These are (very well crafted) words that describe the feeling I've felt for awhile now—both as a consumer and creator of internet content. There's a reason I've gravitated towards only writing here on Substack and have largely ignored my social media presence. I've had conversations that feel much more alive and lively in my comments here on Substack than I ever have anywhere else online, even dating back to the blogging heydays. I could also see a generational shift occurring as we continue to learn how damaging all this mindless scrolling is to our psyches, similar to how smoking has decreased dramatically in younger generations.
Smoking is a good example, as I touched on in the essay. You are always going to have a percentage of diehards who stick with something after its time in the sun has passed. So even if everything I have outlined above exactly comes to pass (which of course is questionable, as it is with any big prediction) there will still be a hardcore of doomscrollers who will still make up say 10-15% of the population.
But if people are leaving the Big Tent for smaller and more intimate means of online creation, discussion and entertainment then it would make sense that something like Substack would be at the vanguard. Sensing this is a large part of what drew us all here, I suspect.
While you are correct that this topic has been talked about a lot, the way you nestled it into a prediction was clever and smart - kept me reading and gave me hope. I look forward to reading what appear to be numerous comments below as I'm sure many have opinions ha! Also, have you heard of Rhizome? They are the train of the internet, still chugging along with the original concept but with the aid of sometimes newer technology - they have an archive of digital-born art dating back to the 80s - they even put together a physical book years ago that provided a sort of survey of the first art and artists to populate the internet when the internet was more about creativity and connection and less about the necessary minutiae of life. https://rhizome.org/tags/preservation/
I always try to find some sort of hope with these things. I think there's something tyrannical about dumping a lot of negative (albeit truthful) shit on people and then saying, 'right then, see ya.'
I'm generally predisposed to say 'this too shall pass' which is both true and a comfort of sorts. One of the problems about this version of the internet that we find ourselves stuck with is that everything is so extremely blinkered and zoomed in. By design I expect. Because 'eyeballs' and 'time on app' is the ultimate metric to drive those advertising dollars, so everything must be done to stop people coming to the obvious realisation that they are always free to simply log off and walk away. This is the fact that can never be spoken if this whole house of cards is going to remain standing.
Also from a brief scan through it Rhizome looks amazing, thanks for sharing this.
Very true, and even when you come to the realization, it's tough to walk away, especially after a cognitively taxing day. I always love your hopeful curmudgeon take on life! ;)
If I were to really go all in on being an online pundit 'The Hopeful Curmudgeon' would be the brand. You've nailed what I'm trying to be/ what I actually am.
Envious of the pub you found TJB. This essay reminds me of the German economist Rudiger Dornbusch's econ maxim: " In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.."
One other tidbit, this essay really bedazzled me on the power of a stupendous sentence, which is likely an essay in itself. I mean, that wonderful mental pause when you read a great assembly of words. You wrote, " this latest contribution to the thousands of terabytes of jeremiads that festoon the worldwide web..." Sharp, crisp, effective, like when your maul is splitting straight white oak and the sound conveys force to your ears. I chuckled at my reactions to reading the line of namely: 1. Wow! shrewd word selection, 2. itching to (at least for the next week) pepper "festoon" into my conversation, and 3. envy, but a benevolent envy because you making me think makes me want to inspire others to do the same.. With any luck I will not be a buffoon at using festoon.....thanks again,....and hearty applause for the insightful footnote #3.
You're too kind, Worth. For all of the negativity that I aim in the direction of twitter it can help you hone your ability to write a good sentence. But then so can simple pen and paper practice. More so probably.
As to footnote #3 this is something that my wife, who is wise enough to have never used social media, points out with some regularity. Credit where it is due.
Great to hear from you, mate. But I'm afraid I can't disclose the location of that pub. hahah
I think you're right about screen-addictions all going away, and I'll go one further.
Silicon Valley is built on a house of free and easy VC money. We're standing on the precipice of the end of the post-1945 order that made that possible under the Pax Americana.
Add to that a real energy crisis waiting over the next 10-20 years and this becomes unsustainable, not only because people are sick of it (which I agree they are), but because there will not be the energy to run the server farms.
People have this idea that digital means free from material constraints. No, you simply don't see the matter behind the shiny GUI. Consider that Zoomers know less about technology than teenagers in the 1990s because they don't work with the machine. They press virtual buttons.
Server farms use up huge amounts of energy and depend on complex supply chains feeding them parts, which also have to be manufactured and shipped. The whole system is incredible fragile and even tiny shocks can threaten to send it flying apart.
