The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is could have been called “what we talk about when we talk about the internet”. Through this book, Justin E.H. Smith explores the basis of the internet in attention, the link to the past in figures such as Liebnez and Lovelace, the blur of where it starts and stops, as well as metaphor as a way of understanding.
Self-hosted sabotage as a form of collective action.
Smarter people than me are coming up with ways to protect content through sabotage: hidden pixels in images; hidden words on web pages. I’d like to implement this on my own website. If anyone has some suggestions for ways to do this, I’m all ears.
If enough people do this we’ll probably end up in an arms race with the bots. It’ll be like reverse SEO. Instead of trying to trick crawlers into liking us, let’s collectively kill ’em.
This is a podcast about hackers, breaches, shadow government activity, hacktivism, cybercrime, and all the things that dwell on the hidden parts of the network. This is Darknet Diaries.
Think of the web as a series of living rooms. If you’re in my living room, I have the right to kick you out if you start being abusive to me or other people in the room. I get to set the rules in my space so that other people can feel safe to be there. Different people have different values, so their living rooms might have different rules. But I get to set mine.
I also get to decide which rooms I want to be in, and which rooms I want to invite other people into. I don’t have any interest in hanging out in a room with Nazis, and I certainly don’t have any interest in inviting my friends to hang out there with me. If I find that the owner of the living room allows people who make me or my friends feel unsafe — or, as is true in this case, pays them to hang out there, and makes money from their presence — I can use the law of two feet to leave.
What gets me a bit worked up about the “you’re the product” sentiment is that it implies there’s an ulterior motive for any good deed. I’m dependent on a heap of goodwill for every single project I build and none of that makes me feel like “the product”. I use NWebsec for a bunch of my security headers. I use Cloudflare across almost every single project (they provide services to HIBP for free) and that certainly doesn’t make me a product. The footer of this blog mentions the support Ghost Pro provides me – that’s awesome, I love their work! But I don’t feel like a “product”.
Conversely, there are many things we pay for yet we remain “the product” of by the definition referred to in this post. YouTube Premium, for example, is worth every cent but do you think you cease being “the product” once you subscribe versus when you consume the service for free? Can you imagine Google, of all companies, going “yeah, nah, we don’t need to collect any data from paying subscribers, that wouldn’t be cool”. Netflix. Disqus. And pretty much everything else. Paying doesn’t make you not the product any more than not paying makes you the product, it’s just a terrible term used way too loosely and frankly, often feels insulting.
Troy Hunt marks the argument that just because you are not paying for the product, it does not necessarily mean that you yourself are the product. Sometimes, he posits, we are simply consuming goodwill. On the flipside of this, he points out that when you pay for products such as YouTube or Netflix, this does not all of the sudden make you less of a product.
For me, this reminds me of Austin Kleon’s discussion of the power of an email list:
The model is very simple: They give away great stuff on their sites, they collect emails, and then when they have something remarkable to share or sell, they send an email. You’d be amazed at how well the model works.
L. M. Sacasas with an essay on the premise that life online is lived in the past.
The essay is organized into seven points.
On the internet, we are always living in the past – There is no present online, there is only recreation and memorialization of events of the past.
On the internet, all actions are inscriptions. We steadily create digital versions of events to create documented reservoirs legible to humans and machines.
On the internet, there is no present, only variously organized fragments of the past – We spend time, and effort looking busy by endlessly re-interpreting, reshuffling, recombining, and rearranging the past.
On the internet, fighting about what has happened is far easier than imagining what could happen – We fight about the past, and because our fights are documented online, there is no resolution…only more conflict and overwhelming/silencing/canceling others.
On the internet, action doesn’t build the future, it only feeds the digital archives of the past – I’ve written about this as digital breadcrumbs as we look to the trail we’ve created, as opposed to looking forward.
Because on the internet we live in the past, the future is not lived, it is programmed – As we spend time documenting and digitizing our past, these data points are scooped up, aggregated, and form the structure that dictates future actions.
On the internet, the past is a black hole sucking the future into itself – Our capacity to live in the present and imagine the future deteriorates as attention, energy, and creativity are devoured.
