So there's a lot of kvetching, from myself included, about how the modern internet has gotten worse, usually due to a combination of SEO, social media gone evil, and the prevalence of money as more and more of a guiding factor in tech.
But of course the old internet had the problem of being fairly boring. The interesting question is how to get a third way. I've heard a few proposals:
@ZachWeinersmith FWIW, I disagree that the Internet of old was boring. Despite its technical limitations and questionable accessibility to the general public, it was in fact often much more interesting than the modem web.
(Also, the answer to the art issue is, a for many other things, universal basic income.)
Can you expand on what you mean by boring? When I was a preteen I could find random websites with lots of circuit diagrams for simple things someone found useful, Seaview fanfiction, and various very esoteric topics. My impression is that finding as satisfyingly in-depth descriptions, especially of niche topics, is now harder.
@ZachWeinersmith my personal view on the matter is that there's a divide between people who use the internet as a purely consumer experience and people who want more out of it, and the latter will organically seek out and build capabilities and platforms to fit those wants and needs, while the former group will largely continue to be served by commercial interests and occasionally benefitting from the work of the latter group. there will not be any defining structural change.
@ZachWeinersmith proposals to fundamentally alter the fabric of the internet in any widespread technological or sociological way are doomed to remain proposals. the logistics of getting such proposals in front of enough people to matter at the scale of the internet are just infeasible.
change will occur organically in microcosms because individuals want to see that change and are willing to put in the work. some of those ideas may grow and reach larger scales, but many will not.
@ZachWeinersmith I think it's wise to remember that the commercialisation of the internet occurred because it filled people's needs and wants. convenient commerce, cheap / free access to entertainment, etc.
nothing that is happening now is new. all that's happened is that the people who were building the things that met our needs are no longer up to the task, and new people are stepping in to replace them. we've always done things this way on the internet.
One from Cory Doctorow, and others, is to essentially have government intercession to prevent rent-seeking. The tech solutions I've heard tend to focus on some kind of tokenization. I honestly don't know what will work, and one thing that worries me is that I think we content-suppliers see more rot than consumers. That is, we're saying "but arrrrrrrt" while people are actually getting lots of media they like for free.
In other words, my worry is that on some fundamental level evil social media (or whatever) will always win because they're supply what the consumer wants, or anyway is engaged by. One reads stories about GenZ wanting to drop out of obsessive media culture, but I have no sense that this is the norm.
And I think as long as most entertainment comes through these filters, it's going to be hard to live in a golden age of good work. It'll necessarily be more disposable algorithm-tripping stuff.
@ZachWeinersmith there were a lot of things about the old internet I definitely hated at the time. The old forum admins were even less fair than social media managers. Trolls everywhere. And so many websites were IE-only or didn't properly support non-Latin languages. Open standards were often disregarded and important software was often Windows-only.
But this is all beside your point. One technological solution that would help a bit is AI to filter out repetitive and stolen content.
To my mind the ideal ecosystem for creativity has certain qualities, e.g.
There's a large artistic "middle class," meaning that although there may be big stars, people doing solid work, or still learning their craft, can make enough money to focus on their work.
Getting work viewed is less about advertising than about quality, meaning that most tastemakers should care about what's lasting more than what's zeitgeisty.
There should be enough money coming into the system to support many axes of diversity among creators in order to encourage more new weird stuff.
Consumers have to actually care about the difference between what is amusing and what is good - the artistic equivalence to the difference between another candy bar and a healthy meal.
The locus of great art should be among the public, not universities or restricted environments.
There's likely more, but my point is that all this stuff seems to me to be pretty straightforward, and much of the current ecosystem is against all this stuff. The rise of social media means you have e.g. people getting millions of readers on facebook and deriving literally zero revenue from it, unless they're willing to also do a little dance to get people to buy a t-shirt. Young artists now spend countless hours learning platform algorithms, rather than craft.
In retrospect, what was best for me about the early internet was that although there was competition and we cared about reader numbers and so on, because there weren't big aggregators or modern social media, your only paths forward were making stuff people liked and making friends among peers. Emotionally, aesthetically, I might even say morally, it was better. But you need money to attract and sustain more artists.
Anyway, I don't know the solution. Artists can't really unionize en masse because social media could just murder most careers. And anyway, we're too disorganized and dispersed. But as a for instance, if social media networks had to pay 1% of revenue made from ads posted next to artist's creations, on their own sites on the platform, billions would pour into the arts, meaning more full-time careers, more learning, more books.
@ZachWeinersmith Zach, surely you are not seriously suggesting that "art" should be able to have even a single thing that commerce cannot co-opt, ruin, bury or outright steal?
@ZachWeinersmith I think it's useful to think about this as a manifestation of power relationships rather than as a vague sense of unease with a set of unpleasant realities. Where is power concentrating, and where is it dispersing? Social media conglomerates concentrate power on the aggregation side and they disperse power on the artist side. Infinite niches means no monoculture, no monoculture means no superstars, no superstars means no one to wield power in the interests of artists.
@ZachWeinersmith The fediverse is a potential counterweight to that, as it disperses power among the media conglomerates. If they become popular you maintain much of the power of revealed preference / vox populi in terms of artistic tastes, you still don't have a monoculture, but you also don't have a Zuck or a Musk dictating some insidious aspects of the incentive structure about what gets promoted.
@ZachWeinersmith And obviously unions don't work that well, because the formation process of a union involves a clique of workers who are exploited under very similar conditions, in communication proximity within a corporate structure; you have to be able to withhold labor in order to be able to bargain, and the global nature of social media makes any unionization attempt against the "boss" of the algorithm into shadowboxing
@ZachWeinersmith But that's not the end of the story! Thoughtfuly constructed artist collectives can pool power amongst a group with a related audience, and you're starting to see this, particularly on YouTube; networks of creators that collaborate with each other both on- and off-platform (i.e. the much-maligned "breadtube" label does describe a certain group of people who often show up in each others' videos as voiceovers).
@ZachWeinersmith If these could be united more intentionally in a sort of guild, there is potentially a way to counterweight large social media networks, assuming that something like Fedi could cut those networks down to a manageable size rather than globe-spanning culture-defining genocide-enabling behemoths
@ZachWeinersmith As someone who has been involved in the Internet since before there was an Internet (reaching back to early ARPANET days), I can assure you that it will continue to be a race to the bottom. These are the GOOD days in comparison to what the future holds, including government ID requirements for usage, government tracking of all Internet use, blocking of content "not considered appropriate for children", banning of VPNs ... well -- look at the Chinese Internet and you get an idea of what the future holds for the world. Trust me on this.
@lauren@ZachWeinersmith If the future includes Star Trek/Star Wars-grade transportation, yes. But, if it is more Mad Max, not so much. Now, if it's somewhere in between though ...
@ZachWeinersmith@nyrath I want UBI so that artists and writers can comfortably make niche stuff that they and their friends like without worrying about not being able to make a living off it or having to work a day job in addition (resulting in less quantity and probably less quality).
rn my webnovels are free but I write them in my spare time, not ideal but what else can I do...
@ZachWeinersmith this is, I’m afraid, something that needs a legal solution—like every other problem that’s fundamentally a people problem there’s no technical solution.
Your idea about revenue sharing is a good one and probably has the best chance of success, though given all the art theft on the internet it’ll be tricky.
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