The Slow and Sudden End of the Web

It's almost Christmas, and as I'm writing this, everything is finally ready: I finished cleaning the house for the in-laws' arrival, the driveway's been shovelled down to the cement, and I just finished putting away the holiday groceries.

Now's the time for all the year-end and best-of lists, things like Spotify Wrapped, or all those Best Books of the Year lists timed suspiciously to guide people's Christmas shopping. But one of the year-in-review pieces I read recently, by Scott Nover over at Fast Company, asks if 2024 was the last year of the usable web.

It's a good question. A lot of people have been noticing for a while that the web as a whole feels like it's been in decline. This would've been unthinkable at the start of the millennium or even in 2010, but the 2016 US Presidential election laid bare a very uncomfortable truth: the web doesn't belong to us, the people, anymore, not really; corporations have laid claim to it, seeing our every interaction online as a potential monetization point. Or worse. The biggest piece of shit people you've ever met started to realize that a lot of people's entire online lives were being conducted through the rectangular screens of their phones, and a handful of apps, and that therefore there was a glorious opportunity to influence them in various ways through the same. Facebook ad campaigns, fake profiles, disinformation, sock puppets - 2016 felt like a real turning point in how most of us saw the online world.

And it's only gotten worse. Since the release of ChatGPT, of MidJourney, Dall-E, and others, the internet has filled up with so-called slop, content generated by AI and presented where normally you'd see something created by a person. Before writing this, I was watching some videos on YouTube, when one suddenly autoplayed: a Mario Brothers film trailer done in a 1950s animation style. A robotic voice narrated it. The whole thing was generated by something (Sora? something else?) and dumped on YouTube. At time of writing: 300k views. I get it: if you're trying to make a living by putting things on YouTube, it takes a lot of time, and effort, to make things on your own. Or you can just type something into a prompt, and dump the slop bucket into your channel.

It seems like for a lot of people, it's an easy choice. For the rest of us, it's a heartbreaking one. The web was never perfect, but it was good, and where now we have site after responsive site with details on Best Plumber Des Moines 2024, impossible to tell the true from the trash. What we had before was jankier, uglier, but made with love, made by people, and made for people.

It's in this context and in this current moment that I read Ed Zitron's latest column, a very long piece on just why things are so bad. He's spoken about a lot of it before, at length, but it's hard to blame him, because he's trying to make a living by writing and podcasting, and unlike whoever made that fake Mario Brothers trailer, he's happy to actually put in the hard work. One of the things he goes into detail on is the difference between what he calls the Rot Economy (essentially, a next-quarter-numbers, grow-at-all-costs mindset) and how that differs from Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification (the rot economy, he argues, is the force that drives companies to ultimately enshittify).

The most interesting part comes toward the end, when, he writes, he's often asked why this matters so much to him, and, well,

I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I didn't have friends. I was insular, scared of the world, I felt ostracised and unnoticed, like I was out of place in humanity. The only place I found any kind of community — any kind of real identity — was being online. My life was (and is) defined by technology.

Had social networking not come along, I am not confident I’d have made many (if any) lasting friendships. For the first 25 or so years of my life, I struggled to make friends in the real world for a number of reasons, but made so many more online. I kept and nurtured friendships with people thousands of miles away, my physical shyness less of an issue when I could avoid the troublesome “hey I’m Ed” part that tripped me up so much.

Without the internet, I’d likely be a resentful hermit, disconnected from humanity, layers of scar tissue over whatever neurodivergence or unfortunate habits I'd gained from a childhood mostly spent alone.

Sometimes someone writes something that really hits at something raw for you, and that was the case for me, and for this. I'm older than Ed, though not significantly so - Google says he's 38, and I'm in my early 40s. And I expect how we first got online is probably different, too. For me, it was via BBSs, slowly getting into this whole "web" thing sometime in 95 or 96, and gradually spending more time there, and less on BBSs, as people abandoned those for the shiny global network.

But the whole thing about being ostracized and awkward and unnoticed? It was like a jolt back to high school, where I had friends, sort of, but it was shaky - grade nine being the worst year of my life, full of bullying, endless bullying and taunts and shaming, to the point where I had the only psychotic break of my life, and came very close to doing something very final. And my irl friends in that year felt distant, only one friend I could talk to about an instance of domestic violence, and nobody, until the next summer, about the bullying and sexual shaming.

