fun and your righteous justice at the same time: doesn’t it feel good to be good?
clicking that link takes me to a 404 page
Try now - I switched it out for an archive link. Apologies, there was a weird looking ID in the URL and out of paranoia I’d removed it. Clicking it worked for me, but the was probably some weird caching going on :bordiga-despair:
Everyone That Matters Has Started Wearing Jeans Over Their Heads With Their Arms Down The Leg Holes And Their Faces All Cramped Up In The Sweaty Groin Region, And They Walk Down The Street Like This, Bumping Into Things, And When They Sit Down To Eat They Just Pour Their Subscription-Service Meal-Replacement Slurry Over The Crotch Of Their Jeans And Lick At The Dribblings From The Inside, And They’re Covered In Flies And Smell Bad And Also They’re Naked From The Waist Down Because Their Trousers Are On Their Heads, That’s Part Of It Too—We Show You How To Get The Look!
Here’s how web3 is about to disrupt the meat industry. Every time you buy a pound of tripe, your physical offal will be bundled with a dedicated TripeToken, which maintains its value and rarity even after the tripe has been eaten, thanks to a unique blockchain signature indexed to the intestinal microbiome of the slaughtered cattle! By eating large amounts of undercooked offal while trading TripeTokens on secondary markets, you can incentivise the spread of your favourite cattle diseases—and if one of the pathogens you own jumps the species barrier to start infecting humans, you’ve successfully monetised the next pandemic! Once you get sick, you can rent out portions of your own intestinal tract to an industrial meat DAO in exchange for SlaughterCoins. Because SlaughterCoins are linked via blockchain to the progressive disintegration of your body, they’re guaranteed to increase in value! And when your suffering becomes unbearable, local abattoirs will bid to buy up your SlaughterCoin wallet in exchange for putting you out of your misery with a bolt gun to the head!
Why wouldn’t they open the fly to feed themselves
Life is already like this in America
This is basically the Republican party platform.
Especially true considering their entire platform is built on insane, fleeting internet trends now
In 1995, Robert Metcalfe predicted in InfoWorld that the internet would go ‘spectacularly supernova’ and then collapse within a year.
It did. This was the mythic “Eternal September” of 1993 and 1994. Metcalf was a year late. The internet as it existed before America Online and similar early ISP portals was wiped away in a few years and while it might still be hiding in very obscure corners of the network the broader internet has never been the same since.
But when I’m listlessly killing time on the internet, there is nothing. The mind does not wander. I am not there.
Idk about you but this is exactly why I am addicted to the internet. It’s cheaper than alcohol or heroin and you don’t have to think about how much you hate being alive when you’re fifteen articles deep in to the biology of rabbits on Wikipedia.
More numb, more blank, more nowhere. A portable suicide booth; a device for turning off your entire existence.
Yes. Exactly. You have perfectly encapsulated how I escape from the existentially crushing horror of living with bipolar disorder.
In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible.
Dude. We’ve been saying this about Capitalism for like 200 years. The Internet didn’t start in 1968 when the US realized it needed a better way to send intelligence information back and forth between Vietnam and Langley so they could more efficiently murder and torture Vietnamese farmers. It began in the 1840s with the wide scale deployment of the electric telegraph. It will probably outlive everyone currently alive, though it’s form may change again and again.
There is simply nothing there online.
True. The commercialization of the net and the ruthless optimization of skinner box programs that attack our attention has crowded out all the neat, weird shit that used to be out there. Reddit is a shell of what it used to be, Facebook is nearly useless and largely unused by young people, and the vast, colorful tapestry of personal website, forums, bulletin boards, and blogs that existed before then have all been crushed by ad driven content platforms
this thing is nearing exhaustion.
:doubt: People use the internet because there’s less and less else they can do. Everything is too expensive, the environment, at least in America, is constantly being made more hostile to human existence, whatever is left of society is being pounded out of existence by the brutality of modern work culture. The internet is the only escape left for many people. It can’t stop because there’s nothing else for people to turn to in order to maintain some pretense of sanity. It took us a thousand years to kill Feudalism. What does that say about the potential longevity of this hellish place?
And this was, remember, a year in which millions of people had nothing to do except engage with great content online
No, dude. This was the year when, maybe for the first time in years, millions and millions of people could not work. Their businesses were shut down. They had free time. They went outside. They baked bread. They spent time with their families. They got sick and died. But what they didn’t do was come home with their brains obliterated by 8 or 10 or 12 hours of mindless drudgery, completely unable to do anything but destroy time with mindless scrolling on the web.
‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.’
We are still headed aggressively in this direction and giant rent seeking conglomerates will not let it stop simply because we are bored with tikotk. Also, we will not be happy.
They were betting that this would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff that rules the world. They were wrong
Okay but hear me out - Global panopticon used to control all movement, production, and every moment of our lives until death in order that the ruling class can efficiently and ruthlessly protect themselves while they slaughter billions of now superfluous workers on our rapidly dying planet.
that user data could power a system of terrifyingly precise targeted advertising—was a lie.
Yes, but have you considered that it can power AI driven robotic machine guns?
This is what sustains the entire media, provides 80% of Google’s income and 99% of Facebook’s, and it’s made of magic beans.
