Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1027
PTA Mom aspirations, pool contracting accounting, who would hide you, Taylor and Katie and Naomi and the internet and diagonalism, advertising is not the problem, dream of a Danish band in India
Good morning! Hello! How are you? What day is it? Tuesday? Cool. Jane is safely at school. Didn’t want to go today cuz she has art, which she loves, except they had to draw monsters last week and Jane is deathly afraid of monsters. We reassured her it was Owls this week and that helped, but still wasn’t very psyched about going, stalled at the drop-off, the PTA mom had to help but boy, that PTA mom delivered. I think I would enjoy being a PTA mom at drop-off if I didn’t have to work so much.
Fridge is fixed, that little mini-drama mini-boss has been beaten. Clogged drainage line. We are blameless. We are poorer for it.
Partner came over last night and we balanced the pool company books. Swimming pools, man. Crazy business from an accounting POV. Gotta account for individual bolts. Not something I’m used to from tech.
Finished my rewatch of Minority Report while Emma worked. Pretty good job of future projection, but as with all of them, some predictions are comically early and other are comically late. Still using removable media in 2054 lol. Imagining a 12-lane self-driving-enabling, horizontal and vertical highway could be constructed in less than 50 years. Lol. Infrastructure construction time is always the weak spot in Sci fi predictions. They always imagines that somehow construction speeds will speed up, when in fact they are continually slowing down.
Also got to watch the entire vote of Jim Jordan going down. That was pretty satisfying. Would be pretty content to see that again today.
Had a dream last night that I went to India because Air India was having a deal and I needed to get to Bangkok and going via India was cheapest, sorta like those old Iceland Air deals (do they still do those?) Since I was in India, I took a twelve-hour train from DEL to some unknown village to meet my old friends in the Danish alternative band Si Senor, who, as a group, had absconded to India maybe ten years earlier. Just like in real life, I hadn’t seen any of them in, oh, twenty-five years. But they welcomed me into their giant ramshackle flop house commune where they all lived with six or seven other Danish alternative ex pats. They had aged as much as real life, with the assorted normal outcomes that we’re all seeing in Gen X as the years go by: one was unchanged, barely aged. One had severe health problems and was very tired and had trouble walking. One had gone diagonalism/Q-anon/conspiracy ish. Jakob had become a complete recluse and wouldn’t leave his room. They were all still close friends, but also kind of sick of each other.
I often have dreams involving large, ramshackle old homes converted into seven, eight, nine-bedroom houses where punks and freaks all rent rooms and ignore fire codes. It is a recurring theme of my dreams. I must miss that period.
Someone on a work Zoom call made fun of me for my two houses yesterday, rightfully. I took it in stride, cuz c’mon. But I had a serious esprit d’escalier about the situation and what I shoulda said was: “trade the houses for your years.” Oh to be under thirty again. So I could meet my wife all over again. And put her through pregnancy again. OK maybe not.
Naomi Klein clarified in last night’s chapter that Diagonalism is different than the Donut theory, because the Donut theory has the far right aligning with the far left, the collectivists and socialists, where Diagonalism has the far right aligning with the “far out,” as in the hippies and yogis and whatnot and I thought that was a great phrase: “the far right and the far out.” My body is a temple and I put nothing in it so I am special. Never mind that we are all made of microplastics, not stars. There is no escaping it. Three miles behind those trees backgrounding your commune is a lithium mine.
Got all tied in knots yesterday over this whole “which friends would hide you” thing going on, as in “who would hide you if there were a holocaust going on and they were coming for you” and I suppose that is a very unpleasant thing to think about in any situation, as is the realization that a lot of friends wouldn’t hide you. I like to think I am great and I would hide you, I would hide anyone. I suppose there is a supremely Sophie’s Choice miserable component to the situation where hiding someone is risking my daughter’s life and that is a choice I am not allowed to make alone. But I acknowledge that, theoretically at least, my daughter is not more special than a Jewish or Palestinian friend. That’s a tough one: Do you have what it takes to be a hero to a minority friend? A stranger? At the very least, do you know you should? I can confidently say I pass the latter test. Obviously, we all should. On the former, I fully admit I’ve never been put into a life-threatening situation not of my own making, so I can only dream about what kind of person I’d be were I put in one.
I hate that feeling: the feeling that you wanna say “yeah! I’d be a hero” but you just have no idea. This fear, this belief in us, that our bodies can override our morals. That our fear can override our morals. Of course it can. We see it all the time. Just an absolute shit feeling not knowing yourself in that way.
ANYWAY.
