The internet is already over

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over

by imichael • 4 years ago

97 69 4 years ago

samkriss.substack.com

hoseja2• 4 years ago

This guy's slurping the slop off the top of the mob and complains it's fecal and watery, while invoking alchemy to try to explain why.

There's more deep, weird, genuinely interesting stuff than ever, just usually not on twitter. Actually, yeah, the author is conflating Web 2.0 with the internet.

boxmonster• 4 years ago

I was going to say the article is written in the style of Bill Hicks with some George Carlin, but then I remember that everyone is freaked out right now and "end of the world" themes are popular. No the internet is not going away, unless of course the world does. Some current concerns from an American point of view:

- An ex President may be indicted soon, the first time in US history

- The ex President threatens the nation with the wrath of his supporters

- How much danger are Americans in from domestic terrorism? Not sure, but could be substantial

- The American West is drying up. Europe and China are running out of water too

- Russia is losing the war. No one knows what to expect when Putin is backed into a corner

- An election is 7 weeks away. No one knows what will happen. Will there be revolt by the losers?

- The pandemic may be declared over but is still killing people. Long Covid is a problem

- Gender and sex cultural wars are raging in the Anglo sphere

- Inflation is slowly eating into the savings of Americans

- Supply chain and workforce turmoil are still a problem from the pandemic

- The Greenland ice sheet is melting at a faster rate than expected. The Gulf Stream may shut down

- Climate change is disrupting agriculture and there are dangers of famines and climate refugees

It's all happening at once in real time.

BenGosub• 4 years ago

You've missed the point, the author explains how some things are simply older than the internet and will probably outlive it (the night, the sea). I think it's the Lindy effect.

P.s. do you have to make this about politics?

desindol• 4 years ago

Did you put the author in any context or are you trying to gaslight the response to a highly political article?

dane-pgp• 4 years ago

Thank you for that compact summary of the state of the world. I completely agree. Reading those 12 simple points was like doomscrolling, except I didn't even have to scroll, which feels so efficient!

bregma• 4 years ago

That's great, it starts with an earthquake Birds and snakes, and aeroplanes...

forgetfreeman• 4 years ago

Weird that a mild rehash of current events is getting downvoted. Clearly I have no idea what motivates you people. Anyway, I was going to say this person's writings remind me of Warren Ellis at the tail end of a 14 hour blotter-fueled house party. Head still reeling but too strung out to muster any but the most muted emotional response.

hoseja2• 4 years ago

Why is it downvoted? Half of it is Trump Derangement Syndrome, people are tired.

v4dok• 4 years ago

Definitely an entertaining read, so in that matter it "won" its place here. Now in regards to the actual content I am torn.

On one hand you could say he is bored, bitter, "old" dude who is tired from keeping up with the advancements and declares the end of progress.

On the other hand, you could argue that there is some genuine insight there. Internet is not an internal part of being a human. I even subscribe to the idea that it many ways it goes against being a human (social and physical detachment, desensitized emotions). And in the end of the day, no matter what is said and done on the internet, our existence is primarily physical.

Maybe the internet will not die, but maybe there is a regression to the mean. It feels like the excitement of the "digital self" is past its peak and people are slowly re-discovering that offline life is "cool again". Or if not "cool" a necessary plane to exist in order to effect changes. I think the Floyd example was on point; change happens on the street, not online. The stakes are simply not high enough there.

Karrot_Kream• 4 years ago

I guess I think very differently from the author and you. I fundamentally see "online" and "offline" parts of the world as two parts of the same whole with fading distinction. The offline is the online; the online is the offline. The Floyd protests were significantly organized on social media and activist discourse happened all over social networks.

Some people will spend more time online than offline, some the opposite, just like some folks spend more time playing sports or reading books. That doesn't mean they engage in separate lives, though probably do have different circles of community and friends.

woojoo666• 4 years ago

I think the same way. Online and offline are just different mediums of communication, of experience. Each has their own advantages, and their own UX, and thus there is a place for both of them. Well at least until we get true matrix-style simulation, after which the offline world becomes a subset of what's possible in the online world.

twic• 4 years ago

Definitely an entertaining read, so in that matter it "won" its place here. Now in regards to the actual content I am torn.

Sam Kriss takes some getting used to. He is definitely someone you read for the ride, not the propositional content. A rollercoaster, not a freight train.

