Dialup Pastorale, computing from a bygone era. From the author's collection, 2024.

Table of contents

• Dial-up Pastorale (Intro)
• Habermas (2022) "Further Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere"
• Farrell, M. (2024) "We Need to Rewild the Internet"
• Chayka, K. (2024) "The Revenge of the Home Page"
• White, M. (2024) "We can have a different web"
• Dial-up Pastorale
• Current Reading: Technocapitalism (2023)
• Hashtag of the month: #digitine
• Multi-melting: X-men and Apes
• Looking forward

They say twice is coincidence, three times is a trend, and while perhaps it is a case of the Baader-Meinhof effect (you know, how someone mentions something specific to you, like VW Beetles, you start to see them everywhere, aka the frequency illusion), it seems more likely that there is something floating around in the zeitgeist.

In this case, it's a wistful return a more idyllic age of the internet, real or imagined, something we'll call the Dial-up Pastorale. I mentioned last month that I was reading Habermas' recent discussion of the "Further Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere", and perhaps that was what primed the pump or enhanced my senses to it (not up to Spidey levels, but enough), and that seems as good a starting point for the discussion as any.

Jurgen Habermas returns to his early work on the Public Sphere, which has become an oft-cited touchstone in the social sciences in the last 60 years. Here, Habermas provides commentary on the changes that have occurred in the media landscape since his initial publication of the work, and it paradoxically feels both timely and dated at the same time.  The disruption that has taken place in media since 2008 (to pick a date) warrants the re-examination, but the historical nature of H~'s work looking at trad mass media (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV) feels dated.  In 2024, are mass media even still a thing?  I mean yes, but the relevance is slipping away...

H~ recognizes the changes (somewhat), noting that 'the reach of new media, TV and radio have held ground (have they?) and newspapers and magazines have cratered' (paraphrased), as the unrelenting wave of "digitalisation is transforming the structure of the media".  The platforms are rising, and this "is taking place in the shadow of a commercial exploitation of the currently almost unregulated internet communication."  The challenge, then is whether the instability can be addressed, or if we'll return to an earlier (pre-Renaissance) way of forming public opinion.

Because STotPS was a historical account of the co-evolution of privacy and publicity in a mediated world; it's why he went back to the renaissance era as he traced the origins of public opinion and how it was formed and shaped. The original book was by it's nature a political work, and this continues here. He notes the "improbable conditions that must be fulfilled if a crisis-prone capitalist democracy is to remain stable", a situation that we are very much living in and have not yet reckoned with with respect to the social media platforms.

There is an element of hope, here, as the creator-generated aspect of modern social media allows for new voices to rise through. As H~ notes: "the platform character of the new media creates a space of communication alongside the editorial public sphere in which readers, listeners, and viewers can spontaneously assume the role of authors".  This is where the audience commodity fights back, and what is so powerful about platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, as well as the other creator-driven practices of blogging and podcasting.  But his is further source of tension, exposing "the structural conflict between the public and private roles of citizens..."(p.153) and it is here where I'm thinking something like TikTok is a great leveller, as it makes those private sphere moments public, but it also highlights the income inequality, as the increasing media literacy of the users has shown the disconnect between the lives of influencers and the rest of us (see below).

Aurora borealis in Jasper National Park, May 10, 2024. From the author's personal collection.

Moving on from the academic perspective of Habermas, we take our first step into the dial-up pastorale with Farrel and Berjon's viewing of the internet through an ecological lens. They suggest that a specific call to action is needed, one that can combat the affront of the entrenched, bemoated, and increasingly walled gardens of what Yuval Varoufakis calls the 'Cloudalists': the technofeudalists and their fiefdoms (see below).

Beginning with a historical look at failures in ecology, in the case of 19th century German forestry, the authors outline how the ecosystem metaphor that is pervasive thoughout the analysis of the internet, both academic and not, is fundamentally flawed. "Online spaces are plantations" according to the authors, and they lay out a strong case.  The look at the commodification that occurs online - initially of the audiences, and now of the very content that they create, which is then tossed into the hopper of the digital shredders providing fuel for the generative AI tools that sell our Soylent Culture back to us for a monthly fee. However all this machinery is starting to heat things up.

