I was born too early for telepathy. I was born too late for email, although I did receive plenty of e-cards from my parents. But luckily for me, I was here just in time for the chatroom, I was on the scene in time for forums, and much to the profit of my in-network optometrist, I was born just in time for talking on the computer.
There are 2 Internets. One has passed, but the other is here, a chrome, corner-less chimera who devours cookies and has already launched a Reader’s Digest ICBM directly at your house. This Internet is a digital pantheism: you and it are One, and the Internet of Things is as much an inside joke as it is an understatement. The whole of our existence is itself an Internet of Things. This is the Internet to whom we owe our defeat in the war between our most vulnerable – young and old – and the iPad.
But in my dreams, I see another yet. I see the Internet in its domesticated obedience, a descendant of the horses who carried wares between mercantile societies and the bustling new interstates from a post-war age. This Internet is TCP/UDP port numbers and IP addresses, a medium whose access point is fixed and localized to one or two rooms in a household. It is the deliberate asynchronous movement of data across oceans, and it produces stronger social bonds than the present powers of the air.
What did this look like, and why must we be careful to define it? To be sure, I am not describing something as elusive as languages lost to time or knowledge that’s long since been forgotten. Obviously, the Internet is still here, and deep divers and Anthony Bourdain’s will take all the best spots with them to their graves. But herein lies exactly the problem: the Internet as a distinguished mode of communication is dead.
The Internet as Pantheism
My name is Josh Camacho. This is my full name as it appears on all government identification, and it is also like to produce my home address, phone number, and mother’s maiden name after an insultingly easy search. More to the point, “Josh Camacho” is my username now. Thinking back to the now-extinct rearing of human young formerly known as parenting, one may remember the ancient adage: Never give your full name out on the Internet. Today this advice is outdated, and one may easily confuse it with elbows on the table or asking parent’s permission for a Disney Channel Flash game. This speaks to the constant blurring of online and offline that distinguishes the pantheistic Internet. “BRB”, “GTG” – nevermore, because “Josh Camacho” never logs off. I can be reached at any time, and my every movement or action is linked, recorded, and sold.
I was definitely born too late for meaningful public spaces, but the 2000s Internet may as well have sufficed. I say we bite the bullet and admit it, that the world lost something special when all those stupid forums shut down. This is a useful claim because while we know by this point that the pantheistic Internet is no good, it is harder to accept that the old Internet produced its own sort of benefits: friendships and communities, yes, but knowledge too. The early series-of-tubes Internet peaked with that nascent smartphone era where it felt as though digital momentum might indefinitely produce net positives.
Here, maybe, is where I start to falter. It could be that I am losing you by now. But recall a time where YouTube felt overwhelming. There was a very popular idea that you could stumble onto anyone, a real-life person whose humanity was more uniquely expressed by their artificial username than their given name. Now, YouTube has probably exploded exponentially in raw data alone, but does it actually feel as though there are more videos? Blame algorithms, which open you like a fridge and serve you your own chilled blood. Rather than broaden your horizons, the feeling of the Internet elicits the waveform of a Shepard’s tone: constantly, incessantly getting bigger, but never actually moving forward. And that’s all to say nothing of commercials.
Content and Consumption
Or “commercial” to be more precise. And, really, do you think I’m unaware of the cost of hosting a web server? For that matter, I am no expert on economics beyond an acute pit in my stomach (this is the correct position). If nothing else, though, might I at least reminisce for a time when ads would nestle together on the margins of a page like newspaper classifieds? All that leisure is coming back to bite us, too, such as “cable-alternative” streaming services all deciding unanimously to start slipping unskippable ads back into the fold. Can I not also mourn the sudden jump from sponsorships to full-blown Hollywood collaborations? It is not the inconvenience factor that rallies these criticisms but the shift in the spirit of the early Internet from community to centralization. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find modern-day examples of site administrators graciously hosting a forum for their users and bearing all expenses. Much as I’d like to see the positives in the ubiquity of platforms such as Patreon, I can’t help but notice that its existence is its own sort of parasite, existing only to skim a few points off each donation. All this is not to say that altruism once guided the invisible hand of Internet flame wars all along, but rather that the sense of community has decomposed into a transactional relationship. There are no forums because you can fit only so many ads on them, likewise for the death of the 10-minute YouTube video or the birth of the multi-network deal inflating every single “content creator” into stardom.