I say this not out of a desire for pity, but to emphasize just how much going online was an escape for me, necessary for getting through that year and into the next. Facebook and the other platforms will insist you use your real and verifiable name, but on the BBSs of the day, all you needed was an alias, and all you needed to do to escape was change it. I went through a handful of aliases in those years, sat up in my sweltering bedroom, my 8086 connected in the early and late hours to the online world at 2400 bits of per second, the text scrolling across the screen just faster than I could read it.

It was a real world, a real place, the kind of second life that would later give rise to an MMO of the same name. But at the time, whenever and wherever you went online, there were people. You called a BBS, read and wrote messages, or played door games against other people in your city; later, on the web, you made a website, talked with people through email, through your guestbook. Maybe you posted on forums (I did). Maybe one summer you met a girl from out east who was visiting a friend of yours, that she'd met through boards as well. Maybe the summer after you meet someone through another forum, and you have a whirlwind, tumultuous romance. Maybe in 1997 you log into a MUD, and right now, you're still logged in (though idle), still chatting irregularly with people you've known since those early days.

In 2005 I moved across the country for school and my only friend in my new city was a girl I'd known online since 1998, who'd been my friend online, and happily became my friend offline, as well. I was on Twitter for six years, Bluesky and Mastodon for the last two. I'm there because the web is dying and we've all been forced into platforms. But though I've met so many people through them, those connections ultimately feel more shallow. Breadth, not depth. Where have all the interesting people gone?

It's almost 2025 and when I go online, spaces with people, people who give a damn, are getting ever harder to find. Websites used to stand as markers or sign-posts; people would make their own, putting in a kind of care and attention to them that's all but lost today. How many people make a website anymore, anyway? A real website, not just hitting post in a CMS. Very few. And while at the time everyone laughed at the terrible designs, the garish colours, it's hard not to notice that when people took ownership over something they made, they often made something wonderful. Google used to surface interesting and wonderful sites, but now it feels like all the results are the same: Wikipedia, Fandom, links to e-commerce sites to purchase something maybe tangentially related. The Web of People has become the Web of Stuff, and it's difficult to express the size of the loss I feel when I think about that. I'm not looking to fall in love again, but I am looking to fall for something. And as we've been trapped like cattle in Facebook, in Instagram, in Twitter and now Bluesky, it's easy to see the problem has layers. We don't make things anymore, sure. But what we're finding on the web is varying degrees of hot garbage, and often not made by people. That will be what a much younger generation thinks of when they think of the web.

Given that, given the prominence of social media, its place as a kind of default experience: who wants to write HTML?

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm glad others are articulating the problem as well. That it's not just old, never-logged-of-types like myself who feel and lament the loss, but regular people as well, who miss forums, who find social media increasingly soulless, who find algorithms' intrusions into their lives downright objectionable.

Almost two years ago I found myself joining a group chat of old online friends, and some new ones, friends of theirs who'd soon become friends of mine. Some of these people I'd known since the end of the 90s, when we were fucked up teens posting on a fucked up self help forum, and where I fell for someone with hazel eyes who said I was lovely when I smiled.

We got together on WhatsApp because that's now one of the few ways of guaranteeing that you're actually talking to an actual person, and where you can restrict the audience to people you actually know, and care about. With Twitter being bought by the world's biggest bellend, with bots now an inevitable blight on any open, public platform, what used to be assumed - the human connection - is now increasingly tenuous.

It doesn't take much to see what they took from us. As Zitron writes, never forgive them. The web feels like a vast garbage heap, but it doesn't have to be that way; it's only that way because capital decided that was necessary to try to extract a bit more money, and it was this ruination that pushed, and continues to push, people elsewhere. Discord, WhatsApp, even here, in Geminispace. That connection, to real people in a shared electronic space where my physical stress and concerns and worries could drop away, was a lifeline for me when I was fourteen. I know it can be that for others too, and it breaks my heart that the worst people we've ever met are hard at work flooding the commons with disinformation and slop AI copy and images and fucking fake Mario Brothers shit. When I look into the web these days, it feels like staring into the dead eyes of a Funko Pop. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can reject the platforms, and just build things again. Make websites, chat with friends, put up a forum, ban the idiots. Easier said than done. But once you take that first step away from the platforms, you'll start to notice a change. A feeling of autonomy. The sense that something was lost, but that it might come back again, too.

Because it's coming up on Christmas, here's something written by a real (dead) person and played by a real (live) person: Elicia Silverstein playing Biber's Passacaglia from the Mystery Sonatas. I'm a sucker for religious music even if my religious days are two decades behind me.