Is the Internet Heading for a “Punk” Revolution?

"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."

Some dodgy-looking late 'eighties punk. Wouldn't be surprised if he ended up writing blogs with names like Popzazzle and Planet Botch. Nice semi-acoustic tho.

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?

The Irremovable Badge: How Tech Platforms Use Humiliation For Coercive Control

"But remember what the original Reddit team revealed back in 2005 about the purpose of downvotes, and remember that forcibly-displayed popularity totals are a form of branding. Like hot-ironed grades on the backs of livestock."

Their goal is to play us off against each other, for their ultimate benefit. The butter-wouldn't-melt authoritarians behind Web 2.0 strive to create in us a level of status-anxiety which will drive us to serve their needs.

They force us into a giant league table, in which we're constantly compared, and comparing ourselves, to others. We're devalued as people; reduced to scores. And the only way we can improve as “a score”, is to help Zuck, Dorsey, or any of the other tech moguls, increase their imcomprehensible wealth. The system was designed that way.

Big Malware: Why We Must All Treat Data as a Currency

"In other words, we are buying online services for an unspecified and upwardly dynamic price. We are handing Big Tech a blank cheque."

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Imagine what it would be like if inflation topped 100%… Imagine pumping double the amount into your entertainment budget this year, as compared with last - and getting a worse experience. I'm sure you wouldn't be very happy. And yet that may be happening to you right now, without you even noticing.

In the data economy, 100%+ inflation is already a very real scenario. And the primary reason for this out-of-control data-sucking spiral is that most of us have no idea how valuable our data is. Indeed, critically, we have almost no control at all over the spread of our data, once we've given it up. Access to our data can be sold again, and again, and again. Far from being able to stop this happening, we're most unlikely even to know about it. In other words, we are buying online services for an unspecified and upwardly dynamic price. We are handing Big Tech a blank cheque.

Do you let out a sigh when you hear the word “telemetry”? What about “session recording”? “Data points”? “Data log”? “Canvas fingerprinting”? “Cloudflare”? The “third-party data-piggyback loophole”? “JavaScript enforcement”? “Unauthorised human A/B testing”? “Unauthorised human psychological profiling?” “Unauthorised human intelligence testing”? “Unauthorised human labour-tasking”?…

Who Killed The Blogosphere?

"But if it doesn't read like the contents of a call centre Team Leader's motivational speech, it's most unlikely to be widely visible. I mean, come on, that's not a blogging site."

A classic fixed-width design theme from WordPress.com, named 'Twenty Ten'. This was one of the most popular themes of all time, but is now 'retired' and unavailable to new WP.com users. You can now find a deep dig history of WordPress themes, appropriately enough, in The Deep-Dig History of WordPress Blog Themes.

Have you noticed? Blogging platforms died. Oh yes they did. No one wants to open them anymore, and the biggest, most successful blogging platform in the world surreptitiously reinvented itself as a website-builder. In an age where it's vastly easier to find an entertaining or incisive “blog post” on Twitter than it is on the one-time king of bloggery WordPress.com, surely it's time to ask: what happened? Who's to blame for our collective unfriending of the blogosphere?

How The Internet Destroyed Your Attention Span

"It explicitly trained us not to click links. Not to investigate. Not to stray from the short-form consumption mechanism we have in front of us."

Photo by Tine Ivanič on Unsplash (image modified)

It's hardly news these days, but our attention spans have been in drastic decline, and there are stats to prove it. Masses of them. The Internet PLC tells us we're looking at more stuff, for less time per item, and certainly on social media, it's pretty easy to see that's true.

But is this a problem with us, as people? I mean, did human evolution suddenly, around the start of the 2010s, enter some bizarre phase of plummeting natural attention capacity? Or was there something that the Internet PLC did to rewire our brains?

Twitter Thread or Blog Post: Which is Best?

"Many Twitter users believe the Tweets in a Twitter thread will get more views than a blog article, because people don't like hitting external links. But is this true?"

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

If someone had said back in 2009 that the social commentators of 2021 would be stringing together entire blog posts from individual, character-limited Tweets, they'd surely have been categorised as insane. But that's exactly where we are. For many users of Jack Dorsey's maverick-platform-gone-mainstream, there's no longer a need to find an external blogging service. If you want to post 800 words or even more, you just open that Twitter Compose box, and keep adding Tweets until you've kit-form assembled your "article".

It's technically a monumental mess. Still fraught with issues. But it's caught on, and dedicated blogging services like Blogger and WordPress must surely envy the amount of public engagement some Twitter threads now draw in.

So which is the best option for you? A trad blog post, or a Twitter thread? The first consideration would be whether or not you have an existing audience on Twitter. If not, and your sole goal is to write long-term, long-form content, forget about Twitter threads and start a blog. But if you do have an existing Twitter audience, and you mix short form and long-form content, you may find Twitter threads serve you better. The decision is far from simple, though. Let's start at the beginning…

Publisher vs Platform: Where's the Line, and Does it Matter?

"If Twitter or Facebook's publishing is deemed to be libellous, defamatory or discriminatory, they can be sued. That's the basic, theoretical goal."

Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels (image modified).

One of the hot debating topics of early 2021 centred around the rights and immunities afforded to social media platforms. In particular, whether these vast monoliths of info-dissemination have mutated into publishers, and thus, whether they should be subject to the stricter rules that apply to publishing.

So what defines a publisher? What defines a platform? And what difference does it make? Let's find out…