Nathan Schiller

Following up on last month’s post about Twitter . . . 

The great hope and hype of the Internet is that it is the new frontier. Cyberspace was supposed to be Columbus’s India and California’s gold, a realm both beyond and inside the atmosphere.

We never really explored the Internet

The great letdown is that the social fabric of this place has proved to be the opposite: a wall too tall to scale, too wide to sidestep, too deep to tunnel, too thick to penetrate. The biodome metaphor may seem more apt, but I doubt we’re trapped. We’re content to let land grabbers grab and ad dollars flow.

Frontiers are unruly places of aggression and suffering; that’s obvious glancing at (and underneath) any online discussion forum or marketplace (though pales in comparison to real imperialist invasions). In the natural world, frontiers are disorienting in how the alluring metaphysical beauty is juxtaposed with the fear of the unknown, the scent of violence. Lush forests, yellow plains, shimmering deserts, mountain vistas, starry black skies—these are places to gape at, but probably not to luxuriate in, when you’ve dreamed of contact but don’t know what’s out there.

We made social media a tidy place

The web is different. It’s mainly tubes, wires, and blank screens, as many as we want, a gateway to whatever we decide. Elements of it were inevitable. Give someone a cheap and easy way to communicate with someone else in another place and of course they’ll take it. Digital transformation is, in this way, elementally value-neutral, a natural occurrence. 

But that’s simple. Communication stops being a faster and more convenient version of a phone call or mailed letter when it connects more than two people, allows an algorithm to suggest connections to hundreds, and mixes in audio/visual media. Where we’ve landed with social media has been a choice, and today it is tidy and gooey, soft packaged candy, a frictionless experience, no doubt, but also weightless entity (until that perverse moment when it’s leveraged against the powerless). 

Design thinking made the internet boring

The web is a physical specimen in that we’ve spent three decades building it with layers and layers of brilliant and powerful advancements in math, science, tech, engineering, and language. Yet it’s packaged as if an eager 23-year-old programmer was looking in the mirror: all the magic of life encased in a sleek, regenerative skin, ornamented with features. 

The wrinkle is that this design, no matter its dressing, is counter-productive to the original will into existence. The social web, instead of activating creativity and (forgive me) the soul of the explorer, locks us into unending sensation cycles, the urge to purchase, possess, and engage. But is that path even original? The most beloved consumer hardware, the stuff that seems to transcend utility, is by no coincidence also the most elegant, whereby the simplicity edge of Apple long ago yielded to status. Descriptive processes reveal the idea as well: “UX” is the reduction of the web from active to passive, from “portal to another planet” to “object experienced by user.”

Everything online looks and feels the same

There are a few things you can do on the awesome Twitter website and billions you can read, and it all looks and feels the same. As you scroll, you see box after box where only words and characters change. Type a glowing response to a heartwarming clip of a cuddly animals, tap an identical box to unload your gut reaction to the world’s latest tragedy. This is Internet frontier disorientation.

On algorithm-amped video social, it’s even worse: truly infinite containers of bite-sized “theater” and “perspectives” and “achievements.” If you experience these things in a first- (, second-, or even third-) hand fashion in real life, the thing—or the stories you head about it—would command a week of chatter, would create a character, build a lore. Optimized online for speed and volume, they “reach” “thousands” of “users,” capturing a blink of attention, before being forever discarded. 

The Internet is still young enough to change

It seems likely—logical—obvious—that our species is barely at the beginning of our foray into cyberspace. And even if the digital world evolves magnitudes faster than the natural world, compelling change will outlast human lifetimes. We should not expect significant differences in the systems we’ve built, until, I don’t know, sometime next century.

Owning up to the fact that our big chance to go elsewhere led to turning on ourselves is a start. (The “hollow abstraction” of the Web3 farce is but a microcosm of this.) Tidy tends to be harsh and tasteless, myopic in its infantile sense of order. There’s already so much of this in our natural world. Why design the new one like it?