Two things are sticking out for me. First, I’m thinking about some of the focus in last week’s issue of DL in which we discussed reading and time for reflection and how this impact the way we think, interact and make sense of the world.
Second, it makes me wonder why I continue to write this newsletter. ┐_(ツ)_┌━☆ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ
On the one hand, I am left thinking about my breadcrumbs as possibly leading to slow hunches. The thought that ideas for the future are produced from pieces over time.
On the flipside of this, I was also left thinking about the way in which we have become content machines.
Like yourself, this all makes me wonder about why I do what I do? Why make it public? And why publish my newsletter? I think that I actually like the habit and find it a useful exercise in regards to taking stock of things, but maybe I am just fooling myself. I have long given up on taking much notice of the ‘clicks’. In general, I only POSSE now days when I feel there is purpose.
Kyle Chayka discusses two new books about the Internet—“Content,” by Kate Eichhorn, and “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is,” by Justin E. H. Smith—which examine how social media traps users in a brutal race to the bottom.
In reviewing Kate Eichhorn’s Content and Justin E. H. Smith’s The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Kyle Chayka explores the way in which the internet has turned up into content machines. These books continue a long tradition of books critiquing the internet and its influence on us, including Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Eichhorn discusses the way in which “content begets content”. This is captured in the term ‘content capital’, referring to a user’s ability to create additional content.
Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work. Where “cultural capital” describes how particular tastes and reference points confer status, “content capital” connotes an aptitude for creating the kind of ancillary content that the Internet feeds upon.
On the flip side, Smith’s portrays the internet as a ‘living system’ that is the product of centuries of work. We cannot just undo all of this, instead what we need to do is better understand ourselves.
To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor. The ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities.
In some ways, this reminds me of Ethan Zuckerman’s discussion of the ‘good web‘. I wonder if the solution is in the actual discussion and reflection.
Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. Boards invite publishers to use all the richness of modern HTML and CSS. Plain text and blue links are also enthusiastically supported.
Robin Sloan rejects Twitter, RSS, and email newsletters, instead he argues for a more weird and chaotic web that focuses on HTML and CSS which he calls Spring ’83. This reminds me of the work of Kicks Condor and the small web. For now I am happy with RSS, but will keep on an eye on this as it definitely looks interesting, especially in regards to serendipity.
Have you ever wondered: Where does this link go? The URL redirect checker follows the path of the URL. It will show you the full redirection path of URLs,
BookmarkedBooks Become Games by Justin E. H. Smith(Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet)
On the face of it, the gamification of reality looks like fun. But when everything becomes a game, it turns out, that game ends up dissolving into its merely apparent opposite: work. The dupes of the new ideology, underlain by the metaphor of the game, think they’re giving us life in an arcade —a child’s dream!— but what we’re really getting is life in a global warehouse, monitored and metricized, forced at every turn to devise strategies that maximize engagement with whatever it is we’re putting out there… all in the name of scraping by.
Whether it be reviews written based upon promotional copy, responding to random podcast requests or competing with Amazon ‘study guides’, Justin Smith reflects upon the way in which the the publishing of books has become a game.
If ever you apply Thing 1 to ask a question in public, always keep in mind Thing 2— understand that there is often more.
I always find asking questions online intriguing. There is often so much ambiguity in responses. I find there is as much learning to be had in making sense of suggestions as there is of the suggestions themselves.
The problem I have with the metaverse, and “everything changing” is a concern about trust and third parties in a distributed system. Up to this point, it seems like most of the solutions we’re seeing in terms of blockchain, distributed ledges, the metaverse, NFTS, and crypto are trying to solve current problems using newer solutions. For now, I don’t see the solution to the problem and the introduction of blockchain and “what comes next” as being better than the current solution.
What is exciting is decentralizing power and decision-making as we think about the possibilities. Add a dash of transparency in the model…and count me in.
