It is, and it isn't

The coming theinternetpocalypse

I largely agree with the sentiments in this piece by Sam Kriss, but let's talk about this bit:

"In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers: all those novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet plastic drab. And all your smug chortling over the people who failed to predict our internetty present—if anyone remembers it, it’ll be with exactly the same laugh."

Remember when people said the Internet was gonna kill television? Millions of words on the subject in the 90s and early 2000s - shit, I probably wrote some of them in my youthful enthusiasm.

And yet, of course, that did not happen. In fact, most people would agree, I think, that the era of the Internet heralded the “Golden Age” of television, from Buffy and The Sopranos and The Wire on down.

But in another way, the Internet did kill television… if the way you understand that word is “a medium of sequential audiovisual programs transmitted on VHF to boxes dedicated specifically to that purpose”. The Internet put a stake through the hearts of first broadcast and then cable TV, which is still spasming in its death throes.

The mechanism died, but the medium, thrived.

The opposite is the case here. “The Internet” is not social media. It's not TikTok, it's not YouTube, it's not morons shouting at each other through every available glory hole in the truck stop bathroom that is modern discourse. It's not the Web. It's not email. It's all of these things, and none of them.

When Kriss says “the Internet” will be over in five years or ten, I understand what he means - that this particular stupid, narcissistic, hypercapitalist culture that is not limited to but certainly emanates throughout and from the most popular bits of the Internet will almost certainly implode, and that right quickly.

But whatever comes next, unless it comes at the end of a nuclear war or climate extinction event, will also be “the Internet”. The evolution of all media to sit on top of digital globalized networking was, and remains despite the worst efforts of hype men and influencers, as fundamental a shift in how human technology and culture work as the invention of the printing press.

Nobody was wrong about that part. But the early, enthusiastic techno-optimists that Kriss mentions - and I know this, because I know and knew a lot of them personally, and knew their mindset a d their thinking and their outlook - were much like those radical theologians who hailed Gutenberg's invention because it surely meant that the word of God could be made available to everyone; surely this would usher in a new era of piety, right?

Right, you guys? Guys? Piety, right?

Every new transformative technology is both a delight and a disappointment to the first generations to create it and witness it. TV was going to be the greatest tool for educating the masses ever… until it wasn't. Except, one might argue, it also was: I would not be surprised if half a billion humans watched Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow and all the BBC educational stuff over the last century or so. The intended use became incidental, but even in incidentality - is that even a word? - it became profoundly influential.

So yes, “the Internet” sucks, but the Internet is still amazing and will continue to be as the ways in which we use it evolve. The media will die, here, but the mechanism will certainly survive.

I personally think that we are about to witness a sort of new digital version of the Amish ordnung - a moment where we stop and collectively evaluate exactly how we allow this technology to enter our homes and our heads, which bits are worth having and which represent a threat to our sanity and emotional stability. I think we're going to see a simultaneous return to older, less garish sorts of online discourse, along with a Great Leap Forward to whatever the hell comes next. If you'd asked me ten years ago, I would have said “what comes next” would be augmented reality, but I'm not so sure anymore. I think we all will collectively demand, as Kriss says, a season of rest.

But even that season will be carried on digital packets in one form or another. The Internet is not a Pandora's box; it's an evolutionary leap, for a species who primarily evolve through ideas and technology instead of simply biology. It's a Rubicon we crossed; there's no going back, but we can choose what path we take moving forward, and I think the willingness to make those choices - rather than having them made for us by Mad Men marketers and creepy techbro oligarchs - is what Kriss so rightly sees coming down this particular pipeline.

It can't happen soon enough, can it?