Katie Notopoulos, whom I admire very much from afar, wrote a piece for the MIT Technology Review about “How to Fix the Internet” wherein she mostly — not completely, but mostly — dumps the problems of the internet at the feet of unending growth, driven by advertising. The original sin of the internet, she says, was building the thing on advertising, rather than a more sustainable business model.
So. Thoughts. First: this reminds me I never wrapped up my comments on Taylor’s Extremely Online after I finished it. But I definitely sense a bit of the same tendency both from Taylor and Katie, two very very smart people who are, I know in Taylor’s case, but I am actually not 100% sure in Katie’s, Gen Y/Millennial. They know their history. They might even dimly remember certain aspects of the early internet. There is definitely this tendency amongst Millennials to claim to be the first generation to have “grown up on the internet.” I think the better phrasing is that millennials are the first generation where most of them grew up on the internet. But there are plenty of Gen Xers who grew up online, who grew up as the internet was being built alongside them. Like… a million maybe? A lot but not a majority.
Taylor’s book made me feel like the Architect in the Matrix. Watching a whole new set of Miss Allens, Keanu multiplied ad infinitum, being the same characters on the internet over and over again.
But those of us who were there the first time ‘round, like the Architect, were there. I remember the internet before advertising. And you know what? It was fucking toxic. There was so much horror. Were there great things? Yes. But there was endless toxicity. The early internet fucked me up. There were trolls and pedophiles and fuckheads and fascists.
The first person I ever met in real life who I had met online first was in 1986ish and the first thing they said to me in real life was “oh I hate you.”
Because of a DnD game where I, you know, looked around the room too much or something.
Advertising did not help. But advertising was not the cause.
And even in the later periods, Livejournal’s toxicity grew up in its ad-free era, before SixApart bought it, before there were ads. Shit most of Livejournal’s life was ad free, paid even — the very model Notopoulos puts forth as a better, alternate model. Let’s not forget about LJDrama.
And you know who else never really ran ads or made any money off of them? 4Chan and the image boards.
Katie’s essay is smart, and she is smart to be looking at the systemic causes. And advertising is just sitting there as this great culprit. It feels like it makes sense. But boy, I have delved and delved and delved for more than a decade on this topic. Advertising is not the problem, it’s a symptom as much as anything else.
Of course I am biased, so take it with a grain of salt, but I am also stubborn and proud and relentlessly introspective so at least trust I would not still be working in it if I did not believe this and have spent plenty of time convinced to the contrary.
One thing that is real exciting is that Facebook is finally being forced to offer a paid version in the UK. Like Notopoulos, and many others, I am a person who pays to avoid ads on the internet, wherever possible.
I also pay to see ads, since plenty of places like the NYT to Amazon stuff ads down our throat even when we pay. Which brings me to Rick’s universal law of the internet: if a company can make money off of ads and subscriptions, it will. It is a fallacy that subscriptions replace ads.
The reason it’s exciting that Facebook is offering an ad-free version (exception to Rick’s universal law: when a government prohibits it) is not because it will be revolutionary in any way, because it will not. Facebook will roll this out in the EU because the government will make them, and then absolutely no one will use it. Then when they realize this, they will roll it out elsewhere just to get people off their back, because it won’t make any difference.
This will be a hard realization for a lot of people. And shit, maybe I’m wrong, I hope so much I’m wrong. But we have Youtube sitting there as evidence. Raise your hand here if you pay for Youtube. I pay for Youtube, it fuckin rules. But no one else does.
Because ads are not the problem. And paid subscriptions are not the solution.
Youtube’s toxicity level has not correlated in any way to its paid options.
What it’s correlated to is its level of trust and safety and moderation.
Which leads me to my point:
I would absolutely hate those of us who want a more-safe internet to focus our ire on ads when the real culprits are people who call trust and safety enemies, people who think free speech is a reason to keep the internet insane and toxic.
Wow that was a rant I wasn’t planning on writing this morning. You know what’s a great record? Came on when I was driving home from school? Freakin Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Still every bit of a masterpiece as when it first came out.
Shoegaze playlist for you. Mostly new, except the Verve, cuz I’ve been thinking about their early years again, and Adam Franklin, though I didn’t know about that album for ages (thank you Aug). And Underground Lovers, the wildly underappreciated Australian shoegaze band still going strong after two-plus decades. Ways T’Burn recently reissued on vinyl. Some new stuff from some legends - there is a new Blonde Redhead, new Majesty Crush, new Warlocks (it’s so good). And a bunch of young turks shoegaze bands: Bedroom Eyes being one I’ve been into for a year or two now.
Forgot to sign off yesterday. Forgive me. Was a bit overworked. Tuesdays are the hard day. But we got through it. And we will get through today. Together.