information wants to collapse like a protostar

Squidi was right(?!)

In light of what seems to be a quietly thickening techno-pessimistic mood in response to the masks-off arrogance of billionaire tech bro chiliasts, I guess I’m a little surprised to see reports of the the political class turning against Sam Altman on the basis that his company maybe did (but actually didn’t but it’s still weird) steal Scarlett Johansson’s voice for use in its new & improved Chat GPT-4o.

Of all things, that’s what did it? But then again—being vaguely creepy and upsetting a pretty actress lady is precisely the sort of concrete tech-related issue our nation’s gerontocratic legislative branch is competent to wrap its liverspotted head around.

Last Tuesday, one Charlie Warzel published an eloquent piece in the Atlantic about the implications of Altman and co. initiating another round of Move Fast & Break Things. As I read it, I found myself thinking once again about the world of early-aughts webcomics. I’m not sure why.

Actually, I was thinking of a particular person, whose name hadn’t crossed my mind in like twenty years: Sean Howard, better known by his nom d’internet Squidi. His pixel-art strip A Modest Destiny was fairly popular and pretty good—easily better than most of the webcomics that launched in 2003—but its quality and reputation were totally overshadowed by Squidi’s personal notoriety.

(2003–2011)

Squidi was a character: verbose, combative, and incapable of coming across as the more reasonable party in an online dispute—a superlative example of what some denizens of the internet have since come to call a lolcow. And after the public collision of his ego with Mike Krahulik’s (of Penny Arcade fame), there was pretty much a zero percent chance the webcomic world would ever know him for anything else.

In early 2004, the now-defunct website Comixtalk published an interview with Squidi, where he gave his own perspective on the controversy. An excerpt:

You recently had some sort of problems involving the use of your characters as avatars on the Penny Arcade forum. Want to share your side as to what caused the problem?

Well, the issue isn't very clear from what most people know. It wasn't just that people were using my work to create avatars. They were modifying my work, taking credit for, and distributing it to others. I wanted them to stop, and they refused. I contacted Gabe and Tycho about helping me with this situation, but that tragic flaw slipped in and Gabe took offense at what I wrote to him.¹ He decided to take comments out of context in the email and post them on the front page to make it look like I was threatening PA, which was not true. He probably thought I was, but I had emailed them to help me. Not to threaten them.

The worst part is, nobody bothered to learn the whole story behind it. They just took Gabe's post at face value without questioning it. He had many facts wrong and made assumptions about my work which were very much untrue, not to mention very damaging to my reputation. And speaking of reputation, any one who has ever had a beef with me decided to take this opportunity to come out and publicly bash me. It's just been this giant game of telephone where the facts get more and more muddled the further from the source it goes. There are some webcomics that have the facts so completely wrong, it's scary.

But something good has come out of it. While the amount of people stealing my work to spite me has increased tenfold, they are in fact giving me credit for that work through that action. A picture of one of my characters with a different head pasted on top with the words "Copyright some asshole", while mean, does indicate that they know the original source. Also, though I believe that most of the new visitors to my comic have just been going there to send email calling me a douchebag, I've received a few emails who are glad that they found the comic.

If I could do it all over again, I would. I'd do it differently. There are a few mistakes that I made which made the situation that much worse. But I would still choose to protect my work.

Since the disagreement stemmed from copyright issues and concerns, can you elaborate on your objection to people using your work as templates to create their own forum avatars?

There is an entire genre of comics out there that are created by people taking MegaMan or Final Fantasy sprites. As someone with great respect for pixel art, I cannot agree with this behavior. More than that, it has lead to some of the worst webcomics in existence. Pixel art is unique in its ability to be cut out of the background perfectly, modified with little talent, and released with the same rough quality of what was modified. It is very easy to take MegaMan and put a skirt on him and have it look pretty good.

And people do it, a lot. It is a real danger for an original pixel work like my comic. I've had my work turned into crappy webcomics many times. If I'm not careful, my work could easily become the next MegaMan. It could be spread exponentially as each new crappy comic inspires two other new crappy comics. And this isn't paranoia speaking. I've seen it happen to my own work and the work of others. Perhaps I should've chosen an artistic format that is more difficult to steal, but like I said, I enjoy the both the style and creating it.

There is another less obvious danger to consider. If two people, working independently, create a pixel person, it is going to come out VERY different. It may not seem like it, but there is a surprising amount of variety available in a 32x32 pixel character. However, if they work from the same template, their characters will look VERY similar. This is because their inherit the style, proportions, and composition from that template.