As far as I know this has been widely known for at least 5-6 years now. I have to say It will be interesting to live through the collapse.
it’s true that the internet has changed some things: mostly, it’s helped break apart the cohesive working-class communities that produce a strong left, and turned them into vague swarms of monads.
NAFTA, globalization, Reaganomics, J-I-T logistics, suburban sprawl, inflation, declining real wages, and cable news did this. If the internet had any effect it was small, and happened after most of the real damage had been done.
his game only works within the internet, and only when everyone involved agrees to play by the internet’s rules.
Lol swatting
At the time, I worried that the mass street movement risked being consumed by the sterile politics of online; this is exactly what happened.
Dude I was there. Democrat political agents took over the protests and the speeches and called the cops on anyone who suggested we all go get our guns and solve the problem
a oozingly digitised political current whose effective proposition is that people should welcome a total dictatorship to prevent corporations posting rainbow flags on the internet. You can guess what I think of its prospects.
Dude Hilter rose to power by blaming the Jews for World War One. Come on. Even the Russians are whining about “Globohomo” like they don’t have any actual problems to worry about.
If anything interesting ever happens again, it will not be online.
This I agree with, but that hasn’t really been important to the continuing life of the internet for years now.
I have no idea what kind of demented pervert is actually reading this stuff, when you could be lying in a meadow by a glassy stream, rien faire comme une bête, eyes melting into the sky.
Sir I have a variety of rare, exotic, and untreatable mental illnesses.
I’m interested in the forms of writing that were here long before the internet, and which will be here long after it’s gone. Not thinkpieces or blogs, but the essay, the manifesto, the satyr, and the screed. Ludibria, pseudepigrapha, quodlibets. Or folktales. Prophecy. Dreams.
There’s no going backwards, dude. Future Shock is still real. Things are still changing too fast for anyone to manage or make sense of. Brand new horrific beasts that we can only see the vaguest outlines of are emerging too fast to count and leaving broken bodies in their wake. There’s nothing behind us, and nothing ahead but nightmares.
Every few weeks, there are ads for some new band plastered over the Tube. The acid, whipsmart voice of twenty-first century youth! Then you listen, and they’re just ripping off the Fall again.
Spider Robinson wrote a short story about this called “Melancholy Elephants” back in 1982
the new world of barbarian kings
Europe was an unimportant cultural and economic backwater. All the cool stuff was happening in Baghdad, which was as vibrant and innovative and corrupt as Rome ever was. White people just fixate on Rome because they’re racist and they don’t want to learn Arabic.
But for true exhaustion, you need to know that everything that could be is as empty as everything that is.
I feel like this guy really understands bipolar depression, even if he doesn’t know he’s writing about that.
When I was younger, my brother and I had a running joke about a lemon that could connect to the internet.
I’m pretty sure that someone made a computer that could run DOOM out of potatoes.
My closest friends are online so I will not be laying next to a creek because I am also widly allergic to most things that are outside
Yeah, basically no one I know IRL gives a single shit about any of my creative projects. If I couldn’t share them online, I doubt I would have any motive to continue making them.
The internet has been absolutely transformative for weird, disabled, chronically ill, queer, and unusual people. Before this you were lucky if you had a group of friends to talk to about your interests, or anyone in your immediate area who could relate to your problems. Now you can talk to millions of people who understand what you’re going through, who can share ideas and solutions, who can commiserate with your pain.
This sounds like it was written in 2003. In 2022, in my experience, it’s just as difficult to make friends online as it is anywhere else. No one here is my friend, for example. We just post in the same space. When I used to post on Reddit, which I did for years and years, no one there was my friend either. I check a few of those boxes but communities online are so bloated with hundreds, thousands of people, that it often doesn’t feel like there’s room for another weird, disabled, chronically ill, queer, and/or unusual person. The most you get - if you’re lucky - is a positive reaction to something you post, maybe some commiseration that someone out there feels the same way, as you said. But then that interaction finishes, that person goes away.
I really enjoyed the paragraph about web3 and SlaughterCoins :data-laughing:
Does this mean the noobs are leaving? We’re going back to bulletin boards?
We’re already on a Bulletin board comrade
Pinch me is it Christmas already
I have no idea what kind of demented pervert is actually reading this stuff, when you could be lying in a meadow by a glassy stream
:kitty-cri:
What a brilliantly written piece. Thank you for sharing.
A foundational tenet of contemporary leftism should include post-internet rehabilitation. Helping people get offline and finding themselves again, finding community, finding a physical world again.
Wholeheartedly agree. I’ve been ruminating on the same ideas recently. Fundamental reconstruction of the internet should be a requisite for generational healing.
Absolutely great idea, I think this would definitely kill one of the social pillars that leads to young male mass shooters. Fighting against atomization and isolation would do a lot I think.
lol just wait til you see what isolation and atomization of society is doing to our elderly.
No, not the fox news elderly, the impoverished, senile, shitting themselves in a nursing home elderly.
Even here on Hexbear I’ve gotten it from very online people that insisted that what they called “meatspace” lacked meaning and substance compared to the internet. :lea-why:
Do not click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me any money.
:fry:
