Robin Sloan invites us to take this opportunity of the “overdue MySpace-ification” of the social epoch to get weird again:

I am thinking specif­i­cally of exper­i­men­ta­tion around “ways of relating online”. I’ve used that phrase before, and I acknowl­edge it might be a bit obscure … but, for me, it captures the rich overlap of publishing and networking, media and conviviality. It’s this domain that was so deci­sively captured in the 2010s, and it’s this domain that is newly up for grabs.

Here is just one helluva lede from a post by Max Read I find lodged into my thinking regularly:

One of the foundational beliefs of this newsletter is that, especially at the elite level, many important spheres of human activity and commerce including politics, newsmedia, and entertainment now largely take place on, and derive their context from, huge tech-industry platforms that are, formally and culturally speaking, not very different from the message boards and forums of the Old Internet, and therefore that understanding the world in 2022 requires historical and genealogical knowledge of internet culture1. Put another way, some immense portion of elite energy is currently directed toward what scholars of and participants in the pre-platform internet will recognize as trolling forums, winning message-board arguments, complaining to mods, and other, similar activities – activities that were undignified and debasing to the circa-1995 teenaged pornography addicts, Japanophile I.T. administrators, awkward goths, and underemployed lawyers who once made up the core population of early forum posters, let alone to the titans of industry, public intellectuals, Hollywood icons, etc. who are now the foremost practitioners of message-board culture, spending their days, as they do, trying to have the last word and accrue upvotes in our bleak approximation of a public sphere – and longtime forum posters are, despite their obvious mental-emotional insufficiencies, the people best-equipped to apprehend and contextualize American public life in the 21st century.

(See also this deeper dive into how today’s internet most resembles Something Awful)

For one, I find this thesis (that today’s platforms are functionally indistinguishable from chat rooms and forums of a bygone era) obviously true because it appeals to both my age and one of my broader critiques of tech platforms, namely they are somehow more bereft of responsibility than bored teenagers during the Clinton administration.

I was reminded of this reading Derek Powazek’s “A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar”

Bars are subject to a heinously complex mesh of laws. City, county, state, and federal, not to mention departments of health and safety. And those laws will be vastly different from city to city, state to state, country to country.

Bars are responsible for serving only so much alcohol per drink, not serving someone too intoxicated, not serving to anyone below a certain age. Keeping track of every drop of alcohol. And if they break any of these laws, they can be shut down permanently, owners can lose their license, people can go to jail. Why? Because alcohol is dangerous. With Facebook inciting genocide in Myanmar, mass shooters in America being radicalized online, the January 6 insurrection that was planned online, and nazis reinstated on Twitter, can anyone still claim that poorly managed social spaces are any less dangerous?

Another of my peeves about today’s platforms is their almost insistent misunderstanding and misconstruing of not just the word but the very idea of “community”. How many times has Zuckerberg, in his infinite non-apologies before Congress and the world, invoked the billions of people on his website as a singular community?

Powazek’s got it right here, a bunch of people online is as akin to a bar as anything.

I’m of the nerd vintage who came of age reading Slashdot, so Cory Doctorow has long been a fixture in my map of the tech landscape. I remember staying late a few nights at my first real job to print out chapters of his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, on the company’s toner dime.

As the industry shifted, it seemed more and more like Doctorow’s arguments about digital rights were losing, or at least failing. His warnings about DRM and trading control over our computers for slick design started to feel, at the very least, quaint as streaming and the iPhone ascended. Rather than shrink back, though, Doctorow only expanded his critique, in march-step with the locust-like way tech was, as Marc Andreessen so inelegantly yet appropriately put it, “eating the world”. After the global financial crisis, it wasn’t just computer manufacturers and global entertainment conglomerates but finance, management consulting, and burgeoning social media companies that came under Doctorow’s ever critical eye.

Reading this recent profile in the New Yorker, I couldn’t help but feel Doctorow’s post-cyberpunk oeuvre has been pretty much right all along. His hand wringing about DRM and mobile phones that we can no longer repair were the forbearers of a level of corporate intrusion into our everyday lives that now feels inescapable.

Having read Doctorow for over 20 years now, I can’t help but marvel at not just his amazingly prolific output but his consistency. As the Washington Consensus of neoliberalism has given way to the Silicon Valley Consensus of a neo Gilded Age, Doctorow’s critique has held up remarkably well. If it feels weird the self-styled brahmins of Sand Hill Road are, for example, cheerleading massive consolidation and monopoly power when it comes to using capital over labor in the case of Uber, but very performatively skeptical of that same monopoly power when it comes to Apple’s app store, it will be comforting to know Doctorow has written extensively about how they’re both wrong. The same is true for those on the left who saw social media as tech-as-liberation during the remarkably brief aftermath of the Arab Spring — Doctorow knew this was foolish long before Cambridge Analytica or Elon Musk.

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like he intends to slow down, with eight books currently in the queue and his gaze ever widening to AI, VR, crypto, and whatever else is coming. I’m willing to bet he’ll continue to be right.

Tom Scocca and Max Read are two of my favorite writers, whose beats roughly translate to “what the hell is happening??” as the internet terraforms every aspect of our culture.

And as someone who was just as surprised as they were that Disney made a Star Wars prequel-spinoff-of-a-spinoff-prequel, I knew their discussion of the merits of Andor would be great.

And that, I think, was what made Andor so great and so relentless. Gilroy seemed interested, above all, in the question of what it would actually be like to live under, or within, a Galactic Empire, day after day: the material and moral experience—the bureaucracy and logistics (even the erotics)—that would go with an interplanetary system of domination.

There’s incisive corporate media decoding! Excellent Hollywood history! Parenting advice! Even some politics!

UPDATE: There’s also this excellent piece from Jamelle Bouie’s must-read newsletter.

while “Andor” is billed as a show about the Rebellion, it is just as much, if not more, a show about the Empire. It is most interested, I think, in how the Empire works — in the bureaucracy of domination. Key moments take place within the Imperial intelligence agency, in scenes reminiscent of a John le Carré novel or adaptation (it helps that many of the actors are British, with the Received Pronunciation that we expect from Imperial officers in Star Wars). We see how paperwork in an office translates to brutality for ordinary people on the ground; how Imperial control is administered, and how dissent is repressed. We see why someone would join the Empire, find fulfillment in the Empire, seek to advance Imperial goals. It is a show that uses the idea of the “banality of evil” in exactly the way it was meant.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, writing on their blog:

The aim of the Internet Archive Democracy’s Library is to collect, preserve and make freely available all the published works of all the democracies– the federal, provincial, and municipal government publications– so that we can efficiently learn from each other to solve our biggest challenges in parallel and in concert.

Democracy’s Library is the foundational information of free people.

There’s no link to a working site because nothing exists yet. It’s an ambitious idea and if anyone can actually get there, it’s the good folks that power archive.org.

From the tone of the post, it seems like the ultimate site will be at least somewhat crowdsourced. I can imagine that they’ll provide tools and resources and rely on local groups to find the docs and keep their respective sites filled with content.

I don’t know that the social era of the internet is ending but it’s reached a definite inflection point and people seem to be looking around for other ways forward. And while blogs never really died they’re certainly down from their highest points. Still, there’s good stuff out there and ooh.directory is a good place to start.

Phil Gyford (he of Samuel Pepys online diary) built the decidedly web1.0 site to showcase the hundreds of blogs still churning away.

A few years ago, I noticed the number of people who died from gun deaths and the number of people who died from car crashes was roughly the same — about 35,000 per year. This is, of course, a grim a coincidence but I kind of extrapolated this theory that 35k is roughly the number of preventable deaths most Americans are willing to accept while just blithely going about their lives.

It’s obviously a silly and naive view of the world and really my own confirmation bias at work — I despise both gun and car culture and the wretched way they work on the world, and this numerical coincidence fit neatly into my worldview.

We’re starting to get statistics of how the world is changing since the start of the pandemic and it’s horrific to see these two numbers have both risen sharply, in nearly equal proportion. Despite much lower rates of driving in 2020, deaths from car crashes rose 7% and then another 10% in 2021. In 2020, there were 14% more gun deaths than in 2019.

In a piece for The Upshot in the Times, Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano dig into the data as to why the United States is one of the few developed countries where car deaths rose during the pandemic. The story is a familiar one of American exceptionalism — where other countries have made sensible changes to infrastructure and regulations on car size, the U.S. has simply allowed car manufactures build bigger more dangerous cars while cars, like guns before, have become another front in the culture wars.

