My latest essay is on the decline of the Internet.
In 1993, I did not picture people having their online experience being “fed” to them by large corporations using mysterious algorithms. Instead, I envisioned individuals in control, creating and exploring on their own.
My theories of its decline include a snobbish view that the masses made it worse. Feel free to give me pushback after you read the whole thing.
This is overall a note about the internet of the 1990s to 2004ish but it reads a little bit like everybody in the early 1960s lived like Andy Griffin nostalgia.
1) The early internet reminds me a lot like the first scene from Cimarron in which they showed every hundreds/thousands of ambitious people in odd like horse carriages grabbing a piece of land (or 1994 anybody could grab a piece of internet. (Although the first scene of Cimarron is great the rest of the movie sucks and the 1931 version is better as they celebrate the Oklahoma economy right when it was collapsing.)
2) In 1990s, Amazon was once an oddball going up against the evil large corporations like Wal-Mart, Target, and Barnes & Noble. The internet did not replace small Mom & Pops but the large corporations.
3) The big piece of early internet was we had nothing to compare to. It was completely new and anything seemed exciting. I enjoy watching I Love Lucy and it was a big deal they had a new television to watch the fight.
4) I really don’t understand how a libertarian economist thinks of large corporations as wrong in general. Even as a Democrat, I believe Koch Brothers know how to run a business just as Google or Amazon know how to run a business. Capitalism is vicious in nature and if good companies learn to manage economies of scale they slowly take over the market in many cases. What happens if Amazon builds their network of home deliveries and continue to drive down cost? In California, with Prime membership I know of people order stuff every other day. (I think Megan Mcardle stated that capitalism at its rawest was the United States of 1930 – 1932 driving out cost and closing down business every day while throwing 20%+ of people out of work.
You stated capitalism is great at controlling the consumption of expensive resources and what is more expensive than human labor?)
The old internet, and the current internet has always been doomed. It is based on values we brought with us from the past, but those values required the friction of the analog world to work. It assumes general good faith, and the ability to isolate and deal with a few bad actors.
Before the information age, we had just as many people who acted in bad faith, but there were limits to what they were able to do, and they usually had to expose themselves in order to pursue opportunities. We built the internet as an open, unsecured global network with billions of nodes with direct access. Global reach, anonymity, and the ability to act on a massive scale with minimal cost changes the balance of power.
There are amazing efficiencies to unsecured peer to peer communications, and it will be very painful to give those things up, but we are going to have to. The internet, as it is currently constructed, is impossible to secure. In the old days, that meant some isolated social problems that could be tolerated for the greater good brought by freedom. Now, problems can scale rapidly. It is inevitable that events will occur that will make the vulnerability unacceptable.
While Facebook is part of the internet, you could argue it isn’t part of the web.
similar to the old AOL (same kind of users too).
If you’re logged into Facebook then it sort of integrates with the web. If you’re not though, it’s completely walled off. myself, I can’t see any Facebook content at all and other than people always writing and talking about it, I wouldn’t even know it exists..
Oops, sorry I should have finished your article before commenting, you said the same thing 😉
There’s always Urbit. Seems like an outside shot of being the next next big thing, but it could get there.
I always shy away from the use of “AI” to describe what are essentially relatively simplistic machine learning algorithms and data processing, but these points are well made.
In essence, I saw your argument boiling down to two interrelated parts.
1. There are many more people online, people who don’t really care about the Internet for its own sake, but for which it is a delivery mechanism, like TV. In that sense, it’s the same argument as back in 1993’s “Eternal September”. These users are looking for SOMETHING, whether it’s distraction, or news, or human interaction, and if Facebook is the easiest way to do this, it doesn’t matter if it’s an open or proprietary network, or if FB is showing them fake news. Remember all the TV journalistic scandals (like the Dateline NBC faking exploding Chevy trucks) that had little or no impact on their business.
2. Winner-takes-all means that firms are looking for the best way to sluice these users to themselves, creating an environment (highly motivated firms combined with indifferent users) where there is a race to the bottom of ethics/quality to reap the rewards. I call this the “daytime TV effect” from the 80s/90s where all the daytime TV talk shows were locked in a race to give their indifferent audience as much dopamine as possible to win. Hence FB (and everyone else) know that there’s no profit in appealing to higher motivations, it’s grabbing and holding on to the users by any means possible because these users would be perfectly happy to be on a different platform if it were marginally more interesting.
