A Requiem for Techno-Optimism

Part 3: The hangover

Listening to a e s t h e t i c vaporwave mixes on YouTube, perusing Windows 95 screenshots and icon packs, and reading retrospective billets-doux to GeoCities, Newgrounds, and the player-culture of long-defunct MMOs are all good for a whiff of early-internet nostalgia—but if you want a hit from the preserved salts of the period, I recommend perusing Pew reports from the early aughts.

Take “The Internet and Daily Life,” published in August 2004. By that point 88 percent of American respondents reported that the internet entered one way or another into their everyday affairs, and the fact of it was still so novel that Pew found it worth reporting that such-and-such percentage of users looked up driving directions online, and another so-and-so percent used the internet to check sports scores and weather reports. None of these figures were at 100 percent, and some of them are even kind of surprising if you were around back then. Only 44 percent of respondents used online banking services; 33 percent used the web to “buy daily items;” a mere 26 percent reported going online to “find new people.”

“The virtual world of the Internet still takes second place to the real world as the place to accomplish daily tasks or enjoy recreation,” say the report’s authors.

I could quote figures and snippets all day, but let me just share the report’s conclusion:

The Internet indeed shows signs of changing some fundamentals of the way Americans do things in their everyday lives. Here, Internet users identified three ways the Internet had most significantly improved their everyday lives: It brings them more information, improves social contacts, and helps them act more efficiently.

The Internet has made users better informed, bringing a lot more news and information into their lives. Describes one, “My home page acts like a newspaper to me, and I check it often throughout the day. I am definitely more “plugged in” to world, regional and local events via the net, and can do this a LOT more effectively than reading newspapers and magazines, or watching TV.”

The Internet has made users more connected to more people, as they can keep in better and more frequent touch with more family and friends, be they old friends or new ones made on the Internet.

And finally, the Internet has made them more efficient: They say they can do lots of things when and where they want to.

It seems likely that as the Internet becomes more ingrained in our daily lives, these and other positive changes will become more defined and dramatic. As a whole, these findings suggest that the Internet is not largely driving the engines of everyday life, but it is making some of them more powerful and helping them run more smoothly.

It all sounds so benign, doesn’t it?

In early 2004 I wasn’t checking my Angelfire email account, printing out driving directions from MapQuest, reading slapdash Wikipedia articles, watching Weebl’s badgers, playing Gunbound, or admiring the convenience of iTunes and the elegance of the iPod while self-consciously luxuriating in the glories of a wondrous present and the assuredness of a better future. The internet was just convenient, reliable, and fun. It made sense to use it.

But I do think that for early adopters, it was hard not to feel like a sort of terrestrial Newtype. Before the triumph of the centralized platforms and the Normie Invasion during the second half of the aughts, participatory internet culture was invested with a Galapagoan character. If you were young and involved in some area of internet subculture, it was almost like belonging to a fraternity whose whose shared values, exclusive knowledge, and group shibboleths were owed to the situation of the virtual community or communities in a space that the larger part of the population (particularly its older segments) hadn’t yet wandered into and didn’t understand very well. You couldn’t but be conscious that there now existed an Internet Generation and you belonged to it.¹

And it is the prerogative of the young to believe in the historical significance and the progressive (or corrective) necessity of whatever large-scale trend they find themselves carried by or contributing to. We were on the internet, and on the internet we felt seen and heard and involved. Optimism about the Information Age and the cultural shifts it drove weren’t so much the outcome of any process of reasoning, but of something a lot like the buoyant energy of 1960s youth culture as eulogized by Hunter Thompson—we were possessed of “a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”

So it was obvious that we’d have a better-informed and more sensible citizenry if the internet continued to expand its role in delivering information and helping people to parse it. It was just as obvious that blogging, webcomics, and Flash videos and games represented the enthusiastic, independent, and uncynical way forward for public discourse and popular art; that multitasking was a way of life, information wanted to be free, and online networks of volitional affiliation could be equally meaningful as IRL relations, if not more.

What a time to be alive. What a future we had to look forward to.