This is my favourite piece of his: https://theoutline.com/post/1249/what-happens-when-you-stare...

raydiatian• 4 years ago

HN articles about doomsday are utterly moronic 9/10. I just glanced and saw an obnoxiously engineered attempt to be ominous. It’s not even the right Goya painting on the header. Will not read

FreakLegion• 4 years ago

The writing wasn't for me either, but Goya isn't mentioned, and Rubens' Saturn predates Goya's by a couple hundred years.

barrysteve• 4 years ago

The internet is over because we have to start subtracting sh*t off it, like pop ups that returned in cookie notices and sign up fade-in boxes. We need to subtract off the bot spam, the copy & paste blogs that haunt google. We need to subtract off posts like this one that dare to fill the readers mind with hopeless garbage glossed up with red hot cultural molasses.

The internet is the khala from starcraft, it connects our thoughts and emotions to our internet brothers and sisters. An interconnected web of points.

We don't need a gustav dore inspired horror cluttering up the place. Subtract out the froth at the bottom of a crashed beach wave, and you'll have the best internet there's ever been.

keiferski• 4 years ago

The author makes a lot of witty, erudite References – a method that has annoyingly become popular and is often mistaken as "good writing" – but I think he has missed a simple and obvious truth: culture is determined by fashion. Not fashion as in clothing, but fashion as in ideas and things that are trendy for a time then fade away, replaced by the next thing. The next thing is often an indirect reaction to the previous thing. Sometimes it's the exact opposite.

Culture has been very online for the last decade and extremely online for the last 3 years. We are just witnessing a cultural shift away from this and toward ideas like real, physical, human, touch, outside, present, etc. being trendy. The Internet isn't "over", it's just adapting to a new cultural fashion. The technological immaturity of stuff like VR is also a factor.

By 2040, we'll all be extremely online again.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

It is true, trends are immense social forces but also very much absurd and chaotic. It works until it doesn't and there's another wave.

wiz21c• 4 years ago

Punk is not dead !

themitigating• 4 years ago

Your initial comment about his bad writing is subjective but you don't state that

lengomango2• 4 years ago

Doesn't he talk about precisely this in the first section?

whiddershins• 4 years ago

Didn’t read the article. But this comment …

Careful, you have gotten so postmodern you have lost your way.

Touch for example isn’t just an idea, no matter what a half dozen philosophers and academics say.

Traubenfuchs• 4 years ago

The vast majority of this article might as well be GPT-3 puke. Some interesting bits can be found at "When I say the internet is running dry,", afterwards it's right back to GPT-3 level drivel and I stopped reading.

Was this really written by a human?

daniel-cussen4• 4 years ago

That's the sad part--like I'm human but get accused of being a mentally ill bot of some kind--the sad part is there's a lot of folks that don't write that much better in most respects than GPT-3. Well and if they read a lot of GPT-3, it reinforces. I for one don't have a problem communicating with machines, they have a message that message might have worth. Just needs a little bit of collateral to look at it in the first place.

didericis• 4 years ago

Your comment is subject to the same criticism.

Most online content is. I think most of what the author is complaining about can be attributed to this inability to distinguish between genuine human conversation with real people and automated attempts to get you to engage, not the internet itself.

jstanley• 4 years ago

The author makes a lot of witty, erudite References – a method that has annoyingly become popular and is often mistaken as "good writing" – but I think he has missed a simple and obvious truth: culture is determined by fashion.

If culture is determined by fashion, and our fashion is that lots of witty, erudite References is considered good writing, then does it not follow that our culture is that lots of witty, erudite References is considered good writing? And therefore that this article actually is good writing, in our culture?

suoduandao2• 4 years ago

No, because our culture holds that truth is not held by the culture, but by the individual's instinct for rightness. Clothes may be a cultural construct, but no amount of collective lying can cover the emperor's nudity.

subjectsigma• 4 years ago

Kind of a silly article but I agree with the premise. Social media is dying, but I'm not sure the argument is as strong for anything else.

People are withdrawing from public Internet forums like Twitter. Twitter is so obscenely devoid of value that your average person has caught on and stays away.

But think about this - if you could plot the number of hours I spent on video chat (Zoom, Discord, Snapchat, Facetime, WebEx, etc.) over the years, starting circa 2018, it would be a near linear increase. Since there are only 24 hours in a day it has to hit a limit eventually, but when? All that time is the "private" Internet, 1-to-1 or very small groups. Meanwhile I'm using Instagram primarily for DMs and ignoring most of the main features of the app.

camillomiller• 4 years ago

Old man is getting older. News at 12.

smitty1e2• 4 years ago

All human efforts

Are but Towers of Babel

Growing to collapse

vixen99• 4 years ago

Maybe true over aeons but blatantly untrue in the shorter term which is what inevitably matters to us now while we're alive making that effort.

smitty1e2• 4 years ago

How many companies on on the Dow Jones were traded 50 years ago?

vitiral2• 4 years ago

Internet haiku

richardatlarge• 4 years ago

Instead of approaching the author as right or wrong, approach the article in terms of how it might be useful for thinking about the future of the internet.