It’s appalling to old fuddy-duddies like you and me who grew up with the “old” internet but it’s not really surprising. The only surprising thing is that it took until now to achieve it since all the ingredients were there in 2004. It may be that it wasn’t until a few years ago that platforms could sufficiently scale at low cost to support the number of users to achieve consolidation and the iPhone made it very easy to waste time online in the whitespaces of daily life (of course contributing to the above-mentioned indifference; if reading something suddenly becomes much “cheaper” in terms of temporal opportunity cost, demand to read high-quality drops dramatically vs the easy dopamine hit)
This sounds a lot like the rise of mass market newspapers and “yellow journalism” in the 1890s.
Actually, the decline of the Internet started before the internet.
See the September that never ended, 1993, when AOL discovered Usenet newsgroups.
I was a voracious consumer of newsgroups before the web browser was invented, and I appreciated DejaNews and Google offering a nice front end when the web and the internet became synonymous. Then, in the first evidence to me that Google could indeed do a lot of evil, someone there who either had no idea what Usenet was, or knew exactly what Usenet was, made the decision of merging mailing-list-designed Google Groups with open-access, broad-subscription designed Usenet newsgroups.
I remember this living example of Gresham’s Law killing the old newsgroups interface, starting with English and continuing for language after language around the world. The last time I could read news through the web was in Azerbaijani if I recall correctly.
Now blogs have replaced newsgroups for me. They are the closest thing to newsgroups in the internet today, and there’s little else that matches their character and interest. But even blog readers are hard to come by on the phone.
But as long as blogs are available, the internet works for me. Islands of intelligence in a sea of twits and myspacebooks. I don’t need to care about the sea, as it has little interest in the islands.
First, for comparison, where is a good statement of your 1990’s view/hope for the future of the internet?
To the point, I sympathize with many of your complaints; no one need apologize for preferences. But as with creative destruction and economic growth generally. Some examples that come to mind:
* a band or music genre that gets too popular may shift focus and lose its edge
* saccharine Hollywood blockbusters and TV sitcoms attract top talent that once ventured into indie films and broadways productions
* a restaurant revamps dishes to appeal to broader bases to the chagrin of some customers
* an airline lowers price and eschews frills to attract the masses while some pine for the pampering of the good-old-days.
* slightly nimbler taxis now compete with Uber and Lyft leaving some nostalgic about service in the olden days
It is a consequence of lumpy production. For example, when a new firm arrives in a Hotelling location game, overall welfare increases but the new equilibrium leaves some farther from any store and actually worse off. Certainly those of us on the losing end have a right to mourn, but it is as though we have lost an arbitrary subsidy. The best approach is to be thankful for the benefits while they accrued and realize that other changes will largely be toward our more mainstream tastes.
I think “decline” is the wrong descriptor. “Market segmentation” strikes me as more accurate. An analogy is wine: a connoisseur will spend a lot more on the vintage than somebody who just wants to get drunk. The fact that most wine is consumed by drunkards doesn’t mean that the number of connoisseurs has declined.
I doubt there are fewer blogs today than yesteryear, but the fraction of traffic they command has gotten smaller, even if, in absolute terms, it has increased.
Re the internet, I’m a connoisseur: I write a blog; I don’t have a Facebook page; I’ve turned off “automatic updates”; I unsubscribe from anything “pushy.” My wife is the complete opposite. We both enjoy the internet.
Dr. Kling, Thank you for sharing your insights about forces and mechanisms that have shaped the development of the internet. A perspicuous essay about a sprawling subject — No mean feat!
It seems somewhat odd to be complaining about the modern internet and praising old-style blogs when you posted your article on Medium/Hackernoon, a third-party centralized site, instead of your own blog.
Medium/ Hackernoon gets more network effects. It’s technology, not mentality. Also why healthy cities grow. More folk to meet more other folk and do more deals, faster, at lower cost. Even the “people watching” deals.