Time, December 25 2006

This will be the legacy of my generation. We’re the cohort that went all-in on the digital revolution and internalized its values. Or, rather, our preferences and habits provided the selective pressures that shaped up the ecosystem of Web 2.0, which afterwards turned around started shaping us up. We digital natives were too happy to see and be seen by one another, too pleased with our hot takes, inside jokes, and experiments in subculture, and too high on our cultural clout and the establishment’s fascination with us to notice how the technical dimensions of the corporate platforms we valorized were stealthily changing the terms of engagement. The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk ever pulled was making us believe that we were still in control.²

To the extent that any polling firm can be trusted in the midst of an epistemological crisis, a YouGov report from March 2023 might appear to take the piss out of the claim that Millennials have become disillusioned with the media landscape they spent their teens and twenties seeding and watering. More than respondents of any other generation, members of Gen Y were more likely to report that social media had a positive impact on their mental health. 47 percent of Millennial respondents said using it had a “somewhat or very positive” effect on themselves; 23 percent said the effect was “somewhat or very negative.” The rest either said the effect was neither positive nor negative (21 percent), said they weren’t sure (7 percent), or claimed not to use social media (2 percent).³

But think: if we believe the poll, about one out of four Millennials finds that engaging with the internet is a net-negative for their psychological well-being. And yes, I know the poll specifies “social media” as opposed to the web itself—but unless all you’re doing is looking at Wikipedia, checking news sites without looking at the comments, and browsing online storefronts, you’re basically using social media. The tendrils of Web 2.0 pervade the entire digital landscape.

One out of four millennials doesn’t seem like a large proportion—but let me mentally gather my extended IRL peer group circa 2004–06 into a room together. I’m imagining myself telling them: if you feel like the time you spend on the internet—on MySpace, Xanga, message boards, chat rooms, whatever—is making you feel anxious or gloomy or isolated, damaging your self-esteem, or driving you crazy in one way or another, raise you hand.

Right—I know this isn’t scientific at all. But I have a very hard time believing that even one out of four Millennials in the room would have put their hands up. There would have been those outliers who gawked too often and too long at rotten.com, were entangled in pro-ana LiveJournal communities, extremely active on some big message board or other, or routinely stayed up all night playing an MMORPG, but I’m guessing they would have amounted to maybe one in eight people of the group. Maybe one in ten.

What if I reassembled the group in 2008 and asked the same question? I don’t suppose the results would have been very different.

I’m not so sure about 2010. I know that by then I found myself having some misgivings about how crowded the internet was getting, and was dismayed to observe the parts of the web that weren’t hosted on the servers of Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Wikia, Wordpress, etc. washing inexorably away like eroding beaches. Nor did I have a good feeling about the advent of a cynical and pervasive careerism in online creative spaces.

Still—I was on Facebook and Twitter as much as anyone else, because that was where the party was migrating to. (I also set up a blog on Google’s Blogspot/Blogger, unaware that the party was already moving away from that sort of thing.)

2014? Hard to say—by then the members of the original sample group had dispersed, and I was no longer close enough to any of them to see or infer the state of their relationships with their laptops and devices. I remember 2014 was the first time I almost had an anxiety attack by dint of getting Too Engaged with current events on Twitter—and that was several months before Gamergate, which inaugurated the internet’s eternal culture war in its present format.

I remember it didn’t escape my attention that the people I knew IRL who weren’t on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, or Tumblr invariably seemed better adjusted than the people who were. (With Facebook it was a question of intensity of engagement, since everyone used Facebook at least a little bit.)

By 2016 it definitely wasn’t fun anymore (unless you were on 4chan, in which case you must have been having a blast) and wouldn’t get much better.⁴ The corporate architecture, hierarchic culture, manipulative interfaces, and feudalistic economics of the web were all locked in, and you couldn’t get away from it without making the deliberate choice of living as an exile or an ascetic.

The adult Zoomers’ responses to the YouGov poll are fascinating. Thirteen percent fewer Gen Z than Millennial respondents feel that social media has had an overall good impact on their mental health, while eight percent more say that they’re psychologically worse off for using social media. The generational discrepancy isn’t stark, but neither is it insignificant.

This shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The Millennial set eagerly bought into Web 2.0 and smartphone culture, while Gen Z didn’t have much of a choice in the matter—and knows it. Every new cohort can be expected to look askance at what its predecessors uncritically embraced as good.