In order to combat this 'climate change' for the internet, the author's argue that it is necessary to "rewild the internet". This would "rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity".   The challenge, as they see it is that the internet as it currently stands is pretty close to a monoculture, with choices limited to one or two vendors in most areas when it comes to ICTs.  The infrastructure is locked in, and the values embedded into that infrastructure are designed for extraction and control.  Quoting from early in Star's work on Infrastructure (1999), they note how the built environment can have values embedded within it, and that specific choices need to be made when deciding what to use.

The authors note that many of the tools needed to re-wild the internet exist, whether it is RSS feeds, blogs, and newsletters like the one you're reading can all contribute to that.  They specifically mention the Fediverse, which we've talked about at length over on the podcast (check our Episode 10: AOL, the Fediverse, and Eternal September) as an option outside the current internet.  They also note that a re-wilded internet won't look like it's out of the 1990s, as if AOL, Lynx and Gopher all came back to dominance.  Pity that.  It did feel more knowlable then.

A short article from May 1st 2024 by Kyle Chayka that talks about the shift taking place on websites online.  Looking at recent successes of 'website as place' like Verge and Semafor, which both made a conscious decision to angle away from the algorithmically-optimized content, the article traces this shift from the dissolution of Twitter as the common place (the 'internet public sphere', as mentioned by others) and the shift back out to elsewhere.

The article is still largely focussed on the corporate web, sites like the NY Times and the others mentioned above, and it continues the maddening trend of characterizing 'social media' in a way that means "FB + Twitter + Insta" and excludes TikTok and Snapchat, social media companies that would challenge the arguments that the author is making when it comes to community formation.

Overall, there is a thread here that gets it right: that there is a return to websites as places one goes to directly, and not hitting the filters and aggregators of Social Media directly. Whether that works for everyone or not, I can't say.  What's interesting is that the dial-up pastorale has found its way to even the pages of the New Yorker.  Is this the urban desire for the bucolic countryside?  Perhaps...

Dial-up pastorale can be best summed up by this recent newsletter post by Molly White at Citation Needed.  She presents an ahistorical take on the history of the internet focused on "the good old days", a period of personal webpages, fewer trolls and bots, and an earlier aesthetic (and ethic) of what the World Wide Web could be.  She states that none of this is gone, which is largely true, even though it's now a fraction of what it once was, made even smaller as it is dwarfed by the social media giants that now dominate the landscape.

The ahistorical nature of the piece is the tiny window where this imagined space of the internet *may* have existed.  Because while the non-commercial web was always present, there was only a sliver of time when it was on it's own.  Compuserve was offering limited internet access by 1989; AOL was launched their DOS version in 1991; the corporate-backed Prodigy allowed web-hosting and access to the web in 1994.  Together, these "big three" accounted for most of the users of the internet who weren't using university accounts or smaller providers. The walled gardens White refers to were always there; it's just that different walls were put up in the 2000s.

This is perhaps the greatest strength and biggest failing with the piece: it is aspirational, referring to an imaginary web that we think we remember, but one that historically never happened. It alludes to the social imaginary of a slower, more pedestrian internet, but leaves out that it was already corporate by the mid 1990s.  We may have just forgotten the extent to how much of it was.

What is going on with these diverse takes? What is the underlying thread connecting these various return movements in the real world?

If I stand by my assertion that there is generally nothing different between online and offline spaces aside from the velocity that comes from the annihilation of distance, then there should be similar patterns seen in return* movements that are seen in real-world examples.  Does this mean that there is a conservative tendency there, even though most people involved would likely not identify as conservative, and would perhaps scoff at the suggestion? Probably.

Not all of these return movements are on the level of Guédelon Castle, the experimental archaeology project trying to rebuild a castle using traditional methods, but I think there is connection to the ethos of the movement, a closeness to the previous lived experience where it is knowable, and the processes of daily life are more available at hand.  It is a retreat from the liquidity and flow characterized by the algorithms, and a desire to plant one's feet on solid ground.

Of course the pastorale is a musical movement, whereas pastoral is the longing for an idyllic kind of life, of simpler times and shepherding and gardening and bringing together in so many ways.  We adopt Pastorale as the collection of these voices, independently crying out for a return to that simpler era of the internet.  The pastorale is the assemblage of pastoral voices, brought together to raise a symphony that calls out to those yearning for that long-ago time, a call that is faint yet just loud enough to be heard by those attuned to the wavelength.

