2 Comments
Dec 31, 2021·edited Jan 1, 2022

I'd slightly amend Balk's law: everything I hate about the internet is actually everything I hate about *some* people, namely money-grubbers like the ones who dominate Greater (but not great) Silicon Valley and the grifters and trolls they enable.

"... and some of the people are even good, yet the overall effect is something else.": As I believe you realize (e.g., you wrote about it here in September), that's largely because the whole thing is controlled by deeply obnoxious people like Zuck who don't care about our enjoyment, merely our "engagement", because that's how they get truckloads of money from the marketers who are their customers. Your lobbing tweets at dumb online fights is great, as far as Jack (or whoever's running Twitter these days) is concerned, because it means you're "engaged", seeing ads (or "sponsored tweets"), and doing things that tell the "algorithm" still more about yourself and thereby help it steer you toward still more dumb fights. Make no mistake, Zuck, Jack, and their bros and the fat cats who back them are the primary problem here. Concern trolls like Hamid couldn't exist without the fundamentally sociopathic attitudes that shape the platforms they use.

"In some very real sense, he only exists to me as a source of a certain kind of irritating opinion.": Hence my motto: block early and often! (If you use troll-infested platforms like Twitter at all, which I don't anymore.)

"What are any of these weird little scolds talking about except themselves?": Nothing. As John Herrman remarked, "Who tweets? Brands, and people who believe themselves to be brands." I think that's a good approximation.

Oddly enough, I'm mildly optimistic that things are going to get better soon-ish. I've been watching this situation closely for many years now. Greater Silicon Valley mostly doesn't get it yet, but they have well and truly screwed the pooch. A solid majority of the public, in the USA and elsewhere, no longer trusts them, to anywhere near the extent they did ten years ago. And most people never did want the internet Zuck, Jack, et al. have given them. I expect we're going to see more and more alternatives spring up and get embraced by enough people to sustain them. (E.g., Substack probably qualifies.) No one of them will bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, but they won't need to in order to prosper.

Expand full comment

If the internet is people and hell is people (Sartre), then is all or only some of the internet hell?

Expand full comment