Anecdotally: I’ve never owned a smartphone. Throughout the 2010s, I got used to smiling politely and explaining my reasons when people born between 1950 and 2000 wanted to know what the hell was wrong with me. 2020 was when the early twenty-somethings who’d see my flip phone started reacting with something like admiration.⁵

Sticker yr correspondent observed in South Philly (2016)

Even if we Millennials are still inclined to think of ourselves as being better off overall for the consumer internet, smart devices, and Web 2.0 as we approach middle age (or cope with being middle-aged), we’re apparently less keen on the prospect of the digital revolution grinding ahead into its next stages. In a May 2023 piece for the [ghoulish] American Enterprise Institute, James Pethokoukis laments that nobody is much looking forward to the wonders Silicon Valley is busy cooking up, and regretfully cites a number of polls indicative of the American public’s perverse and sudden mistrust of technological progress:

• 69 percent of Americans appear to support a six-month pause in “some kinds of AI development.” – YouGov, April 2023

• 46 percent percent say that they are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about the possibility that AI will cause the end of the human race on Earth (with 23% “not very concerned, 17% not concerned at all, and 13% not sure). – YouGov, April 2023

• 75 percent of Americans who have heard of cryptocurrencies are not confident in their safety and reliability – Pew Research, April 2023

• 68 percent of Americans are afraid of self-driving cars, up from 55 percent in 2022 – AAA, March 2023.

• 82 percent believe AI should be regulated, while 78 percent are very or somewhat concerned about AI being used for malicious intent.- MITRE-Harris, February 2023

• Only 35 percent are comfortable using AI for autonomous rideshares. – MITRE-Harris, February 2023.

Quelle horreur.

This apparent crisis of confidence in Silicon Valley had billionaire venture capitalist and software developer Marc Andreessen in such a vaporous state of spiritual distress that he felt called upon to light and lift up a beacon against the encroaching darkness of hoi polloi negativity. His “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is very much worth reading if you’re interested in an object lesson in applying the dictum “when someone tells you who they are, believe them” to sociopathic and intellectually barren reptile-people who, in a more enlightened age, would have been clapped in irons and thrown in the dungeon as sham alchemists for pissing on our legs and telling us it’s gold.

I’m not going to comment on the manifesto itself. I’m very late on the scene, and one Ed Zitron has already done us the service of flushing it down the toilet like the abortion it is. It will be enough to show you a couple of samples from Ben Grosser’s “redacted poetry” edit, which carves away the bloviating and the filler and lays bare the essence of what Andreessen is really saying:

Mark Andreessen, via Ben Grosser

Ditto

I think by now anyone with two neurons to rub together could have read the manifesto in its entirety and seen Andreessen’s message for what it was.

Let’s back up and remember that turn-of-the-century internet culture grew up against the background of post-1989 Western triumphalism, and absorbed some of its assumptions. The world seemed to be headed towards a pan-global association of liberal democracies; this we took for granted. Progressive-minded digital natives knew George W. Bush to be a wrongheaded fool for attempting to accelerate things by force, because we understood that digital technology would effectuate the process through improved communication and new channels for cultural exchange. We also entertained the cautious hope that the backwards reactionary element here at home would, if it could just get online and educate themselves, come to see the rightness and inevitability of our own worldview. Failing that—well, at least those backwards folks’ kids would go online and become liberalized. (As Stephen Colbert said, reality had an obvious liberal bias, and information technology couldn’t but make that clear.)

While we had our problems with capitalism and corporatism, we grudgingly accepted that the Soviet experiment had failed, and were assured by Foreign Policy Experts that China’s shift to a market-oriented economy stood a very good chance of liberalizing its political system. Maybe the unimpeachable reign of transnational capitalism was just something we had to resign ourselves to. We were still morally repulsed by things like sweatshop labor and the violent excesses of oil companies’ security forces, sure, but we admittedly had a hard time of intellectually disjoining global markets from our aspirations toward a cosmopolitan world-culture.

And the new tech stalwarts certainly hardly resembled the ruthless, impersonal corporations of dystopic cyberpunk media, or even looked very much like monopolistic 1990s archvillain Bill Gates. Google was the exemplar here: competent and quirky, giving away an unbelievable amount of stuff for free, and apparently taking seriously its “don’t be evil” motto. Tom from MySpace was a harmless goober. Mark Zuckerberg talked a pretty good game about helping people to connect with one another, and we couldn’t get enough of his fucking product. And whatever Jeff Bezos’ deal was, Amazon was inexpensive and convenient, and you really had to squint to see anything sinister in it.

