"Wikipedia is building its content on other people's first-gen research and investigative work. It publicly links to the source, but then back-door says to Google's search ranking system: 'Consider this source page to have no relevance or value'. It's been doing that for nearly a decade and a half."
We're being digitally lobotomised. Force-fed. Used. The Internet has reached a truly sorry state, in which we're all told what to say, what to think, and what to like. We're imprisoned in an increasingly elitist system of content-delivery, which is calculatedly status-driven, and far more heavily based on real-life status than most of us realise. And outside of the fevered surveillance quest, online tech has innovated no genuinely new concepts since the 2000s. The Internet has become a stupefying Colossus of cultural stagnation.
Just over 45 years ago, the British music scene had fallen into a similar pit of mind-numbing misery. The music business thought its idle, elitist gravy train was safe. It was wrong.
The British punk movement of 1976 demolished the slobbish elitism of the mid 'seventies music scene, and turned a fat, platitudinous gravy train into a ground zero of fresh ideas and novelty, almost overnight. So is history about to repeat itself? Are we about to see the Internet's equivalent of punk sweep aside the repetitive boredom of Web 2.0, giving a voice to disenfranchised creative genius? And if so, how will it happen?
UK punk is most commonly identified as a genre of music. But it was really a cultural revolution, rejecting authority, elitism, and the vapid entertainment with which British youth were being force-fed. If the movement had one central, defining principle, it was:
“Stop worshipping people who are so full of their own importance that they don't even see you. Stop worshipping people who only want you for their own validation. Stop worshipping people with an elitist mentality. Stop worshipping people who hate you... In fact, just stop worshipping people.”
The bands included themselves in that latter simplification, and initially, the punk ethos of anti-worship went way too far. The bands' audiences spat at them on stage - intensively. So intensively that it looked like a crop-sprayer in the spotlight.
For the thoroughbred, original punk bands, being spat at by an audience was heavily symbolic of the anti-worship culture. A sign of authenticity, credibility and, believe it or not, affection. But it was also one of the reasons why punk quickly had to be sanitised and repackaged as “new wave”, in order for it to have a future. Most of the new wave artists were punks in everything but name. They were just sidestepping the P-word because, among other things, they didn't wanna leave the stage drenched in spit every night.
Despite its incendiary, deliberately provocative and offensive beginning, punk settled into a largely positive post-explosion environment that retained the creative and anti-elitist tenets within a more mature framework. This mature version of the punk ethos unquestionably brought what had, in 1975, been a truly tragic music scene, to vibrant life.
Without punk, the UK playlists of 1980 would never have incorporated groups like the Bodysnatchers - all-female, multi-racial and leading on feminist lyrics. We would never have known one of the best UK lyricists of the 1970s - a half-Somali, dental-brace-wearing council estate-dweller who called herself Poly Styrene and fronted a band called X-Ray Spex. Before punk, women were generally considered unsuitable for anything in high-profile UK music but mouthpiecing for the fantasies of middle-aged men, and non-white musicians were considered some kind of “niche market”. Punk exposed the vapid self-indulgence on which an old boys' club had been force-feeding the British public in 1975.
Punk and its immediate aftermath also brought in a refreshing selflessness that proved life-changing for the disenfranchised youth of the day. Those in the driving seat went out of their way to level the field of material gain. The Clash famously forewent royalties on their Sandinista! triple-album to ensure it would be affordable for all their disciples. As Paul Du Noyer related in a 1981 interview with Clash frontman Joe Strummer…
“When they sell 200,001 copies of 'Sandinista!', in Britain their total royalties will amount to 30 pence. Recently Joe was refused a mortgage.”
There will be people in today's environment who simply can't compute the notion of being famous and willingly broke. There's now very little sincerity among the self-styled “charitable” forces online, and we take it for granted that they'll help themselves to a hefty personal entitlement before they even think about who else they might be able to help out.
If they even intend to help anyone but themselves at all. In the GoFundMe age, we've seen entitlement at a level that would surely have made some of the '70s punks vomit. A schoolteacher wanting the public to fund a solicitor to defend his right to post misogynistic videos… A “porn addiction recovery community leader” wanting $200,000 from the public to sue a neuroscientist who says there's no such thing as porn addiction… A stripper wanting eight and a half grand from the public for a private pilot's licence… There's something about gaining a certain level of public attention in today's online world that seemingly delegates the responsibility to fund one's own life. And we're not talking about poor people here.
"Punk's anti-elitism was real, and it ran deep."