My bet is that civilization is hitting a threshold where we won't be able to maintain the infrastructure behind the smoke-show.
I 100% agree on all counts. What you've said perfectly elucidates what I meant when I said in passing 'this is not sustainable'
If you write about this at full length (if you haven't already) I'll definitely check it out. I think you can really see the bigger picture judging by this reply. Cheers.
This was an optimistic essay! I hope and think you will be proven right.
I do spend time reading many Substack posts each day. I find that the writing and the freshness of thought here are superior to MSM and of course to social media.
I'm in Italy now in a relatively small town and I don't see nearly the same prevalence of people on their phones. We're returning tonight to a trattoria with a vibe that sounds pretty similar to the vibe you described. I'll check out phone usage!
Substack itself was part of the inspiration as I have a similar habit. I find that- much like a really good meal- the writing on Substack satiates and satisfied. I can read a few great essays and stories at lunchtime and feel like I am done for the day.
As I said in the essay I think the reason why people spend so much time on their devices is because they are compulsively searching for what is no longer there and if people were to switch their attention to something like substack, or a private online community that meets their needs, then I bet they would use their phones a lot less.
I look forward to hearing you report from the trattoria.
"Half an hour or so a day is ample time to catch up with my online community of people and read the thoughts of those writers who I have personally verified to be human. Beyond that the wider internet just strikes me as a sad place."
That's one of the wildest things about these days. I'm definitely an information addict and am driven to just read text regardless of whether the text is meaningful, but I'm shocked by how quickly a quick scroll on any platform gives me the gist and then ends the need to hunt. I still have the habit of bringing out the phone to check it, but then there's nothing to check. The Internet itself is one big phantom vibration syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_vibration_syndrome
I think that was made plainly visible to all when Threads was fired up and immediately swarmed, both ironically but also just meaningfully, with brands all stating out loud they were excited to have a new platform to be a brand and do branding things and communicate brand stuff -- with, as it turns out, nobody else but other brands. You couldn't have planned a better own goal.
Threads was a real 'showing the cards' moment. This new iteration of social media, this (supposed) new dawn that turned into the same old within a mere matter of days if not hours.
People are tired of it- even if they lack the means of articulating exactly what 'it' is- and Phantom Vibration Syndrome is one of the very few things left that keep us checking before we check out.
I hope you're right. I am seeing this in my own life now increasingly. I stopped watching TV more than 25 years ago. At first, people thought I was making some sort of statement but the truth was, it just wasn't interesting, so I stopped. I'm feeling the same thing with social media today. Many times lately I've decided to spend an evening just messing around online, reading, scrolling whatever and after about five minutes I just put the device down and start listening to music and talking with my wife and never pick it up again....because there's nothing more interesting behind that glass than the real life happening in front of it.
'.because there's nothing more interesting behind that glass than the real life happening in front of it.'
This is it. And somehow the more sophisticated and targeted the means of distracting us become the more this truth somehow shines through in spite of it.
Yes, there is something I can't quite put my finger on about what you just said. But the more they refine the algorithms, the more boring I find it. Twitter was far more exciting in the beginning when my feed was simply chronological. The algorithms somehow suck the serendipity and organic-ness out of what used to be kinda fun. Granted, Twitter had far fewer people back then and most were tech people so we had a lot in common and it wasn't so cringy and political yet. But still, there is something to your idea in this comment.
All most people want is a feed filled with all of their friends. The hardest thing for social media companies to do is to realise they are on to a good thing and simple step back and let their community do the organic creation for them.
I'm still able to sort of simulate this with twitter lists (though they aren't purely chronological, but the game affects the people. I can sort of see only people I follow, but half of those people are not adjusting what they post to feed the algorithm, which, in turn has made their posting mostly boring.
This is what I found towards the end- I was doing so many hacks and tricks to get the platform to do what I wanted (which was often simply what it used to be able to do no problem) that I was stretching the elasticity of the medium to its limits. And then you find that all of that is too much like hard work. Like I said above, all they had to do was to realise they were on to a good thing in the mid to late teens and simply stop meddling and let the praise roll in.
Yes, I felt the best era was when my feeds were just people I followed and were chronological and then a separate "discover" tab when I want to see people I don't follow. I think the issue probably was around, as always, that they couldn't make enough money with that model.
