The Gentrification of the Internet

From a producer's perspective, though? It's a disaster! There's a huge pressure to shape content in a specific way, to post it to specific sites. Even something as simple as sharing a non-image or a non-video file with somebody is a lot harder now than it was a few years back. File hosting sites are going dark left and right, cloud storage services are shuttering direct file access capabilities, the new types of devices have limited options for simple file management, and so on and so on.

Now I disagree with using gentrification to describe that, and I don’t totally agree with the authors point anyway, but I think that is what he’s trying to say.

I work in a new building now, but I walk past the former store most days of the week. Through the wall of glass I could see people engage in their activities under the glow of a cliche Edison lightbulb arrangement. I would walk past and see the adjustments of aprons, the exchanges of cash and mugs of coffee, the hats and t-shirts hanging off slabs of wood pinned to the walls, and the sacks of coffee beans stored on top.

A dark and empty room sits behind the facade of LEDs that now occupy the glass. Advertisement.

I think you are conflating gentrification with access. My city has more people and a better public transportation system now. More people have access to the sidewalk in front of my old office where you could once purchase a decent cup of coffee. But what used to be a store, a small seedling of human existence, is now just a wall to display ads on.

"I wonder, is there some sort of an alternate future where this could be avoided?"

There's a dystopian set of novels called "The Domination" where the author explores this. Instead of the Internet, because of a protracted Cold War between two superpowers (not the ones you're thinking), this alternate world has iron fused memory cores immune to any hacking that we can conceive of in our timeline.

I often think about what probably defines a typical experience online for people these days and I feel that the smaller and more cozy feeling of actual community has been replaced by the digital equivalent of big box stores. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Netflix. Big corporate places with portals and algorithms. I think it's safe to include reddit there now too with the direction that site has been going in.

These aren’t necessarily bad things in and of themselves (aside from the chasing of a world in which _nothing is left unplanned_), but I’m trying to hone in on the idea that the sheer randomness of this medium has more or less vaporized. The concept that anything and everything you do on the Internet wasn’t aggressively being tracked and developed into digital profiles to be traded, used, shared, and sold by ad companies and an array of other organizations was a fart in the wind compared to what it’s like online today. Websites simply didn’t have 5 megabytes+ (!) of Javascript whereas now you need a half a dozen browser extensions to make the internet a halfway decent thing to be on.

My hunch is that once upon a time, people (at least those that even had access to it) had a kind of amateur desire of wanting to create an account at a website (particularly a forum). Coming up on 2019, I think long and hard before creating another account anywhere. There even was an expectation to introduce yourself in some introduction subforum at many of these boards.

A theme that has become completely domineering is the inflated ego linked to tribalism. I see people being so serious about everything; there can be no reciprocal discussion about anything. "You're either with us or against us" and other types of fallacy-addled thinking. I've also seen a lot of the kind of lowbrow "edginess" caked in psuedo-ironic bottom of the barrel commentary where people try to pass off low effort one liners as a means of scoring cheap points with a crowd. And then there's also this brand of posting [0].

Usually this behavior has a negative effect associated with it as this kind of driveby posting encourages more of itself at the expense of discussion. Quality then decreases as people seek other sources of community (I think this is what has been happening with reddit).

I think it’s probably trivial to dismiss this as nostalgia but I feel there are some real truths to this. The Internet is something you had the choice of actually logging off and disconnecting but today, everyone is constantly connected. We are in the age of distraction and preoccupation. Think about it: how many times have you picked up your (smart)phone purely out of reflex, not even to check something with purpose? You see it everywhere in public, certainly. The constant stream of brightly colored iconography, beeps, alerts, buzzing, push/notifications, and beyond are endless. Everything demands your attention, and it is never enough.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/iYT5pPl.png