But this fever pitch, high-octane tide of “champagne scrounging” is a fairly recent development, and the glut of “personal donation sites” is a product of the social media age. At some point in the past ten years we reached a moment where we would be offended by a homeless man approaching us on the street to ask for 50p, but would applaud a website owner who's already making £500K a year in passive income, asking ye benevolent randoms for a no-strings twenty grand to basically throw a party. To which ye benevolent randoms are very much NOT invited.
This was the exact type of nonsensical, brainwashed idolatry that punk exposed and rejected.
So are we there again? Is this the Internet's “1975”? And if so, who's going to start the rebellion, and how?
There have already been trends of cultural epiphany, or supposed cultural epiphany, in the Internet age. Fourth-wave feminism and the manosphere, for example. But these movements have not changed anything. The world is still exactly the same as it was before they came along. That's because their venom doesn't target any actual centres of control. It persistently targets theoretical/imaginary villains, or designated “opposition influencers”, or small, anonymous individuals who are easy to pick on. Most of the manosphere's flagship examples of “female evil”, for example, were written by male propagandists. For example…
Can you make a male baby sitter pay child support?
That catfished MRA standard appeared many times in various edits on Yahoo Answers, before porting across to social media. There are still appalled gullibles sharing versions of it now - over a decade after it first appeared.
With these “protest groups”, there's virtually no attack on the power structure itself. They're like: “We set up this movement because the justice system is corrupt!”. And I'm thinking, but you're not haranguing the justice system - you're haranguing immature girls on dating sites or Tumblr. And the groups provide no alternative to the power structure. Punk provided its own answers - its own alternative. It took over the handle of control, and changed the status quo.
There has, however, been a broader online revolution which could be equated with the impact of punk, even though it starkly contradicts punk's anti-materialistic vision. It's the “Me Revolution”, in which formerly stigmatised traits like extreme vanity and greed became not only acceptable, but positively encouraged.
Before Web 2.0, anyone who adorned their surroundings with pictures of themselves was an egomaniac. Anyone who asked for free money or free goods was a scrounger. For an increasing number of people, the “Me Revolution” has dispensed with the stigma of egomania or scrounging. It's taken an attitude that was once held only by the very wealthy, and drawn it down into a sizeable sector of the general public. That is a revolution of sorts, and it has in part attacked the power structure, because if someone donates all their spare money to an influencer's “valiant cause” (i.e. the influencer's bank account), they don't have any money left to chuck at Amazon. Whether the influencer then decides to chuck the money at Amazon is, however, another matter.
But the “Me Revolution” doesn't lead to the exciting world of fresh ideas and novelty that punk ushered in. It does the opposite of that. Telling people they're entitled to something for nothing has the unsurprising effect of motivating them to do… Yep, nothing. Some of them dedicate almost their entire existence to scrounging. And the more people who latch onto that ethos and behaviour pattern, the more boring and creatively-devoid the world will become.
It's hard to see how this could be reversed online, because the Web is set up to reward “entrepreneurship” rather than artistry. And it's not operating via an expendable middle body such as a record company, with the consumer serving as judge and jury. Web 2.0 is a direct market, with the public in roles of both consumer and distributor. As distributors, the public are subject to the same corruptive influences as the record companies were in '75. And online, those corruptive influences are omnipotent.
Web 2.0 rewards copying and repetition, and it doesn't place any recognised value on originality at all. Web search does, to an extent, motivate originality, but that's easily hackable through “entrepreneurial” behaviour. For example, a domain which has built power through media and outreach campaigning can spin ideas from a lowly domain and outrank it in the search results.
Wikipedia, megablogs like Buzzfeed, and major news sites will nearly always outrank the people whose information and ideas they spin or outright steal. Wikipedia does link to its sources, but since early 2007 its outbound links have carried a “nofollow” attribute in their HTML code, which means the links pass no status or search validity to the source sites. Wikipedia is building its content on other people's first-gen research and investigative work. It publicly links to the source, but then back-door says to Google's search ranking system: "Consider this source page to have no relevance or value". It's been doing that for nearly a decade and a half. And that's one of the reasons it maintains top results placings. It's a classic parasite.
This only works for Wikipedia and other massively powerful domains because Google's search ranking system favours business bastardry above first-hand experience and creative art. This is the problem with having “entrepreneurs” in charge of the Internet. They don't see it as wrong to reward parasites without any subject knowledge or creative ideas. They see it as helping the most enterprising people, which to an “entrepreneur” is right.
Social media is worse. It's overtly anti-artist. Not just in the way it rewards copying and repetition, in the way it steals art by proxy, or in the way its moderation systems suppress unconventional speech. It doesn't even value the most basic freedoms of expression. For instance, on the desktop app, Twitter confines the timeline display of images to a near-letterbox format. So artists are either governed by this monumentally restrictive format, or their images are displayed with an insensitive, bot-controlled crop. It's disgustingly disrespectful. A perfect indication of what these companies really think of creatives.