Many even here on HN frame things in a divisive way.

The article asks us to imagine the future. That is an interesting place to begin…

throwaway787544• 4 years ago

As long as clickbait drivel like this is upvoted, and advertising is legal, there will be internet.

And after that, when we return to the primordial ooze of AOLs and Prodigys and CompuServes, and even before that to UseNet and BBSes, when there is barely a commercial entity left, but there is still a wire to shove weird binary non-euclydian poetry into, there will be internet.

And even after, when illicit shortwave modems screech their crude 300 baud message across the planet, and very slowly a fat gray cat, Cheshire-grinning a question about a sandwich, progressively renders into a cracked and crudely lit LCD, an old meme will take form, and there, in the gray matter, there will be internet.

Nobody really knows when the body dies. After brain death, and then organ failure, and all the electricity's gone, a rotting corpse still feeds the world, mother's diesel for the biological engine of life. Who knows where the internet will go, or for how long, or in what strange aeons it will return? Who can say if ours was even the first?

jvm___• 4 years ago

...let there be light.

daniel-cussen4• 4 years ago

Beautiful prose-etry.

I see the internet as an extension of the telephone before it, then before it the telegraph, then before that flags on ships and messenger pigeons with like a color tied to their feet depending on who won the Battle of Actium. Blue meant it was Augustus, pretty efficient for that time.

simonh• 4 years ago

Thank you. Too many commentators equate them being bored or disillusioned with something as meaning that thing is dead. Meanwhile umpteen millions of people carry on as usual. I’ve lost track of how many times newsletters, blogs, whatever have been declared dead. Whereas in reality all of these are still growing strongly in both number and user engagement. It’s lazy mindless valueless trend worshiping masquerading as analysis.

sweetbitter2• 4 years ago

I would love to get some reading recommendations from you that fuel this style of writing. Pretty please?

mrkramer2• 4 years ago

This article is akin to dot-com bubble mentality: "Internet sucks", "Internet is dead, move on" etc. but then Amazon, Google and Facebook rose, proved critics wrong and got mad rich doing it.

If engagement and revenue is in decline for internet businesses that means nothing. There are always business cycles of expansion and retraction.

The only thing that can kill internet is something better than the internet.

JohnFen• 4 years ago

Amazon, Google and Facebook rose, proved critics wrong

I disagree, but it probably depends on what it is that you value in the internet. In my view Amazon, Google, and Facebook are all large factors in why the internet sucks more now than ever.

mrkramer2• 4 years ago

I saw your comment only now but I wanted to say that I value free, reliable and somewhat satisfactory service that Amazon, Google and Facebook offer. They are not excellent but they get the job done. I'm aware that I'm trading my privacy for free service but there are no real alternatives to them or to their business model. That's why I stopped using Facebook 10 years ago before WhatsApp got popular now I only use WhatsApp, again Facebook's property but who cares at this point. I think the only viable competitor to them in the long term is decentralized crypto solution like blockchain and its smart contracts. But that stuff is far away from getting mature and widely accepted as means of commerce, communication and sharing of data and information.

aeonque• 4 years ago

Only a slave mentality of a Christian in a fantasy world of believe or burn could turn a fundamental law of the universe into a depressing and horror of negative.

All things arise and pass away. This is truth.

If you believe it to be terrible then you are blind to half your life.

Once a man, twice a child. This is not sad, it is nature. The end gives VALUE to what existed.

The author criticizes the downfall of the techno-optimist, pretending to be one amidst his sad broken romance of limited perception and judgement of the state of world.

The internet is a tool that humans created. It’s going to stick around just like fire did for us, which is now a convenient plastic container in your pocket btw. Because it isn’t bad or good (believe or burn - goodness, learn to think and stop feeling), it just is.

There is nothing wrong with the world. It is as it always has been and it always will be., arising and passing away. The only problem is that your eyes are closed.