The internet has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives, but there’s one aspect of the digital world that I bet you take for granted. Did you ev
Elise Blanchard explores the archives to find out why hyperlinks are blue. She traces it back to Mosiac, but cannot find any explanation for why. What is also strange is that there seems to have been two separate developments at the same time:
Our “link blue” had never shown up in user interfaces before 1993, and suddenly it appears in two instances within two short months of each other in two separate browsers at two different universities being built at the same time.
Blanchard believes that the real reason behind the push was Windows 3.1 and the support for colour monitors.
Mosaic came out during an important time where support for color monitors was shifting; the standard was for hyperlinks to use black text with some sort of underline, hover state or border. Mosaic chose to use blue, and they chose to port their browser for multiple operating systems. This helped Mosaic become the standard browser for internet use, and helped solidify its user interface as the default language for interacting with the web.
We need public spaces, built in the spirit of Walt Whitman, that allow us to gather, communicate, and share in something bigger than ourselves.
Eli Pariser reflects upon Walt Whitman’s creation of Fort Greene Park in 1846 and suggests we need an online version of a shared public space. He suggests that there are three problems with the current space: it encourages a frictionless experience, unequal by design and the lack of maintenance/governance. Pariser discusses three challenges that need to be overcome in the creation of such a space: funding, talent and will.
Private spaces and businesses are critical for a flourishing digital life, just as cafés, bars, and bookstores are critical for a flourishing urban life. But no communities have ever survived and grown with private entities alone. Just as bookstores will never serve all the same community needs as a public library branch, it’s unreasonable to expect for-profit corporations built with “addressable markets” in mind to accommodate every digital need.
Alongside and between the digital corporate empires, we need what scholars like Ethan Zuckerman are calling “digital public infrastructure.” We need parks, libraries, and truly public squares on the internet.
In his commentary, John Naughton spoke about the rise of the automated public sphere, rather than the one that was hoped for.
When the internet arrived, many of us thought it would provide a virtual space that would be like Whitman’s concept, except on a global scale. In my case, I saw it as the first instantiation of Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere”. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, this looks like utopianism, but it was real enough at the time. The problem was that it blissfully underestimated the capacity of private corporations to colonise cyberspace and create what the legal scholar Frank Pasquale designated an “automated public sphere” – ie, a collection of privately owned spaces (walled gardens) that we know as social media.
In a different take, Richard Flanagan references John Clare and his writing about the enclosure movement in Britain in 19th century to privatize common waste. For Flanagan, we are going through a second great enclosure, where these platforms are enclosing our emotions, soul and fear.
I wonder if that makes someone like Kicks Condor a modern John Clare?
Ethan Hauser writes humorous descriptions of different parts of the Internet, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Google, and why they are terrible.
A humorous take on the web and what it has to offer.
One of the more pernicious mistruths surrounding the debate about TikTok is that this will potentially lead to the splintering of the Internet; this completely erases the history of China’s Great Firewall, started 23 years ago, which effectively cut China off from most Western services. That the U.S. may finally respond in kind is a reflection of reality, not the creation of a new one.
What is new is the increased splintering in the non-China Internet: the U.S. model is still the default for most of the world, but the European Union and India are increasingly pursuing their own paths.
Ben Thompson continues his exploration of TikTok in his discussion of the ‘four internets’: China, Europe, Silicon Valley and India. In particular, he highlights the rise of Jio and the Indian internet.
It is increasingly impossible — or at least irresponsible — to evaluate the tech industry, in particular the largest players, without considering the geopolitical concerns at stake. With that in mind, I welcome Jio’s ambition. Not only is it unreasonable and disrespectful for the U.S. to expect India to be some sort of vassal state technologically speaking, it is actually a good thing to not only have a counterweight to China geographically, but also a counterweight amongst developing countries specifically. Jio is considering problem-spaces that U.S. tech companies are all too often ignorant of, which matters not simply for India but also for much of the rest of the world.
This is missing Washington DC’s commercial internet and the Moscow mule model from Kieron O’Hara’s list.
Although I have an awesome, trustworthy ISP, I’ve used a DNS resolver for years. Recently I switched from using Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1service locally on my machines, to using 1.1.1.1 for families on our home router. This blocks both malware and adult content.
Ben Werdmuller
Troy Hunt