Tumblr for many years excluded anything but portrait-format images for its radar feature, and never displayed text posts on the radar at all. It still doesn't put any imageless posts on the radar as far as I'm aware.
This kind of restrictive practice oppresses creativity. It's anti-artist. Nearly all of the Internet is structurally anti-artist; pro-conformist. Anti-creative; pro-parasite. Whatever it verbally claims. You go on supposed "artist platforms" like Ello, and the first thing they do is tell you to imprison yourself in some tired, pre-existing category. Whoever designed that site doesn't even understand what art is. And the alternatives are no different.
Punk fostered valuable contribution by freeing the environment from all rules and expectations, and by freeing it from status. Punk or post-punk gigs would sometimes end with more of the audience on the stage than on the floor, because the audience were considered part of the network of bands.
The band members drank with the audience, shared stages with the audience - some even let audience members crash in their rooms for the night. Not for sex - just so the people had a place to sleep. Audience members would also often appear in magazine and newspaper photos with the bands, because there was no division. They were photographed and filmed together at events, because they were together at events. The anti-elitism was real, and it ran deep.
And this level-status, success-sharing ethos quickly caught on, because it gave genuine power to the audiences - power they could feel and tangibly see. Those audiences didn't just facilitate the bands' success - they were visibly part of it.
This was the only way that the voice of the disenfranchised could finally be heard. Punk recognised the art-stifling effect of gravy train culture. It defined the rich world as slothful, lazy and parasitic. And the disenfranchised world as instinctively creative, vibrant and full of novelty. And it quickly proved its point.
"Perhaps the only truly feasible grass roots revolution the Web could now encounter is abandonment, in favour of the real, offline world."
But Web 2.0 is set up to calculatedly pit the public against each other in perpetual competition. It's a staunchly status-first environment. You can't develop a statusless utopia, to showcase the creativity of the disenfranchised, in a fish tank of deliberately-induced, everyone-for-themselves, status war.
So any “punk” revolution nucleus on the Web would have to design its own platform, and that platform would look very different from current social media. It would be a platform that values new expression above all else. Rewards and thus encourages originality and novelty. Rewards people for being innovators rather than emulators. Systemically discourages the blind idolatry that gives more power to the already powerful. More money to the already moneyed. It would have to be designed to encourage a completely different user-mentality from the ground up. And that would mean implementing a groundbreaking reward system.
Who would bother to design such a platform?
The most likely candidates would be large groups who have been marginalised by the Internet, and who are under further threat of invisibility. The most obvious of these groups in Britain is that of the online sex worker. But as we've seen with sex-worker-friendly platforms like OnlyFans, the connected stigma ensures that sex-worker-friendly quickly becomes sex-worker-only. And once the platforms reach a certain size and decide they want to diversify, they end up with the same status-first, elitist approach as the mainstream platforms. OnlyFans has already tried to airbrush sex-work out of its top-level marketing, within five years of launch. For a platform that's about 99% sex work and is owned by a porn company, that is an airbrush job of some magnitude.
But it just shows how true, grass roots revolution is immediately and perpetually prone to hijack. A platform designed for the marginalised and disenfranchised will almost inevitably be subject to a sell-out to mainstream values if it succeeds.
And punk itself was not everlasting. UK punk, which began in 1976, was broadly airbrushed out of the visible face of its own genre by 1979. And by 1984, the UK music scene was firmly back in the grip of the gravy train. Manufactured, stage managed, and doing its damnedest to lock out anyone but nice, besuited, middle class pretties who looked like they'd just walked out of the stock exchange.
The Internet may see minor blips of power subversion here and there. But human beings are too easily bought off for any serious inversion of power to last, and the nature of the Internet means that the end consumer is far more susceptible to corruption than the public of 1976. Money dictates culture more than ever before, and online, the dangling of financial bait has almost become a form of hypnosis.
Perhaps the only truly feasible grass roots revolution the Web could now encounter is abandonment, in favour of the real, offline world. But the scope for that has limits, and at best the uptake would only be very partial. Many people just don't have an offline life to retreat to. And the Big Tech powers have sought to exacerbate that, whilst infiltrating our life essentials to enforce a universal dependency on their digital environment.
The late John Peel - legendary UK radio DJ and champion of truly diverse music from all areas of the status spectrum - said, when reflecting back on punk, that it was something that could never happen again. And much as it pains me to say this, I think we're all going to prove him right.