Oct 23, 2023·edited Oct 23, 2023Liked by Thomas J Bevan
I love a long bet, having made my own that “Advertising is Obsolete” loooong before it might actually come to pass, and I fully support @Thomas J Bevan’s prediction here.
“…the internet now is boring. People spend all day scrolling because they are trying to find what isn’t there anymore.” I know the feeling. I don’t walk down the street doing it, but, having grown up with computers, and then the internet, I still spend hours online looking for something—something that isn’t there.
There was a there there, a little bit, for a while, and I was even there—at WIRED, for example, in 1996—but now, there’s no way to go but further down, and then out.
It is already “vulgar,” and there are already some people, even some young people, who see endless screen-scrolling as just kinda gross. These are the latest crop of “early adopters.” Although of course there will be those that have the whole damn thing implanted, the wireheads will then disappear inside their own self-constructed black holes.
Oct 24, 2023·edited Oct 24, 2023Liked by Thomas J Bevan
btw, I remembered a piece I'd stumbled across some months ago that expresses this in quite a different voice. The bit at the end about a shame-powered cultural movement akin to what's known as "nofap," but for social media, is potentially quite powerful. Politics aside, I dig the writing, and it's another argument for "Burning down the digital longhouse."
"Girls need to start telling one another that being on social media all the time is gross, that it is low status, that there's something unpleasant and broken if you're doing that."
I'll check this out. As I eluded to above, I think that our grappling with the internet mirrors the stages of grief: grief for what could've been had we taken a different turn and not gone all in on the advertising monetisation model and network effects, grief for wasted time, grief for all of the effects (intended or otherwise) that our technological choices have had on our world.
And anger is one of the stages. And it has to be dealt with. Thanks for the recommendation, Bowen.
'I've been on more walks in the last six months than the last six years.' Same and it often hasn't been intentional either. Log on, instantly read some nonsense and then soon find myself reaching for my coat.
It's great to hear from you, mate, I hope you've been well and I'm really pleased that you have posted a new piece.
These are (very well crafted) words that describe the feeling I've felt for awhile now—both as a consumer and creator of internet content. There's a reason I've gravitated towards only writing here on Substack and have largely ignored my social media presence. I've had conversations that feel much more alive and lively in my comments here on Substack than I ever have anywhere else online, even dating back to the blogging heydays. I could also see a generational shift occurring as we continue to learn how damaging all this mindless scrolling is to our psyches, similar to how smoking has decreased dramatically in younger generations.
Smoking is a good example, as I touched on in the essay. You are always going to have a percentage of diehards who stick with something after its time in the sun has passed. So even if everything I have outlined above exactly comes to pass (which of course is questionable, as it is with any big prediction) there will still be a hardcore of doomscrollers who will still make up say 10-15% of the population.
But if people are leaving the Big Tent for smaller and more intimate means of online creation, discussion and entertainment then it would make sense that something like Substack would be at the vanguard. Sensing this is a large part of what drew us all here, I suspect.
While you are correct that this topic has been talked about a lot, the way you nestled it into a prediction was clever and smart - kept me reading and gave me hope. I look forward to reading what appear to be numerous comments below as I'm sure many have opinions ha! Also, have you heard of Rhizome? They are the train of the internet, still chugging along with the original concept but with the aid of sometimes newer technology - they have an archive of digital-born art dating back to the 80s - they even put together a physical book years ago that provided a sort of survey of the first art and artists to populate the internet when the internet was more about creativity and connection and less about the necessary minutiae of life. https://rhizome.org/tags/preservation/
I always try to find some sort of hope with these things. I think there's something tyrannical about dumping a lot of negative (albeit truthful) shit on people and then saying, 'right then, see ya.'
I'm generally predisposed to say 'this too shall pass' which is both true and a comfort of sorts. One of the problems about this version of the internet that we find ourselves stuck with is that everything is so extremely blinkered and zoomed in. By design I expect. Because 'eyeballs' and 'time on app' is the ultimate metric to drive those advertising dollars, so everything must be done to stop people coming to the obvious realisation that they are always free to simply log off and walk away. This is the fact that can never be spoken if this whole house of cards is going to remain standing.
Also from a brief scan through it Rhizome looks amazing, thanks for sharing this.
Very true, and even when you come to the realization, it's tough to walk away, especially after a cognitively taxing day. I always love your hopeful curmudgeon take on life! ;)
If I were to really go all in on being an online pundit 'The Hopeful Curmudgeon' would be the brand. You've nailed what I'm trying to be/ what I actually am.
Ah that makes me feel good! Let's Trademark it immediately!