And then Google made us stupid. Twitter made us crazy. Instagram made us hate ourselves. The iPhone and its imitators made us addicts. Facebook destroyed our politics. OkCupid and Tinder turned dating into a desolate hellscape.

Tumblr gave us so-called Social Justice Warriors; 4chan and Reddit gave us the so-called alt-right. Uber and its ilk gave us the precarious gig economy. Amazon had us pissing in water bottles. Slate, Buzzfeed, and the Huffington Post turned metropolitan papers of record into midwitted bloggy mirrors of themselves.

This all happened in the course of one decade.

Meanwhile: for all his messianic hype, Barack Obama (the first social media candidate and a Gen Y darling) turned out to be a flop. Occupy Wall Street was a flop. The Arab Spring, prematurely celebrated by Millennials as a vindication of transformative popular politics fueled by social media, was a flop. The George Floyd protests were a flop. MAGA and Brexit destroyed the last shreds of our naïve faith that increased access to information and powerful new tools for civic dialogue must necessarily foster public enlightenment and consensus. The Great Recession, the student debt crisis, the repercussions of elite overproduction and industrial offshoring, post-COVID inflation, soaring housing costs, the unaffordability of childcare, the persistent shittiness of our healthcare system in spite of the Affordable Care Act, the climate crisis, and the hallucinations of a tiny but piercingly shrill voice inside our ears whispering “r > g hypothesis” whenever we saw some report about corporate profits increasing by some incredible percentage while real wages had stagnated for so-and-so many decades in spite of this-or-that increase in productivity and so now Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg are worth this many inconceivable billions of dollars more than they were twenty minutes ago and doubling their investments in research to unlock the secret of eternal life (for themselves)…taken altogether, it spoiled our outlook on just about everything.⁶ We’ve been economically screwed and exhaustively disillusioned. We’ve had our minds fucked with and rewired. We’re sick and we know it. We are demoralized and very tired.

Our inclination, as always, is to envision the future as an intensification of the most salient trends of the moment, and our hypernormal present is looking pretty bleak.

And now Andreessen has the gall to tell us how annoyed he is at our reluctance to get on board with AI. Why shouldn’t those of us who’ve been battered by the post-crisis economy be stoked about machines threatening to replace us on the job—whether we’re Uber drivers, fast food fry cooks, illustrators, web developers, copy writers, call center staffers, supermarket cashiers, voice actors, paralegal clerks, camgirls, and whatever else? And what kind of pool-pissing killjoys would we be to point out that handing the internet over to a limitless army of LLM-powered bots indistinguishable from human users and content creators would be the last and utmost perversion of the web’s original rasion d’etre?

It’s just as hard to work up much excitement about the other supposedly revolutionary developments coming out of Silicon Valley. Remember the Internet of Things? Who wouldn’t want a toaster that requires a smartphone and a wifi connection to operate properly, and that can’t be fixed without making an appointment with a licensed service technician? It’s anyone’s guess as to why the IoT keeps failing to find its way into people’s households. Then again, for all we know, the Amazon Slice finally is four years away from becoming the industry standard, after which toasters that don’t eavesdrop on us and report what we’re saying to advertisers will be increasingly hard to find anywhere.

The Metaverse? You know, why not—at this point, what’s the point in dithering any longer? It’s not like Zuckerberg doesn’t already hold a commanding stake in our perceptions. Might as well just lease him our eyes and ears and be done with it.

What about cryptocurrency? Let’s face it: if you’re interested in crypto, you’re either (1) hoping to get rich from minting and speculating on energy-hyperintensive virtual currency, or (2) buying drugs by mail. Only one of these has anything to do with the real economy, and it’s not (1).

Remember how all the right people were installed to persuade the world that NFTs were the ineluctable future of art, marketing, social media, gaming, youth culture, moral hygiene, and every other instantiation of Beauty and Truth? If on some level we didn’t believe them, we wouldn’t have puked up such a titanic volume of bile in response.

The reaction to the attempt to install NFTs as The Next Big Thing suggests that we’ve internalized the lesson that all it takes for some noxious and/or oppressive new technology to warp our lives and give psychopaths like Andreessen, Musk, Bezos, Bankman-Fried, Zuckerberg, et al. even more wealth and control is for just enough investors, businesses, and rubes to buy into it, after which the rest of us must be dragged along with them.⁷ Techno-pessimism is the perception that the [permanent] digital revolution is no longer anything we’re opting into or that’s working for us, but has become something being done to us by rapacious and amoral firms, and by the coked-out TESCREAL eschatologists at their shareholder meetings and in their Burning Man tents.

