Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

The advertising/panopticon funding model is turning this timeline into a dystopia worthy of George Orwell. Because of algorithmic tuning to optimize "engagement", the promise of the internet has been turned into a dark pattern instead.

We can run our own servers, curate our own sources of information, and build reputation networks, in spite of the overall trends. The key difference is to do it for any reason other than profit.

Another weakness of the evolved systems is the whole "Up/Down" voting system that happens everywhere. When you force everything into that single dimension, you waste almost all information that can be gleaned from someone who has just spent their attention on something. I think that we need to have systems that can vote with vectors. Something can be funny, technically wrong, and insightful all at the same time... wouldn't it be nice to be able to learn those things?

Also, a pet peeve - HTML doesn't allow the Markup of Hypertext. It actively works against the idea of a Memex, a thing we still don't have 80 years later. 8(

The worse thing about the Internet is that it enabled all the socially maladjusted & anti-establishment types to find each other since the cost of discoverability & distribution of information plummeted.

I enjoyed this. I find it somewhat telling though that while the title is about "the internet", the actual discussion about what's changed focuses a lot on money. You can argue that the internet changed how money is made, but I think it's a mistake to conflate technology with our societal response to and management of it. As gun-control advocates love to point out, firearms have been around for centuries but that doesn't mean people everywhere are shooting each other constantly. We have things like laws to contain the effects of technology. I think a major component of the culutral changes described in the article is a lack of political will to ensure, by force if necessary, that the economic gains of technology are spread widely.

Another caveat to the title is that the article seems mostly to be talking about the "web 2.0" or post-social-media internet. I'd say that earlier stages of the internet, particularly what some people now see as the "golden age" from the late 1990s to around 2010, actually involved a remarkable flowering of culture. Blogs proliferated, traditional media started making websites with substantial content, and there were valuable achievements in new media like Flash games. The article says:

> The internet has made it easy to evaluate all content — including criticism — against three key metrics: views, likes, and shares.

And that's true, but it's not "the internet" that did that, it's the specific subset of the internet that we allowed to run amok. Blaming that on the internet is like looking at a street full of obnoxious advertising signs and saying that paint ruined this town; maybe that's a factor, but another one is a lack of signage laws.

The part of the internet that has destroyed and continues to destroy culture is the part that's built on pandering and profiteering, which, not coincidentally, is the same part of other industries that has destroyed beautiful and promising things in the past.

That said, the article makes a lot of good points. This one in particular:

> What happened to journalism in the 21st century is, in many ways, the story of the conflict between two utopian values: Information wants to be free and Writers should be paid.

There's no denying that technology played in role in the creation of this dilemma. It's not just about journalism, of course. It has to do with the fact that computers enable the essentially resource-free copying of information, and that's affected many industries (perhaps most notably the artistic ones like movies and music that the article discusses in other contexts). But just because technology brings us new problems doesn't mean we can't address those problems by updating our expectations and standards of behavior.

I think adjacent to this is an element of reduced risk taking from younger people because the stakes are much higher (or at least feel much higher). I've worked with so many smart and talented grads who have seemingly planned their lives/career to the nth degree, in a way that was certainly not that common in my broad circles when I was a similar age.

From conversations with them, it all stems from the view of you can't afford any mistakes/missteps if you want a relatively benign type of comfortable middle class life, in terms of things like housing in particular. If that'd your starting point, you're looking to ge a guaranteedish success at anything you're trying to do and that inherently puts a lid on how much you want to deviate or be creative from the norm. More so than ever, I think, people are more aware of optimising monetisation in all aspects of their lives, and that sort of results in more things being the same or only having minor deviation from what "works".