Pour One Out for the Internet

A eulogy, for it was never supposed to be more than a subculture, and the high school cafeteria vibes ultimately killed it.

RIP to art being profitable online.

We gather here today to pay our respects to the internet as it was from 2005 until last week. When social media started, there was no real money to be made for users. The whole point of getting attention online was simply because you loved whatever you were making and wanted to share it with the world, and maybe someone in traditional media would scoop you and give you the shiny career you’d always wanted.

In fewer than 20 years we’ve gone from personal blogs and “Top 8s,” to an endless ad machine where using clicks as a metric for quality has gone from paying a fraction of a cent on the dollar for independent creators’ viral videos to finishing the job of killing journalism pretty much worldwide.

I say “finish the job” because newspapers and magazines have always been teetering precariously on the edge of irrelevance. As a kid in the 90s, I remember magazine subscriptions becoming burdensome to the family after just a few months. You read one article, and promise to read the rest, but by the time you get around to it, 10 more magazines have shown up. Subscriptions were notoriously hard to cancel so that the publishers could squeeze another month out of subscribers.

Digitally we see this in the “endless tabs problem.” Loads of writing seems interesting, and worth reading, but with what time? After all, radio news synthesized newspaper stories, cable news summarized further, and if you skip ahead a few years to say 2013, Buzzfeed News made the bite-sized listicle version of the news more digestible and Facebook “pivoted to video” with inflated and frankly false view counts. Now, anyone with a smart phone and TikTok can super impose themselves on a screengrab of an article and get the views (and yes, sometimes money) for explaining what was written. No reading, and more importantly, no subscription necessary.