Safety advocates and government officials lament that so many deaths are often tolerated in America as an unavoidable cost of mass mobility. But periodically, the illogic of that toll becomes clearer: Americans die in rising numbers even when they drive less. They die in rising numbers even as roads around the world grow safer. American foreign service officers leave war zones, only to die on roads around the nation’s capital.

In 2021, nearly 43,000 people died on American roads, the government estimates. And the recent rise in fatalities has been particularly pronounced among those the government classifies as most vulnerable — cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians.

I was living in New York City at the start of the pandemic and the mayor declared an open streets plan that was the absolute bare minimum of sacrificing some car space for public use. Cops — most of whom live outside of the city and experience the city through their cruisers — refused to enforce even this basic plan. I made daily calls to my council member and borough president to no avail. I would drag the barricades back across the streets myself late at night only to see them broken up the next morning. The empty streets were too enticing for reckless drivers from across state lines whose nightly races added a 100-decibel cacophony to that already anxious summer.

Since moving to a smaller city I’ve been advocating for more bike lanes and even happily seen a short section of a major thoroughfare through town converted from four treacherous lanes to two with a turn lane and two bike lanes. The asphalt hasn’t even finished yet and of course drivers have taken to every media outlet to complain about the injustice of sharing “their roads” with “privileged” bikers, despite the fact the new configuration is such an obvious safety and convenience win for everyone. It’s maddening.

I no longer think there’s any upper limit to the amount of death Americans will accept before they change their lifestyles. Over a million Covid deaths, children slaughtered in their schools by weapons built for soldiers, cyclists crushed under the wheels of ever larger trucks. We know how to solve these problems.

I enjoyed this tidy interview with Zoë Schiffer in Embedded mostly because she seems to be the most offline, online journalist there is. I find Schiffer’s arc from UX writer at Uber to freelance tech labor reporter to breaking tweets about the whole Musk Twitter takeover (itself a labor story at heart) fascinating.

I’ve followed Molly White’s Web 3 is Going Just Great for a while now — it’s just the right mix of authoritative accounting of the myriad dysfunctions of what gets labeled “web 3” (even if they’re just run of the mill scams) and well deserved snark.

I didn’t realize she’d open sourced the backend, so I was interested to see Twitter is Going Great! on (where else) Mastodon using the same framework.

If I had a complaint it’s that the site is about a decade late. Musk’s tenure at Twitter so far has been a disaster beyond what anyone could’ve predicted but he really is more of a symptom than the cause.

John Gruber asks:

I’m curious what else you think has surprised Musk about Twitter thus far. Not what you think Musk is wrong about, per se, but what he is already surprised about.

I think Musk is genuniely surprised he hasn’t been able (so far) to bluster his way through this.

I mean this sincerely. In an economy driven by attention, Musk uses bluster like a CDO, it’s how he became the world’s richest man and how he managed to just about single-handedly turn a public company private and rule by fiat.

I think it’s surprising because Musk’s bluster not only generates the attention he needs but acts as an ace up his sleeve, a way to guarantee a win. Musk leveraged, and then weaponized, the absolute worst tendencies of the social-era internet — fandom, brigading, the financialization of everything, the final merge of politics and identity. And Twitter was his weapon of choice.

Take Tesla, a real company that makes actual cars. Not so long ago, Tesla’s market value was higher than the nine leading auto manufacturers combined, despite the fact that Tesla sold fewer cars last year than Mazda. Obviously, this was absurd, but it happened because Musk is a master manipulator of attention, the currency of the day.

I think he thought he could just keep the bluster going. In fact, I’m sure he thought once he owned the braindead megaphone, it would be even more valuable to him specifically, enough to justify paying a 4-5x premium.

But he may finally be overleveraged, both literally and in his ability to command and corral attention.

In these finacialized times, I’m loathe to contribute to the further debasement of the language with this overwrought metaphor — strike me down if I ever declare myself “bullish” about something — but this kind of overleverage is something of an unavoidable theme this week.

FTX, the second largest cryptocurrency exchange, melted down in spectacular fashion. The Grand Old Party, representing one half of the American political system and still embarrassingly in the thrall of a TV-addled tinpot populist, humiliated at a midterm election that they should have handily dominated. And Musk’s disastrous management of a company that is famous for being disastrously managed — all are showing that even the ability to manipulate attention has limits.