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in the last x number of days (cannot disclose for data security) i had a "birthday". i am not much older, just one year in fact. not saying this to fish for birthday messages: as i inch closer to 30 year old boomerdom, excuse this entirely self indulgent thread about the internet
i like the internet, a lot. probably too much. i have come to terms with it. on some days i feel like this is the cyberpunk dystopia only theres less wires and its not dark all the time. aside from that, we do mainly live on screens and i talk to other outcasts through machines.
its pretty lame to view it that way but the hallmark of this time period is that everything is lame so, like i said i accept it + to be honest i actually like it a lot. i enjoy being an odd combination of techno-skeptic and techno-dependent. the pluses outweigh the minuses, to me
this plus my (probably stemming from a mental deformity) obsession with semiotics + structures + worldviews has made me somewhat of a reluctant ethnographer. i would never think of myself that way but often my thoughts turn to this strange network that has now become "real life"
thats really "the twist" that i feel i came along just at the right time to experience. its absurdly obvious now but the internet is "more real" than real life now, or to say it in a more accurate way reality and "real life" is now subservient to the internet, it is "under" it.
i do remember this not being the case though. as a crude example, i used to hangout on a forum online. once, one of the posters addressed a mod and said he was going to go to the police because of what people were saying to him, and that he was a minor, so it was "serious".
the mod then point blank threatened to come to the posters house and do things i wont repeat here to him, and it was all a joke, and everyone laughed, because the idea of anyone in real life caring about some internet forum and what was said there was so absurd. everyone "lol"ed.
and thats just how it was. the internet was decidedly not "real life" in any way and the two were totally separate. then there was this period where the two were kind of balanced, just for a second, and it was ambiguous what the internet was or "meant" in terms of "real life".
people kind of hovered in this space of "yeah well you probably dont want naked pictures of yourself on there" but it still wasnt "real". i think we collectively underestimate what this transition was like and how slow the catch up was, especially if you lived through it.
i have friends who went to "the best" schools for certain degrees that have to do with... certain things, lets say some graduated in... 2010 - 2012, and for some of them the whole concept and idea of social media wasnt even addressed. the "catch up" for institutions was very slow
anyway, thats not really my point, not that i have one. its more of a backdrop. as someone who loves the internet i often lament its now hypercentralization. in the past, every piece of the internet was like a little island, isolated, its "own thing", its own world and scene.
now its the opposite. instead of being little villages its like everyone has moved to one or two of five available massive cities, and all those cities are connected anyway, so it doesnt really matter. everyone sees the same things, and there is no way to escape it (online).
its a little too sketchy for most people to go on the deepweb, and if you go to some little forum (if you can find one) or something out there, people are mostly just posting twitter screenshots and memes from the "big cities" anyway so, theres very little payoff in doing that.
in a way i feel like, if youve been around twitter long enough, that type of thing has happened here as well, to this little strange ideosphere we inhabit. it used to feel isolated, like there wasnt a spotlight on it, but now its "open". i feel like there are so many eyes on us.
it used to be the case that if a post around here got 100 likes, i was like, alright cool, everyone has seen it. but now that threshold doesnt really exist, and i feel like even if youre a tiny account, theres still this omnipresent spotlight that seems to permeate every corner.
cant really complain because i do art so, its tight that people want to look at it, i mean thats what i want more than anything. at the same time, i wonder what this flip of the internet over 20, 25 years, more for some, means and how it plays out long term.
in a sense the entire posting and lurking endeavor is seeking out of novelty, finding and making and uplifting cool things that are divorced from the fully laminated plastic cringe industrial complex. but i feel that they are taking more territory, paving everything.
suddenly, due to this and a variety of other factors, everyone has "heard of" everything - you have to dig so deep to find something that hasnt been penetrated yet by the omnipresent "cyber gaze". maybe this is a good thing. i cant really tell.
thats it really. i never expected to feel like the internet was "my home". i spent a few years in an apartment where i didnt even have a computer and i still had a phone with buttons on it. i could have obtained a computer but i just chose not to, at the time. didnt need it.
but now some days im in my office and i look out the window and i just think about how "wild west" the whole internet was. obviously that is never coming back. not to boomer out (the point of this thread) but i dont even know if younger people experienced that. i have no idea.
so as the internet now is "more real" than real life, im not sure what the implications are for people who, however lame and un-epic this sounds, kind of refuse to capitulate and "get a real job" in the omni-mega-cringe homogeneity factory that runs 99% of things now.
in a way its kind of a perfect mix of everything im into, where now forces beyond our control have forced "real life" into this cyber matrix and are trying to laminate it all with terrible aesthetics and reddit culture so the only way to fight back is being cool and funny online
in a way it could be worse, in terms of crosses to bear its not really that heavy and along the way i get to feel an absurd level of camaraderie with other isolated weirdos who make jokes about women and obscure parts of church history so, not that i have a choice but ill take it
so basically
btw