Envious of the pub you found TJB. This essay reminds me of the German economist Rudiger Dornbusch's econ maxim: " In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.."
One other tidbit, this essay really bedazzled me on the power of a stupendous sentence, which is likely an essay in itself. I mean, that wonderful mental pause when you read a great assembly of words. You wrote, " this latest contribution to the thousands of terabytes of jeremiads that festoon the worldwide web..." Sharp, crisp, effective, like when your maul is splitting straight white oak and the sound conveys force to your ears. I chuckled at my reactions to reading the line of namely: 1. Wow! shrewd word selection, 2. itching to (at least for the next week) pepper "festoon" into my conversation, and 3. envy, but a benevolent envy because you making me think makes me want to inspire others to do the same.. With any luck I will not be a buffoon at using festoon.....thanks again,....and hearty applause for the insightful footnote #3.
You're too kind, Worth. For all of the negativity that I aim in the direction of twitter it can help you hone your ability to write a good sentence. But then so can simple pen and paper practice. More so probably.
As to footnote #3 this is something that my wife, who is wise enough to have never used social media, points out with some regularity. Credit where it is due.
Great to hear from you, mate. But I'm afraid I can't disclose the location of that pub. hahah
I think you're right about screen-addictions all going away, and I'll go one further.
Silicon Valley is built on a house of free and easy VC money. We're standing on the precipice of the end of the post-1945 order that made that possible under the Pax Americana.
Add to that a real energy crisis waiting over the next 10-20 years and this becomes unsustainable, not only because people are sick of it (which I agree they are), but because there will not be the energy to run the server farms.
People have this idea that digital means free from material constraints. No, you simply don't see the matter behind the shiny GUI. Consider that Zoomers know less about technology than teenagers in the 1990s because they don't work with the machine. They press virtual buttons.
Server farms use up huge amounts of energy and depend on complex supply chains feeding them parts, which also have to be manufactured and shipped. The whole system is incredible fragile and even tiny shocks can threaten to send it flying apart.
My bet is that civilization is hitting a threshold where we won't be able to maintain the infrastructure behind the smoke-show.
I 100% agree on all counts. What you've said perfectly elucidates what I meant when I said in passing 'this is not sustainable'
If you write about this at full length (if you haven't already) I'll definitely check it out. I think you can really see the bigger picture judging by this reply. Cheers.
I haven't written on the topic myself because it's such a large thing with many moving parts, and others I read are better positioned to do so.
Here's a couple of starting points you might be interested in:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/09/technological-superstitions.html
https://www.ecosophia.net/civilizations-fall-theory-catabolic-collapse/
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-end-of-the-industrial-age/
Thanks for this, interesting looking stuff there.
This was an optimistic essay! I hope and think you will be proven right.
I do spend time reading many Substack posts each day. I find that the writing and the freshness of thought here are superior to MSM and of course to social media.
I'm in Italy now in a relatively small town and I don't see nearly the same prevalence of people on their phones. We're returning tonight to a trattoria with a vibe that sounds pretty similar to the vibe you described. I'll check out phone usage!
Substack itself was part of the inspiration as I have a similar habit. I find that- much like a really good meal- the writing on Substack satiates and satisfied. I can read a few great essays and stories at lunchtime and feel like I am done for the day.
As I said in the essay I think the reason why people spend so much time on their devices is because they are compulsively searching for what is no longer there and if people were to switch their attention to something like substack, or a private online community that meets their needs, then I bet they would use their phones a lot less.
I look forward to hearing you report from the trattoria.
"Half an hour or so a day is ample time to catch up with my online community of people and read the thoughts of those writers who I have personally verified to be human. Beyond that the wider internet just strikes me as a sad place."
That's one of the wildest things about these days. I'm definitely an information addict and am driven to just read text regardless of whether the text is meaningful, but I'm shocked by how quickly a quick scroll on any platform gives me the gist and then ends the need to hunt. I still have the habit of bringing out the phone to check it, but then there's nothing to check. The Internet itself is one big phantom vibration syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_vibration_syndrome
I think that was made plainly visible to all when Threads was fired up and immediately swarmed, both ironically but also just meaningfully, with brands all stating out loud they were excited to have a new platform to be a brand and do branding things and communicate brand stuff -- with, as it turns out, nobody else but other brands. You couldn't have planned a better own goal.
Threads was a real 'showing the cards' moment. This new iteration of social media, this (supposed) new dawn that turned into the same old within a mere matter of days if not hours.