Calvin and Hobbes (May 2, 1995)

I’d like to suppose we wouldn’t have made the collective decisions we did during the first 15 years of the consumer internet if we had even the faintest notion of how far things would spiral out of control, of how profoundly we were mistaken about the intrinsic virtues of the emergent Information Age and the trustworthiness of its entrepreneurial protagonists. But then again—if someone today built a time machine, went back to 2004 with a full chronicle of the 2010s and a blow-by-blow account of the social apocalypse wrought by Big Tech, there’s no way in hell anyone would believe him. It’d be like trying to convince a young Skyler Lambert that her boyfriend Walt was destined to become a murderous drug kingpin. We just wouldn’t have been able to see it. “But the internet is about democratization!” “What is this, some kind of kooky PR campaign funded by Old Media?” “Come on, Google promises not to be evil.”

Ah, well. At least we’ll always have 1995.

1. Postscript: I just remembered this as I was about to hit the “Continue” button, but it might be worth revisiting (or reading for the first time) the internet-generation manifesto “We, the Web Kids” by one Piotr Czerski. Some things to bear in mind: it was composed and disseminated in 2012, when the original cohort of “web kids” was closing in on thirty and no longer quite so unanimous in its approval of the current state and apparent trajectory of the internet age. Its author was a netizen from Poland—a nation that had been slower to get online than the United States, and which didn’t go into a recession after the 2008 financial crisis. That might account for why Czerski, writing in 2012, strikes the same optimistic and defiant tone as American internet enthusiasts circa 2003–05, and articulates several ideas that early (and earlyish) adopters practically took as given:

Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

[W]e do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information.

[G]lobal culture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more important for defining ourselves than traditions, historical narratives, social status, ancestry, or even the language that we use.

2. Substack is not innocent of this. If you’re a writer here, consider how you might approach things differently if the user dashboard didn’t throw your metrics in your face right away, if the homepage wasn’t a Twitter feed under a different name, or if it wasn’t dangling the possibility of monetization before you like a bill on a fishing hook. Like any social media platform, it does all it can to nudge and wheedle you into generating more content for its users. But that has to be the business model nowadays.

3. Curiously, Millennial respondents were also the most likely to believe that social media use is responsible the rise in depression among American teenagers, suggesting something of a double standard or lack of self-awareness.

4. Whatever else we can say about 4chan and the other bastions of the nihilistic chudosphere, they do seem like they’re having a lot more fun than us miserable smarmy fucks here on the respectable internet.

5. My wife does have a smartphone. The sad thing is, not long ago she was thinking out loud for a few very short minutes about downgrading to a flip phone, and my mind immediately turned to the implications for myself. Living in the 2020s without a smartphone is like not having the use of your legs in a building with no ramps or elevators, and I sometimes wonder what I’d do if I couldn’t piggyback off someone who can call Ubers, get walking directions, or look at a goddamn restaurant menu.

6. Turn-of-the century techno-optimism was inseparable from post-Cold War confidence in neoliberalism and the emergence of a cosmopolitan world order under an enduring American hegemony. The techno-pessimism of the 2020s is likewise impossible to disjoin from the growing distrust of democratic capitalism, the rejection of liberal values, and the implosion of the American empire.

Incidentally, there was a figure at the bottom of Pethokoukis’ techno-fatigue statshot which I omitted earlier:

78 percent of Chinese agree with the statement that products and services using AI have more benefits than drawbacks versus 35 percent of Americans.

He doesn’t give a source, but here it is in the South China Morning Post. Interesting if true.

7. (1) When three out of five of your coworkers have gotten into the habit of taking a miniature computer with wireless internet access to bed with them, that’s when your boss wants to know why you didn’t answer the email he sent you at 9:00 PM the night before.

(2) Do you remember what it was like before everyone employed in journalism had imprisoned themselves on Twitter and/or TikTok? Remember when no respectable person reporting current events had gotten it into their head that the conversations and arguments on some big internet message board were something the rest of us needed to know about?

(3) In the field of voice acting, the floodgates have just been opened.