I love how reality manages to combine the most comically exploitative parts of cyberpunk fiction with literally none of the intense, vibrant, or interesting parts. It’s just a dull, gray, sexless, post-industrial dystopia with ugly cars, chronic obesity, and fentanyl addiction. And now surge pricing.
American corporations want an “easy” war. Like against a country like Iraq or Afghanistan. You know, someone that has no real capacity to fight back or strike foreign military targets (like a Lockheed martin manufacturing facility) and is more of a punching bag for the US military. A war with China would immediately spark World War 3 and trigger a global economic and military crisis. It is also extremely undesirable because China is a nuclear superpower and, uh…we tend not to get into shooting wars with those because they can potentially escalate into literal nuclear holocaust.
Yeah, it’s the age old song and dance of “People on the left were mean to me for five minutes so now I’m going as hard as possible to the right for the rest of my life.” The person I feel the worst for in all this is El-P. Dude’s a decent guy and now his name is forever attached to a guy whose current ambition seems to be being Diet Kanye.
There’s a lot of “older” rappers that aren’t really with the times and you’ll see them releasing music that is explicitly complaining about “cancel culture,” even though they’re not victims of it and are still very successful. I used to be a pretty big Run the Jewels/Killer Mike fan, but the track “Talk’n That Shit!” from his 2023 album, Michael, is just generically mean and kinda hateful, with lyrics like
***** talk to me about that woke-ass shit (yeah)
Same ***** walkin’ on some broke-ass shit
You see, your words ain’t worth no money, I ain’t spoke back, bitch
All of you ***** hang together on some Brokeback shit
I’ll let you fill in the blanks or look up the lyrics yourself, because I’m not looking to catch a ban from posting rap lyrics, but needless to say it’s just “fuck you woke people, you’re all gay.” Like, there’s very little artistic merit to a song like that.
Dude used to write music that punched up, but then he went on NRA TV and talked about how he would kick his kids out of the house if they ever protested in favor of gun control legislation (he’s a huge 2nd Amendment advocate) and now he’s suddenly “anti-woke” because a bunch of people on Twitter told him he was out of touch and closed-minded and that if he really wanted to deliver this particular message, he probably could have selected a platform less comically heinous than one almost exclusively watched by alt-right lunatics. So he decided to prove them wrong by being even more out of touch and closed-minded.
One thing I will never be sorry to see go is the age of pathetic power users who steal content from others and repost it ad nauseam for their own social network capital. Because those people are getting out competed by AI, who are stealing stories from those users, as well as stories posted by other AI. And thank you, writing is a small hobby of mine.
I would imagine IP bans would be useful. Although the issue with this is that you run into the problem other websites are having: people who are valid users that are on VPNs get caught in the filter of IP bans because botnets also use the same VPNs.
What is this cursed place?
Oh, boy, where to begin? Digg was originally a content aggregator founded in the middle of 2004 (around 7 or 8 months before Reddit), that was basically Reddit with a slightly sleeker UI. At one point it actually had a higher number of daily active users than Reddit and it was, for several years, Reddit’s chief competitor.
The fascinating thing about Digg is that it went through enshittification long before it became the phrase to describe our current internet zeitgeist. It happened incredibly early in its life, but for reasons and in ways that would come to be emblematic of the current internet. The core reason is that the owners of the website were just looking to get out of the game with a pile of fast, easy cash ASAP. They were in talks with Google to sell Digg for $200 million in 2008, but that deal fell through.
The beginning of the end for Digg came in August of 2010, when the site went through a major redesign, referred to as “Digg v4,” that fundamentally altered the ranking of posts on the site to heavily favor power users, as well as introducing a metric ton of bugs. It’s hard to describe the feeling of waking up one day and have your favorite website totally, completely destroyed. It was a Frankensteinian abomination; a cruel, misshapen doppelganger of an aggregator that now mainly linked to advertisements thinly disguised as “user content” and content posted by literally a handful of users who were able to manipulate post rankings to exclude any and all posts from non-power users from the front page, driving traffic exclusively to where they wanted it. As many of these power users existed on the political spectrum somewhere between Libertarian and outright Fascists, the political content on the website became especially jarring. No boiling of frogs took place here like it did on Reddit. One single code deployment and server restart later and the website was unusable.
The complete catastrophe that was this redesign triggered a mass exodus from Digg to Reddit. Digg was never able to recover and Reddit became the de facto content aggregator site for the internet (and it’s where I spent around 8 hours of every day from September of 2010 to some time in 2023 when they finally gutted the API and I moved to Lemmy). In a grand example of historical irony, Alexis Ohanian said, in an open letter to the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose,
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
Eventually, Digg was gutted for spare parts and its components and miscellaneous intellectual property sold off piecemeal for a total sum that was less than 5% of the value of the initial deal with Google. And the website Digg itself was ultimately sold in April of 2018 to BuySellAds for an undisclosed, but almost certainly pathetic, sum.
And now, dear reader, you are aware of the sad and tragic history of Digg, whose rise and fall was an unheeded warning of the precipice towards which the internet as a whole is headed.
This is true. Right now the OG internet is sort of kept alive by oral history, but we have the technology to save these websites in perpetuity as historical artifacts. That might be a good coding project - a robust archiving system that lets you point a URL at a webpage and scrape everything under its domain and keep a static collection of its contents. The issue, though, is that this doesn’t actually truly “capture” many web pages. A lot of the backend data that might have been served dynamically from a database isn’t retrievable, so the experience of using the page itself is potentially non-archivable.
Dead Internet Theory is one of the few “conspiracy” theories I sort of buy, in the sense that it’s probably not descriptive of the nature of the current internet, but rather predictive of what it’s becoming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
And also with less of the whole “they’re doing this to manipulate people into believing…things” and more “people want quick and superficial information so that’s all that’s being produced and since it’s easier for machines to produce it than humans, humans will automatically get outcompeted and eventually that’s all the internet will be.” The internet is becoming a dead mall, filled with the corpses of long abandoned Hot Topics.
From a historical or intellectual archaeological perspective, no one in 2000 BC Babylon thought their pottery would be of historical significance, but 4000 years later, it is. These websites, particularly ones independently created and maintained by hobbyists, are snapshots of the ideas of the time and people that created them. These websites may not have been intensely popular, but they were in many ways a foundational part of the inchoate tapestry of the internet that would eventually become the “modern web.”
Maven is a yiddish word for understanding, or something similar. There’s a few things that have been named after it, but as it’s in the tech space for this social non-network, it definitely has the potential to be confusing.
What about remembering him as “Raghavan, Nimble Pilferer?”
Yeah, I remembered that, as well. I have an HD album that I bought a while ago and downloaded as a zip file. I looked again just now and it only gives you the ability to download file by file unless you use their client. That’s remarkably shitty.
I mean, Jesus famously overcharged on delivery and transaction fees when feeding the masses with all that miraculously created bread and fish while also losing 13 billion dollars in the process, somehow, right?
No, wait, I’m thinking of a different guy…