CYBERGHOSTS: Who Were We Before the Internet Flattened Us?
During October, DC Sentence Club will be posting pieces on the theme “CYBERGHOSTS.” What does that mean to us? Stay tuned to find out!
Who were we before the internet flattened us? I’m talking specifically about pre-consolidation internet, before it was transformed by the handful of platforms that now run our lives into an endless hallway of funhouse mirrors and slot machines.1 It’s hard to untangle this question from the nostalgia it invokes, and it varies wildly with age. If you’re in your 20s or early 30s, the internet of your childhood probably served as a vehicle for self-discovery. Personally, I’m thinking of stuff like janky flash games and early YouTube. Maybe you were discovering your sexuality on Wattpad or honing your debate skills on forums or early Reddit. If you’re a bit older, I suppose your experience was more like that of a frontiersman, defiantly carving out new cultural territory on Myspace or the blogosphere.
Those who know the internet’s history will be quick to point out its twisted roots. The early internet was largely a product of the American defense state, a connection which social activists of the late 60s were rightfully suspicious of. However, by the 90s, our cultural understanding of the internet had become defined by a strange blend of science fiction, countercultural excitement, utopianism, and market logic famously dubbed The Californian Ideology.2 This attitude was defined by a commitment to extreme libertarianism, an unwavering faith in personal liberation through the free market, and a move-fast-and-break-things entrepreneurialism.3
Before The Californian Ideology finished bringing the internet to its logical conclusion: platform capitalism, technofeudalism, AI slopfest, whatever you’d like to call it, it had distinct places. Log into a niche forum and you could participate in status games that could only ever possibly matter within its proverbial walls. Now, in the age of optimized clickthrough rates and Linktrees in bios, every piece of information about you is a distributed artifact of your position in The Great Discourse of which we are all a part but cannot see, taste, or touch.
We used to have maybe a dozen split personalities, neatly contained into their boxes. Every once in a while we would take them out, play around with them, and perhaps be better or worse off depending on how responsible we were. Maybe pre-Covid, you could squint and call Instagram or Twitter one of these boxes. But now, does anyone really care how they appear on these platforms who is not playing some higher-order game, consciously or subconsciously?4
I wonder if we’re going through a bifurcation in how we experience this new, flattened hyperreality. On one side we have people whose experience of the internet and position in the discourse are both primarily defined by what they consume. Lurker and Commenter used to be distinct categories, but at this point the cultural influence of both of them rounds off to zero. On the other side there are influencers who have an active stake in the game. I don’t know exactly where we go from here, but I think the upshot is similar to that of my last post: if you’re gonna choose to wade around in the filth, you should figure out 1) why you’re really here and 2) how to make it count.
I’m also specifically concerned with the public internet here. A lot of this doesn’t apply to, for example, Discord servers.
The 1995 essay that coined this phrase is a great introduction to this perspective on the internet.
Now, wind the clock forward a few decades to when Snowden and even Cambridge Analytica feel like distant memories. Neoliberalism is severely weakened and the consequences of the internet are more visible and democratized than ever. From this perspective, neither companies like Palantir nor the flirting of major AI labs with the defense state should seem surprising.
I think it’s telling that it feels as if someone like donald boat, who practices a post-ironic, absurdist form of grifting that has become its own art, is one of the few doing it for the love of the game.