Content – that’s all it is, and that’s why everyone seems to be living on the same Internet now, albeit with different talking heads on their 24-hour news broadcasts/bombardments. In the world of advertising, infinite scroll ended up being the million-dollar solution to the problem of limited real estate, quickly becoming the default feed. Now it is impossible to run out of content; moreover, it’s probably why everyone over and over says “content” now, for the purpose of going online – rather, for the merging of online with reality as discrete categories – is for consumption. Content you will consume and consumed you will be, all for the satisfaction of whoever has bid the highest for your attention. With this dulling of the Internet into content, the idea of a dedicated space has finally and lamely wilted away.
Losing Touch
I don’t think I’ve talked on the computer in many, many years. I think very few people have. The act of deliberately communicating the written word by way of the wire has vanished, its replacement the unyielding insistence on multimedia as the highest pursuit. Previously, talking on the computer meant sitting down (this is key) and deciding to either initiate a conversation or contribute to one. Instant messages were notable not because they were thoughtless but rather because of their speed and convenience. Cache limitations left them with a reputation of ephemerality, but this characteristic does not lead so inevitably into carelessness.
An IM back-and-forth started with a greeting, and this may bring a surprise to our modern sensibilities. One can hardly imagine sending a text that just says “hi” without any sinister motives. The influence of phones as the primary means by which we go online is probably why IM etiquette disappeared. Forget about saying hello – when was the last time you said goodbye? The anxiety in waiting for one’s activity bubble to turn green and the dread of slowly inching toward the dreaded “GTG” have been replaced by an uneasy sort-of-always-here feeling. Maybe that’s why everyone is so casual now. Is anyone really online anymore? No longer active participants, we carelessly spill our thoughts to everyone and to no one in particular. We are here out of circumstance.
No, I will not use Discord, which is about as conducive to meaningful conversation as a shoulder-side conversation in a shopping mall. Discord is a mesocosm, an Internet in a bottle that does too much and has awkwardly filled the gaps left by the disappearance of the older Internet modes. Its explosion in popularity given what we know about it as a format does raise some questions with our lens. It’s obviously too transient for a forum, but why exactly does it fail the “talking on the computer” test? I think the biggest reason is the takeover of voice as the standard for digital communication. When we lost text, we lost the charm of reaching out across a digital chasm; more than that, though, voice became physically manifest in the written word itself. Consider texting, which is arguably far closer to a phone call than it is to chatting, partly because of how popular dictation has become but also because it, too, is reliant on personally identifiable information, much like human speech. As it concerns texting, in direct comparison to the friendly anonymity of the old Internet, of course I’ll keep everything secure under a forward-facing persona. The death of the username has done more damage to self-conceptuality than the original idea of the username as a mask.
Before the Fall
Alone, in those frightening early morning hours of a summer’s new moon, I’d sit at the keyboard and vanish for hours like a ghost. Totally lost not only in deep thought but also in the company of another person, had I not been born too early for telepathy after all? But then, inevitably, as sure as my eyes would start to feel heavy upon my face, the conversation would end. We’d go offline, for by that point, the entire Internet would seem itself asleep.
There is a self-aware uncertainty lurking behind these words. At the end of the day, I am 25 years old, and here I am eulogizing the loss of perhaps too many middle school weekends in Minecraft servers (back when the grass was still bright green). This playful admission goes only so far, though, and if I am even a little uncertain about others’ memories, I am keenly aware of my own. Everything having already been accounted for, my personal attestation is that my old usernames are far truer to myself than the “Josh Camacho” of late industry. The old textual model of the early Internet had to die because the antithesis of the infinite scroll is a conversation that ends.