Whatever it is I’m doing here, you should not be part of it. Do not click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me any money. There is still time for you to do something else. You can still unchain yourself from this world that will soon, very soon, mean absolutely nothing.

I don’t think so, but it’s an interesting, if florid, argument put up over on Substack by somebody called Sam Kriss.

The internet is already over
Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing.

Judging from the style and literary allusions (check the footnotes out for further proof) it’s a fair bet that he’s a writer, perhaps even an English major, certainly far more than just a journalist. That opening image of Zeus and baby is certainly an attention grabber.

Oh, and he’s a Lefty, so there’s that.

As such I think it’s him that’s over the Internet rather than vice versa. However he does make some interesting points about past predictions:

In 1977, Ken Olsen declared that ‘there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.’ In 1995, Robert Metcalfe predicted in InfoWorld that the internet would go ‘spectacularly supernova’ and then collapse within a year. In 2000, the Daily Mail reported that the ‘Internet may be just a passing fad,’ adding that ‘predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate.’ Any day now, the millions of internet users would simply stop, either bored or frustrated, and rejoin the real world.

Funny, isn’t it? You can laugh at these people now, from your high perch one quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. Look at these morons, stuck in their grubby little past, who couldn’t even correctly identify the shape of the year 2022. You can see it perfectly, because you’re smart. You know that the internet has changed everything, forever.

Of course the thing he doesn’t acknowledge is that those of us inside the IT industry well recall those claims too – but we knew they were crap. We didn’t take much notice of Infoworld, let alone the DailyMail or the rest of the MSM’s constant fear mongering on whatever issue of the day they tripped over.

But he’s a journalist so…

Anyway, if you’re reaching back in time for examples of predictions that failed, as a sort of throat-clearing before getting into your predictions for the future of the Internet, then the ones quoted are not a good start. But the rest of his argument breaks down thus, with a quick synopsis either by me or by quoting him:

  1. That it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the internet.
    Forecasts are tough and usually fail, but the Internet will destroy itself.
  2. That exhausted is a whole lot more than tired.
    Online language, fights, activities like selfies and so forth are becoming exhausting and it shows with massive drops in online participation.
  3. That you have been plugged into a grave.
    Death is showing up not just in those drops in engagement shown in section 2, but in profits and share values for Big Tech.
  4. That the revolution can not be digitised.
    Politics goes to die on the Internet where it’s nothing but screaming and punishing people while feeling good about it. Revolutions also go to die, as with post-George Floyd and Woke.
  5. That this is the word.
    The Financial Times will outlive the Guardian. Paintings will outlive NFTs. Print magazines will outlive Substack.

Some of this I agree with, especially when it’s backed by real data, as with this quote from section 2:

The exhaustion is measurable and real. 2020 saw a grand, mostly unnoticed shift in online behaviour: the clickhogs all went catatonic, thick tongues lolling in the muck. On Facebook, the average engagement rate—the number of likes, comments, and shares per follower—fell by 34%, from 0.086 to 0.057. Well, everyone knows that the mushrooms are spreading over Facebook, hundreds of thousands of users liquefying out of its corpse every year. But the same pattern is everywhere. Engagement fell 28% on Instagram and 15% on Twitter. (It’s kept falling since.) Even on TikTok, the terrifying brainhole of tomorrow, the walls are closing in. Until 2020, the average daily time spent on the app kept rising in line with its growing user base; since then the number of users has kept growing, but the thing is capturing less and less of their lives.

And this was, remember, a year in which millions of people had nothing to do except engage with great content online—and in which, for a few months, liking and sharing the right content became an urgent moral duty. 

The share values of those Big Tech firms haven’t just dropped because of the end of free money via zero interest rates.

But I don’t agree about points 4 and 5.

I think he’s right about real works of art like paintings vs NFT’s, but print magazines – in fact all sorts of printed matter – are close to death, with trends in falling subscribers, readers, revenues, profits, staff and content that look like the Great Depression compared to Big Tech’s recent swoon, and with no obvious recovery in sight. Hollywood lost $500 billion in value in 2022.

As far as politics and revolutions are concerned, perhaps he’s looking at things that were ephemeral in the first place – although I don’t think “Woke” has burned out yet. Look at the revolutions in Iran and Sri Lanka and recent protests in China; they were grass roots affairs enabled by people using the Internet, allowing a degree of flexible organisation not seen in past protests; there were no leaders to arrest. Meanwhile, Donald Trump won in 2016 largely because his Twitter account enabled him to reach around the MSM to voters, and the only way to stop him was to disable his account. I doubt he’ll be the only politician to try this in future.

His conclusion.

In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book.

I’d like to agree with him. Even as I write, there are books calling to me from the shelves, demanding that I read them instead of staring at this screen and tapping away on the keyboard, pointing out that this is what I used to do on these summer breaks. And I never have plugged in to the frenetic degree demanded by FaceTikTokTwit; Ye Olde Tyme blogging circa 2005 is about it for me, and as he points out, he’s writing this on Substack, which has become quit the place for journalists who don’t kowtow to the corporate line.

But I did laugh at this piece from section 2 (That you have been plugged into a grave), as he describes how people will go increasingly crazy trying to squeeze profit out of the machine:

Here’s how web3 is about to disrupt the meat industry. Every time you buy a pound of tripe, your physical offal will be bundled with a dedicated TripeToken, which maintains its value and rarity even after the tripe has been eaten, thanks to a unique blockchain signature indexed to the intestinal microbiome of the slaughtered cattle!

By eating large amounts of undercooked offal while trading TripeTokens on secondary markets, you can incentivise the spread of your favourite cattle diseases—and if one of the pathogens you own jumps the species barrier to start infecting humans, you’ve successfully monetised the next pandemic!

Once you get sick, you can rent out portions of your own intestinal tract to an industrial meat DAO in exchange for SlaughterCoins. Because SlaughterCoins are linked via blockchain to the progressive disintegration of your body, they’re guaranteed to increase in value! And when your suffering becomes unbearable, local abattoirs will bid to buy up your SlaughterCoin wallet in exchange for putting you out of your misery with a bolt gun to the head! 

The article’s a bit of a slog so perhaps take his opening advice and not click on it. 😉