People are tired of it- even if they lack the means of articulating exactly what 'it' is- and Phantom Vibration Syndrome is one of the very few things left that keep us checking before we check out.
I hope you're right. I am seeing this in my own life now increasingly. I stopped watching TV more than 25 years ago. At first, people thought I was making some sort of statement but the truth was, it just wasn't interesting, so I stopped. I'm feeling the same thing with social media today. Many times lately I've decided to spend an evening just messing around online, reading, scrolling whatever and after about five minutes I just put the device down and start listening to music and talking with my wife and never pick it up again....because there's nothing more interesting behind that glass than the real life happening in front of it.
'.because there's nothing more interesting behind that glass than the real life happening in front of it.'
This is it. And somehow the more sophisticated and targeted the means of distracting us become the more this truth somehow shines through in spite of it.
Yes, there is something I can't quite put my finger on about what you just said. But the more they refine the algorithms, the more boring I find it. Twitter was far more exciting in the beginning when my feed was simply chronological. The algorithms somehow suck the serendipity and organic-ness out of what used to be kinda fun. Granted, Twitter had far fewer people back then and most were tech people so we had a lot in common and it wasn't so cringy and political yet. But still, there is something to your idea in this comment.
All most people want is a feed filled with all of their friends. The hardest thing for social media companies to do is to realise they are on to a good thing and simple step back and let their community do the organic creation for them.
I'm still able to sort of simulate this with twitter lists (though they aren't purely chronological, but the game affects the people. I can sort of see only people I follow, but half of those people are not adjusting what they post to feed the algorithm, which, in turn has made their posting mostly boring.
This is what I found towards the end- I was doing so many hacks and tricks to get the platform to do what I wanted (which was often simply what it used to be able to do no problem) that I was stretching the elasticity of the medium to its limits. And then you find that all of that is too much like hard work. Like I said above, all they had to do was to realise they were on to a good thing in the mid to late teens and simply stop meddling and let the praise roll in.
Yes, I felt the best era was when my feeds were just people I followed and were chronological and then a separate "discover" tab when I want to see people I don't follow. I think the issue probably was around, as always, that they couldn't make enough money with that model.
The constant growth ideology strikes again.
Exactly.
I love a long bet, having made my own that “Advertising is Obsolete” loooong before it might actually come to pass, and I fully support @Thomas J Bevan’s prediction here.
“…the internet now is boring. People spend all day scrolling because they are trying to find what isn’t there anymore.” I know the feeling. I don’t walk down the street doing it, but, having grown up with computers, and then the internet, I still spend hours online looking for something—something that isn’t there.
There was a there there, a little bit, for a while, and I was even there—at WIRED, for example, in 1996—but now, there’s no way to go but further down, and then out.
It is already “vulgar,” and there are already some people, even some young people, who see endless screen-scrolling as just kinda gross. These are the latest crop of “early adopters.” Although of course there will be those that have the whole damn thing implanted, the wireheads will then disappear inside their own self-constructed black holes.
here's what I wrote long ago about advertising:
https://bowendwelle.substack.com/p/advertising-is-obsolete -- this also shows up in certain chapters of my memoir e.g. https://open.substack.com/pub/bowendwelle/p/12-wired-tired-fired
Wireheads on the one side and the mostly checked out on the other and very little in between is how I see this playing out. Great comment, Bowen.
btw, I remembered a piece I'd stumbled across some months ago that expresses this in quite a different voice. The bit at the end about a shame-powered cultural movement akin to what's known as "nofap," but for social media, is potentially quite powerful. Politics aside, I dig the writing, and it's another argument for "Burning down the digital longhouse."
"Girls need to start telling one another that being on social media all the time is gross, that it is low status, that there's something unpleasant and broken if you're doing that."
From https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-devouring-mother-of-the-digital
I'll check this out. As I eluded to above, I think that our grappling with the internet mirrors the stages of grief: grief for what could've been had we taken a different turn and not gone all in on the advertising monetisation model and network effects, grief for wasted time, grief for all of the effects (intended or otherwise) that our technological choices have had on our world.
And anger is one of the stages. And it has to be dealt with. Thanks for the recommendation, Bowen.
'I've been on more walks in the last six months than the last six years.' Same and it often hasn't been intentional either. Log on, instantly read some nonsense and then soon find myself reaching for my coat.
It's great to hear from you, mate, I hope you've been well and I'm really pleased that you have posted a new piece.