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.
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/
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.
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.
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!
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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!
"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.
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.
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