Let's take an example. Someone uses one of my characters to create a secret agent in a tuxedo with a red bow tie. Since I use my own template to do new characters, if I decided to create a character like that, they would be very similar. Because the proportions are similar, a black tuxedo would very likely look identical. Now, even though it is all based on my own art, the person who created that secret agent could say that I copied him and demand royalties for any work which I sold using my own tuxedoed character.

This is why I have to establish ownership over my work. I one day want to sell t-shirts and printed copies of my comic, even video games. Heck, lunchboxes, toys, fridge magnets, and whatever else. I think there could be a market for this stuff one day if I continue to improve the quality of my comic over the years. If my work becomes too commonplace on the Internet, it would be very difficult for me to show that I owned my own work. It's a scary prospect. What I try to do is not limit people from promoting my work, but distributing it without credit. When that credit is given, nobody can try to take control of my work.

Squidi had his fans—like I said, he wasn’t untalented—but for most of the scene, he was a punching bag. His self-importance, pugilism, and Jim Davisian aspirations were the stuff of scornful caricature, but what really baffled people at the time was his intransigence about ownership.

The early years of A Modest Destiny coincided with the efflorescence of the Information Wants To Be Free period of internet culture. After all, the folkways of the web were informed by the uses which a medium consisting of eminently manipulatable and infinitely replicable virtual objects naturally encourages. In cyberspace, everything gets disseminated, duplicated, edited, spliced, remixed, mashed up, ripped, hacked, recolored, sped up, slowed down, jammed, filtered, glitched, captioned, shopped, and on and on and on, forever. Squidi had a very hard time accepting this, and came across as an egotistical buffoon when he tried to fight it.

Later on in the decade, fans of the Far Side execrated Gray Larson when he started firing off Cease & Desist letters at websites that posted his old strips without the permission of himself or his syndicate. Included with the standard legal notices were copies of a letter written by Larson himself in which he tried to explain his personal reasons for not wanting his work walking around on the internet. The letter’s text circulated, and was received with disappointed sighs, jeers, grumblings about greedy old men and Old Media, and talk of the Death of the Author.

The hive had the same message for Larson as it did for Squidi and James Hetfield: This is just how things are on the internet, and how it’s going to be from here on out. Information wants to be free. You can’t stop it it. Nobody can. Get over it, get with the program, and join the party.

Probably if you were a publisher of print matter, a stakeholder in the recorded music industry, or making a living from the sales of anything else that could be seeded on BitTorrent, you felt you had a good reason to complain about the new state of affairs. I’m not going to talk here about any babies or bathwater involved in the surging normalization of piracy that began with Napster in 1999, or in the mass arrogation of “fair use.” My point is that the internet made it all doable, and so it was done, and it was often hard to tell whether Information Wants To Be Free expressed a kind of principled Robin Hoodism (honestly why the hell should anyone have to have to pay $20 to glance at a single 15-page article from an academic journal published decades ago?) or self-excusing amorality (“I find it more convenient to pirate rather than to purchase albums and that’s on the record companies’ short-sighted, last-century business model, not on me”). In different cases it could go one way or the other. Sometimes both.²

But it was pretty damn hard to sympathize with giant conglomerates that could easily charge less for their products if they’d only prioritize the consumer over the executive and the shareholder. Ditto rich and famous artists: hadn’t Gary Larson already made enough money from selling all those fucking calendars? Where did he get off sending a legal notice to a website posting a scan of a one-panel newspaper strip published in the 1980s?

I feel like it was taken as a given that most of the people playing fast and loose with copyrighted content generally weren’t making a whole lot of money themselves—if they were making any money. A blogger circa 2002–04 might excerpt the bulk of a New York Times article, but in most cases she wasn’t putting her kids through college by punching out current events commentary twice a week. Somebody with a personal website dedicated to the X-Men, a giant stash of back issues, and a scanner might have image galleries full of copyrighted material on dozens of subpages dedicated to his favorite characters, but the kind of geek who’d take it upon himself to compose an illustrated synopsis of Cyclops’ ongoing character arc from 1963 to 2001 almost certainly wasn’t motivated by money (and we loved him for it).

All of those sprite comics that Squidi found distasteful, and from which he strove to distance his original pixel-art strips, didn’t detract in the slightest from the revenues or the prestige of any of the video game companies whose assets they used. Out of some thousand sprite comics, only two (David Anez’s Bob and George and Brian Clevinger’s 8-Bit Theater) had any cachet outside the genre’s turf, and just one of them was a professional endeavor. Clevinger’s net worth was/is anyone’s guess, but I think we can confidently assume he doesn’t own five houses.

