The web used to be so quiet.

It was an affront, a novelty, if a page had autoplaying music. Discovering how to apply autoplaying music to a myspace page felt like inventing dynamite. That something would jump at you like that. Now video is the norm if not audio. Autoplay always. 

You had to be convinced, before, to click and load a thing. To care enough. Even if it loaded fast, it rarely loaded automatically. We had not yet seen the optimization. 

Now auto loading, auto playing, is the default. But auto reading might as well be too. Everything has a closed caption. Another way to draw you in. 

And god forbid you do draw in, or ever have mute off, because everything has audio. And rarely the original audio. Often just something poppy or interesting sound meant to draw attention. It complements things. But it’s an assault on the senses.

The web used to be so quiet. Do I sound like an old man? Maybe. 

There’s something worth appreciating in silence. Of determining what you pay attention to. Not just infinite scroll. There’s a difference between browsing and from like, scrolling. Browsing you are actively looking for a thing, or a thing to engage with. In scrolling you are waiting for it to present itself to you. And when it is there it will be every sense. A caption to engage your reading brain. A song to fire off a memory or association. And likely some face, some expression, a tragic thing, excitement, disgust - to engage the part of you that processes faces. That avoids rotting food. That abhors waste or ugliness or disgust. 

The web used to be so quiet. But we are evolving it to us. In many ways we’re crafting a prosthetic. A virus. A glove. A system that supports and incentivizes the production of content and slop that is perfectly suited to abuse a suite of adaptations. Adaptations that were honed for a world that no longer exists. 

The narrative has shifted too. The web used to be a place where people discovered things, good and bad. They found that band there. She learned to hack in that chatroom. He met a friend on AIM. 

Now the web does things to people. TikTok convinced them they're a narcissist. Twitter radicalized them. There are algorithms and currents now that you expose yourself to. They are not thrift stores that you go hunting in, or bars you visit. You are exposed, you are quantified, you are targeted. These things claim they know some part of you that you don’t. You wanted this, right?

This was always the goal, the web would always commercialize, capitalize. But our relationship to it is so different. There is no longer that space for accessible self direction. Certainly many people carve that space for themselves. In servers and channels and sometimes even publicly, and successfully. But that is exceptional luck and effort, it isn’t the norm. 

There was an assumption before that going online meant you were going to do something. It was a discrete task. It might consume an hour or a week. Online to learn to bake a cake. To play a game. To argue over video card specs. 

But now that is not part of it. You just learn to bake. You just play a game. Online, the web, the internet, is always there. You are not making a decision to access it, it is not a choice among equals.  It is often the only choice, or often the far superior one. 

Going to the library now to learn to bake a cake is equal to what going online to do it in the 90s was. It is a separate choice. Potentially an inferior or more difficult choice. But a choice. 

I do not think the net is dying. It clearly isn’t. It has been changing since its inception. But there has been an acceleration. Access is good. Accessibility is good. But in our world access means a market. One that will be filled, aggressively. And a market means a drive to generalize and profit.

That takes me to South By South West. There are some cities where it feels like the veil between the internet and reality are thinner. When I first came to Austin, I thought it was the thinnest it could be in Austin. Trends permeated so much more quickly here, shirts came out of screen printers, it felt like stickers and graffiti got weekly updates.

But the veil between the internet in reality is, without a doubt, the thinnest it can possibly be without breaking during South By South West in Austin. If you live anywhere within an hour of the city, you are aware of it. If you’re even slightly motivated, you can eat and drink for free for the entire week. 

Hotel prices ballon. The city begs people to do anything but drive. If you want a reservation at any place that takes them, no you actually don’t. Memes or jokes that you thought were niche and interesting are suddenly on every street post, and suddenly you realize that they aren’t that funny. 

Names you recognize are here, and maybe on the streets. And the streets - many of the streets are closed! They flood with people, with the pedicabs we’re familiar with, and with experimental autonomous vehicles. One time a man handed me a pill bottle, filled with M&Ms. It was an advertisement for an online pharmacy. Later that day IBM’s Watson would recommend me a beer, and I hate beer. The beer was okay. I’d put on some VR goggles, touch a periodic table, and combine Hydrogen and Oxygen to make a storm cloud. Another year, I’d watch some people pose with a photo of the Ukrainian flag as a trap remix of The Godfather theme blared in the distance, while a man took a call talking about NFT profile pictures. 

It is fair and normal to think that South By is annoying. It is, it’s a disruption. But disruptions are part of life, and sometimes it’s good to be annoyed. More than anything, South By feels like the internet, past and present. It is hopeful, it is strange, it is fast and vibrant, it is annoying, it is surprising, it is sickeningly commercial. 

So maybe I’m just yearning for exclusivity and sad that something became popular. I wasn’t there for the earliest days of the net. I’m not sad more people are there. I’m sad it took hyper commercialization to bring them there. I’m sad that the internet everyone has joined me on isn’t the same one that drew me in. I’m still drawn in, to be clear. I doom scroll, I binge, I go into dazes. But it’s so rare that I feel that forum feeling. That spark. That smallness. 

There were ads then too. That isn’t it. It’s this increasing awareness of monstrously complicated machinery spawning around us. Built by us. Building for us exactly what we told it to. Things that pacify us, enrage us, activate us. That ask for more and more. And more. 

But more and more, I don’t believe that things are destined to be this way. It feels like every day I hear about a new small project finding success. A small publication, things like dirt.fyi or aftermath.site. Where people try to recapture some of that old feeling, and try to treat the people involved in it better. The web is ubiquitous now, for better or worse. But the fun thing about ubiquity is that it's everywhere.