Rather than contemplate the horror of the internet, why not contemplate what it could become next? How do we turn the camp fire into a lighter? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

vitiral2• 4 years ago

You make good points, but I didn't see such value judgements from the author. Instead, I interpreted the horror imagery as very much to your point: the way things are and will always be, the endless cycle of life and death which so many want to look away from, but which we must embrace.

jeegsy• 4 years ago

Only a slave mentality of a Christian in a fantasy world of believe

This type of reductive discourse cannot die soon enough..

askhan• 4 years ago

Reading the article with the understanding that it was written by a bot, complete with Denigration of Daily Mail subroutine, helps prove its point.

sweetbitter2• 4 years ago

Sup, one of those techno-optimists you mentioned here who uses the 'net as if it's still 2007. I must ask,

U wot m8?

helf• 4 years ago

Dear god. That was like trying to read a word salad stream of consciousness from a high grad student.

marcus_holmes• 4 years ago

There is simply nothing there online.

This isn't true. There is lots of fascinating stuff out there (including this article, which is well-written and enjoyable).

The problem is that it's hard to find, because it's covered over with a layer of SEO-optimised crap churned out by an entire industry of professionals who spend all day, every day, trying to smother anything good or interesting online with their bland, outsourced, uninteresting, joyless, "content". I don't think that's what they actually want to achieve, but that's the net effect, and they know it, so it might as well be.

Gareth321• 4 years ago

I agree. The internet still has wonderful things. It's just harder and harder to find. Google is apparently either a) unable to defend itself against SEO, or (more likely) b) makes more money from SEO. Either way, it is quickly losing relevance. I look forward to new engines with better, more human results, so I don't have to keep typing in "site:reddit.com" to the end of all my queries. It's getting absurd now.

If anyone is interested in alternatives, I recommend Kagi. If the subscription hits the pocket book too hard, consider Neeva and even Yandex.

SleepilyLimping• 4 years ago

It's the same thing with people disillusioned by Marvel or Star Wars or whatever. You need to be able to tell internalize that if you want content that isn't slop, you're going to have to hunt a lot harder for it, and pay a lot more for it, than you did in the past.

jl6• 4 years ago

The internet is fine. This is the sound of bubbles popping.

zimpenfish• 4 years ago

In 1997, Ken Olson declared that ‘there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.’

a) Ken Olsen, b) 1977.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Olsen

motohagiography• 4 years ago

$150 billion, mostly from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which it’s poured into Uber and DoorDash and WeWork and Klarna and Slack. It provides the money that effectively subsidises your autistic digital life.

While I wasn't interested in following the writer down his garden path, this stood out and made me wonder whether over a large enough portfolio, later stage investments that increase the velocity of money can be recouped by investing in the emergent earlier stages of the growth they create. It's a bit of an inflationary and trickle-bubble argument, but from a tech venture perspective, even if Uber and WeWork were subsidized, they changed how a generation moved and worked and created knock on growth.

Softbank's moneybomb investments created a lot of wealth for people who worked for them, but also launched hundreds if not thousands of more companies. The loss of tens of millions here or there also goes on to produce new seed and A round opportunities within a 5-7 year horizon. It suggests that large later stage rounds from giant funds should index on whether the company is increasing the velocity of money enough that it is likely to yield a certain number of new companies, and its talent is risk taking enough to join more startups, and then find a way to get exposure and participation in those through the earlier stage VCs that focus on them as a hedge. Like a $150m investment in a D round for some tech company whose massive growth is behind it should be hedged with $10m+ of participation in VC funds doing seed and A rounds in that company's market where all their talent is going to leave for now that the $150m company has gone corporate.

jackcosgrove• 4 years ago

What I have heard about the Vision Fund strategy is that it's to subsidize a company until it is large enough to go public and be included in the major index funds. After that happens there's a lot more investor inertia and retail money.

Again, it's just something I've heard.

larsnystrom• 4 years ago

It’s as if the author put my thoughts into words, and then put all other thoughts into words, and it resulted in many, many words, without much thought put into it.

jaqalopes• 4 years ago

I’ve been waiting for an article like this. I feel much the same way. My question for the author is, what do we do about it? I’d love to make some friends who share my worldview and go camp off-grid with them once a month to be in touch with real life. How to find those people and coordinate that trip? Therein lies the rub.

It’s easy to be a solo dropout and turn your back on the world. The problem comes when no one goes with you, and now you’re just an old man yelling at a cloud. I yearn desperately for a life where my connections to everyone I know aren’t mediated by the internet. But as long as everyone else is still on the internet, I’m pretty much SOL.

lobstrosity420• 4 years ago

If the author is to be believed, all you need to do is wait 5 to 10 years. Try to join a local hackerspace in the meantime.

taylodl• 4 years ago

One thing is for sure, this site is already over thanks to HN!

bullen• 4 years ago

The internet is the final medium and media.

But energy is finite.

So he's both right and wrong at the same time.

Eventually he will be right when we reach Mad Max without cars.

The internet is already over

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