Mark Zuckerberg reportedly owns ten homes. Very nice homes, I’m sure.

“VR Talk with Mark Zuckerberg” (u m a m i)

Around the time of Facebook’s Instagram buyout in April 2012 and its IPO the following month, some users apparently began to feel somewhat squidian with regard to the possibility of the firm taking liberties with all the content they’d submitted to it [for free] over the last half-decade. People started copy/pasting talismanic, legalish-looking disclaimers onto their FB walls. An example, cited by ABC News in November 2012:

In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner [sic] Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all times!

ABC’s article cites a lawyer who clarifies what Facebook’s TOS mean. Facebook doesn’t say it owns what you post; it merely has a “non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use [emphasis mine] any content you post.”

What a relief. Because that was basically how the web worked from the beginning! You type out a character profile for minor villain Shinobi Shaw for your X-Men fancyclopedia project; somebody else copies and pastes the text into Wikipedia. You put the best pieces of your Sailor Moon fan art on your GeoCities page; somebody else with a Sailor Moon fansite adds them to their image gallery. You give away your band’s self-recorded two-song CD at a local show; somebody in the crowd converts the tracks into .mp3s and lets them move around on LimeWire. You put together a comic strip out of original pixel art; somebody else copies and pastes a strip into MS Paint, isolates and extracts the main character, makes a few edits, and uses the resulting image as their forum avatar. You make it, the hive uses it.

Information wanted to be free. But, as you might have noticed from these examples, it also apparently wanted to be in the same place. And from early on, people showed a marked preference for the giant repository over the little collection.

In fandom spaces, for instance—and the role of fandoms in populating the early internet can’t be understated—the unofficial Big Site was almost always at the top of every small site’s links section. For instance: circa 1998 there were scores of pages dedicated to the band Tool, but the most celebrated and trafficked one by far was Kabir Akhtar’s Tool Page.³ If you were a Tool fan, that’s where you went for Tool news and information—and for resources to right-click, save, and use in making your own little Tool fanpage.

Zuckerberg and the other online landlords could all credibly say that they weren’t putting guns to anybody’s heads and telling them to stop making personal websites or fan pages, walk away from their blogs, cease posting on phpBB forums, etc. If the masses didn’t want to sign up for and stick around on Facebook when it opened to the general public in 2006, the company would have promptly gone bust instead of rising up as the Assyrian Empire’s cyberspatial duplicate.⁴ The internet was growing centralized, and we liked it that way.

Even if you know how the story goes, it might be worth refreshing your memory with Cory Doctorow’s epochal Financial Times article on the concept and process of enshittfication. Early on, after honeypotting a massive userbase into its free-to-register playpen for sharing & surveillance and locking them in, Facebook approached purveyors of online news and culture with a mutually beneficial proposition:

To the publishers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? Ha! Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link and we will cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetise as you please. And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too.

Some years later, after incrementally worsening the user experience to please the publishers and advertisers, Facebook begins applying the screws to publishers and advertisers to please the shareholders:

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.

When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA:

“I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

One publisher exasperated by social media’s increasingly detrimental effect on its bottom line was the Onion, which in 2018 voiced its frustrations under the thinnest veneer of satire with the headline: “We Don’t Make Any Money If You Don’t Click The Fucking Link.”

Informing readers that it was one of the sole means for a digital publication to generate revenue, a report released Thursday indicated that The Onion doesn’t make any money if you don’t click the fucking link. “According to our findings, The Onion doesn’t receive a single goddamn cent unless you dipshits out there on social media move your cursor over to the link and visit the goddamn website,” the report read in part, explaining that “liking” or commenting on a post contributes jackshit to our bottom line and, indeed, has zero impact on the web traffic analytics that help our publication sell the advertisements that allow it to continue operating… “[U]nless you actually visit the website, there eventually won’t be one, you ungrateful pricks.”

Isn’t it interesting that the Onion wasn’t calling out Facebook or Twitter, but the platforms’ users?

From the beginning, the people who were getting their copyrighted materials “used” and their milkshakes drank tried to hold persons responsible on the individual level (remember that thousands of Napster users got swept up in Metallica’s lawsuit), while those who were happily filesharing, emulating, aggregating, copying, pasting, etc. basically claimed it was the technology what made them do it.

All they were doing, they said, was using the internet the way it demanded to be used. After all, you don’t give somebody an airplane and a pilot’s license and then expect them to get in the cockpit and do nothing but taxi on the runaway.

