Twenty-Six: Web Three (08-15-2022)
People on Twitter love lamenting the death of the old internet (the internet of 2005-2012, mostly, since these are millenials and early zoomers who weren't there for the actual early internet of the 1970s and 1980s), whining and crying about the loss of authentic personalities, individual blogs, and the consolidation of previously fractured communities onto either aggregator sites or major social media platforms (with the former slowly fading as well). These people are no more than curmudgeons among mindless fools, who cannot stand the new age of the internet and, like the elderly who bemoaned the death of the silent film, are simply being left behind by the march of time. The new era of the internet, rife with NFTs, likely only a single or possibly two major media platforms, and the strict control of information and content moderation has already become inevitable.
This is okay, however. A seventh of the world lives under a similarly unified internet ecosystem, with little complaint and absolutely no starvation for content. The Chinese internet is actual a powerful economic driver in a way the US and its exported Western internet is not. Americans afraid of the loss of culture or deterioration of novelty with the growth of tech company power should look to China to see that this inevitable centralization is not necessarily a swan song for internet culture. Fear not- this is not another post about China and how great China is, or how China has gotten pretty much everything right, or how America's continued provocation of the otherwise politically stable and dormant China is an egregious overstepping of American power.
In fact, the death of "internet culture", which is not actually dying, but evolving and maturing more or less alongside the growth of the internet as it exits its adolescence, is a good thing for its biggest fans, millenials and early zoomers. It is a good thing because its disappearance from the public realm, its quarantine to archive sites and spotty memories, will mean that those fans will finally put their stupid phones down, turn their stupid overclocked CPUs or overpriced MacBooks off and do something with their lives. The bulk of internet culture was, or is, centered around the encouragement of antisocial and unproductive behavior. Previous farms of online lingo and content like 4chan and somethingawful are often celebrated for their cultural influence, but even a brief inquiry into the most notorious or known instances of said influence shows that the majority of their communities are horrible people, involved in horrible things, garnering a culture of being a lazy, disgusting person.
Some amount of this early internet hedonism has carried over onto the present internet, and the current climate certainly still rewards negative behaviors with attention and engagement, but the behavior is derived from a need for attention rather than a desire to disgust or anger the audience. At the very least, destructive behavior should be for social reasons rather than antisocial.
Whatever. The centralization of digital power sucks, but is entirely optional in terms of its real effect on any given person's life. Handing over sanity to the internet, then complaining when the internet changes, is voluntary. There's a big world out there, and none of it is online.