everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: internet

  • The Internet’s Circle of Life

    The Internet’s Circle of Life

    Paul Ford, great sage of internet culture, has a piece in Wired where he puts the inevitable dismantling of Twitter into perspective.

    Musk is merely the vehicle. The real reason Twitter lies in ruins is because it was an abomination before God. It was a Tower of Babel.

    The internet is always in motion, like the human life it reflects, things are always swinging from one end to another.

    • Online media business models swing from “information wants to be free” to full-locked down paywalls.
    • Content is King one year and the next the power shift to the aggregators, curators, and portals.

    As the internet figures out what works best, it swings back and forth searching for the optimal fit. It’s the internet’s own version of the circle of life. This is what Ford evokes when he says that the teardown of a centralized network like Twitter was inevitable, the internet’s way of bring things back to equilibrium. If there is a ghost in the machine, perhaps this is it.

    But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”

    But in the same breath, while we all begin to navigate this new world of distributed social networks, we must never forget where we came from and that, eventually, the forces of capitalism will figure out how to gather an audience large enough to be targeted and monetizable. Maybe we’re already seeing the fresh roots of this new world with generative AIs that will be able to craft millions of customized sponsorship messages for each splinter of the community.

    If anything is constant, it is that the internet is an excellent platform for testing innovations, at scale.

    But someone will figure out the details. The reason the Babel story matters is not that it happened once but that it happens over and over: We Babelize and de-Babelize. The internet is an engine of both processes. Eventually, brands will find purchase in Mastodon’s rocky soil and grow engagement. Billionaires will order the construction of new marketplaces of ideas. Everything will centralize again, and it will seem eternal, as if the tower could never fall. For now, let’s enjoy the scattering.

    God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

    Same as it everwas.

  • Misinterpreted

    Misinterpreted

    Beware of claims that a generative AI can achieve a higher order of intelligence if you let it crawl the internet. Even with all our collective learning, humans still jump to conclusions and misinterpret each other. Is the drawing above from a child with a disturbed obsession with death or just an innocent rendering of a family snorkeling trip?

    Maybe you remember this one from 2008 where a child’s drawing seemingly depicts mom as a pole dancer when in reality she was a Home Depot clerk trying to selling snow shovels before a blizzard.

    Careful again as the drawing and caption have since been revealed to be a re-mixed internet meme.

    Nothing is what it seems on the internet, there is inaccurate information everywhere, willfully created or not. Training an AI must be supervised on carefully curated data sets. Now more than ever we must heed the motto, Garbage in, Garbage out.

  • Modern Luddite’s Prayer

    I found an old notebook of scribblings from a two week vacation taken in Paris around 2010. We were wonderfully disconnected from the internet and spent each morning at a museum or gallery and each afternoon on extended walks thru selected neighborhoods. As you can see, I took a grim view of technology when viewed from outside that bubble.

    A bit over-dramatic but indulge me. This is what a couple of weeks in Paris will do to you.

    The spindled algorithms of our time are optimizing the sinews of humanity. Gnashing life’s great works in the gears of its Engine. These are the dark Satanic Mills of our generation. Spitting out matchsticks of Knowledge that are mere sulfur-tipped flashes of attention-seeking factoids, no longer able to light the pyre of change to our mossy, over-grown minds deadened by years of trackpad-enabled twiddling.

    We are addicted to the new of newsfeed but have lost the wisdom of perspective. Supplicants to the superior recall of the internet brain, we slavishly log time on the social treadmill with a thirst to be first for our friends and followers. Dark Times ahead if we continue to blindly submit to the false gods of Real-Time, PageRank and Likes.

    Step away from your monitor, stop stroking your little glass-faced friend. Look into your neighbor’s eyes and peer into their soul. Smile to the passing stranger on the street and note them for who they are and how we are all connected. Embrace the warmth and smell of humanity. Live to create, not consume.