But these arguments had a different ring to them when so much of the web was made up of personal homepages and running on open-source software, and when nobody had yet figured out how to reap billions of dollars from hosting and giving away content without charging users a cent for the service.⁵

No technology merely serves the will of the individual or the society that uses it, but plays a substantial role in determining those wills.

This is to say that when the constellated architecture of the web was built up and maintained by amateurs and by enterprising individuals who hadn’t yet uncovered the secret formula of surveillance capitalism, algorithmically-generated feeds, and variable-ratio reinforcement, one might have said that the overall landscape of cyberspace and the activities therein generally reflected the desires and reason of the hive, and made a half-convincing case of it. Today, when the tiny handful of platforms and websites we all visit on a daily basis are run by oligopolistic cloud capitalists whose bread and butter is behavioral manipulation (built with full aforethought into their services), it’s hard to say that what the hive wants or what the technology wants hasn’t been decided in advance on the basis of what the C-suites and shareholders want.

So now we’ve arrived at the generative AI revolution. After spending decades voluntarily piling up petabytes of information across the web (mostly in spaces that don’t belong to us and over which we have no control), we move onto the next logical step after free use, aggregation, and consolidation: condensing and grinding all of that centralized virtual stuff into a paste and feeding it to programs that compose prose and poetry, answer questions, produce made-to-order images, speech, music, and video, and behave as virtual “companions.”⁶

These firms already have licenses to print money. You won’t see a cent of it, in spite of your generous contributions to their success.

The Sam Altmans of the world can still claim that they’re only using online content the way everyone has always used it. No norms are being transgressed. The only notable differences here pertain to the scale at which their means operate, and the ends towards they use [your] content.

Reddit recently struck a deal with OpenAI. Everything you’ve posted there since the aughts will now in some infinitesimal way help to determine the next word ChatGPT composes as it answers a query related to the subjects on which you’re given to discourse. Meta is developing its own AI, and will of course be using all the content you’ve donated to Facebook in making it the best it can be.

Stop it? You can’t stop it. You read the user agreement, right?

What? You didn’t sign anything? You say you don’t want the copyrighted material on your personal website or your professional publications being swept up in OpenAI’s net without your consent?

Okay, one: this is what the technology wants, you luddite. This is what society wants, even if our benighted critics don’t know it yet. This is all going to be for the best. You oughtn’t try to hold up progress.

Two: fuck you, we’re using it. Try and stop us. Information wants to be free, and we will be using it as such. And we all get something out of it! You get software that can write clean and wonderfully generic text, clog the web with useless sludge, drive down the market value of your artistic creations, obsolesce your job, and traduce you and destabilize your country’s politics through deepfakes; while we get a trillion dollars, we get to employ lobbyists and influence governments, we get to impose our will upon a society that’s already coming apart at the seams, and we will pontificate about omelettes, eggs, and awkward but necessary transitional periods—and if it all falls apart, we’ll be hiding in our lavish bunkers while you peons club each other’s brains out.

All I’m saying is that suddenly—good god, I’m realizing that maybe we should have been a little more sympathetic to Squidi. In his own self-absorbed way, he was warning us of the slippery slope on whose edge we’d already planted our heels.

1. The “tragic flaw,” mentioned earlier in the interview: “no matter how much I try to not come off as arrogant, I end up coming across even worse.” (Let it be remembered that a tragic flaw necessarily implies grandiosity, and that a defining characteristic of any lolcow is a lack of self-awareness.)

2. At this point—where ad-laden “watch/read online” sites have superseded torrenting—lucre-driven piracy prevails.

3. It looked better on early versions of Internet Explorer, trust me.

4. For that matter, if blogging has been eclipsed by YouTubing and Tiktokking, it may not just be because people don’t have as much patience for reading as they used to, but because we’ve been habituated to opening two or three apps rather than going down a Favorites list and opening fifteen different people’s Wordpress blogs, one by one, to see if any of them have updated recently.

5. POSTSCRIPT: In the comments, alert reader Brian C writes:

Absent in this timeline but an important midpoint in the zeitgeist’s move away from hating the individual creator to hating big tech is the scorn for the social media aggregator. When the internet knew there was no stopping big tech, its ire was instead moved towards the big accounts taking credit for individual posts. Grindset brands copying individual posts and using them to proliferate a name until it’s recognizable enough to but on a t-shirt or open a sports bar in your mid-sized. Brands like Barstool Sports or the Chive. A baffling example being “The Fat Jewish”.

6. The recent iPad ad that stoked such a ferociously negative response could have just as well been a commercial for OpenAI.