That wavelength, that of the dial-up pastorale, that of websites and personal homepages, seems idyllic. Though I think they neglect the next element needed, that of finding one's way, of search, or... absent search (as Google goes downhill and AI search can't be trusted), a map. A path through the pasture. A directory.  Perhaps not quite the pre-Google homepages, the AOLs and Geocites and Yahoos (but maybe this), but closer to DMOZ? A shared set of links and known-good websites, built on trust and personal recommendation and... curation?  This has happened before. How did it work, and why did it go away?  We'll look at this in a future guide.

An essential read, though not without flaws.  Varoufakis came to my attention a few years ago during his debate with Zizek (when I may have been reading Z~ a little bit more, early in the pandemic), and I've been following the idea of recurrent feudalism for a little while (whether The Coming of NeoFeudalism by Joel Kotkin or Technofeudalism here).  At the time I was really trying to conceptualize "next", thinking about Deleuze's "control society" and whether we had already moved past, or were on the path.

Technofeudalism seemed to fit.

(Though I'll grant that it might be due to me looking, rather than this being the answer).

Varoufakis outlines the changes that have happened since the 1960s, with the rise of the internet companies in a way similar to the Mordecai Kurz book that we discussed last month, but from a different point of view.  While his background is in economics, this is written in a much more approachable style, as a dialog conducted through a letter to his father, explaining the world to them and how it got that way.

In this, and the work's historical grounding, I think, that serve to deliver such a convincing narrative.  Varousfakis' take is that the tech companies have morphed into "cloudalists", and this rent-seeking activity that they are undertaking has forced all other firms to be their renters.  This shift to a full rentier economy is leading to the downfall of capitalism, with the tech firms establishing modern fiefdoms through political donations and business monopolies.

He weaves a convincing tale.

But, as noted at the outset, the book is not without it's flaws.  One is that he buys somewhat into the Cult of Elon, referring to him as a modern Thomas Edison and a tech genius at various points, and I think anyone who has been observing Twitter since the acquisition, or the Cybertruck rollout, or similar recent events may look askance at this analysis.  The other flaw is in the solutions chapter, which advocates for reforming both corporate ownership and political enfranchisement. The extent to which he takes this changes needed feel science-fictional rather than grounded, like much of the rest of the book.

Still, worth taking a look at.  Recommended.

Scenes from an attempted world record, Drumheller, AB., April 27, 2024. From the author's personal collection.

At the Met Gala on May 5th, 2024, influencer Hayley Bayley wore a Marie Antoinette-inspired dress and uttered "Let them eat cake!"  Not necessarily the best look for attendees at the $75000/seat gala where most looked like extras at a Hunger Games themed dinner party, vs. the average family struggling with record inflation on a basic basket of groceries.

The internet reacted in the most internet way possible, with the invention of the #digitine: a digital guillotine meant to cut off the influencers' from their source of power - their massive audiences - by engaging in a targeted mass-blocking campaign. And it extended far beyond the heretofore unknown (to me, I guess? 10 million followers (and dropping)) Bayley, with Kim Kardashian losing 9 million and Taylor Swift reportedly losing 3 million within the first weekend of the campaign.

(author's note: have no fear, we're not about to turn into a celebrity culture blog. This is wholly about the interest in the online activism and new hashtag.)

X-Men '97 (2024). Disney

Watched this on recommendation from a couple friends, and found it a good adaptation of the X-Men, it was a little tough for me to get into, for some of the same reasons that I found with the original X-Men cartoon back in 1992. Due to distribution and media availability being what it was back in the early 90s, I never had a chance to see much beyond the first few episodes, so I don't hold a lot of nostalgia for the original.

(I have heard it got better in later seasons, but by then Magic:the Gathering and Doom had arrived, and well, the rest has been history.)

Overall, I like the stories that they were adapting, though I wish a few had a little more breathing room. Storm especially.  But the stakes were high, the tension was there, and the animation was excellent, so I'll keep my eye on season 2, or '98 or whatever comes down the path.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). 20th Century Fox.

Never seen it, nor any of the sequels, as the Marky Mark version left me noped out before this one even got going.  In an era of heavily CGI'd series like Transformers, the prospect of watching that plus James Franco in anything was a non-starter.  But, with Kingdom coming out, I thought I'd get caught up before seeing that one in the theatres.  Overall, not bad, and I'll see if I can do a series review in some fashion once I'm all caught up.

June should start to see more road trips and concerts, so we will see what pops up from those.  In addition:

• Re-visiting Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community (1993)
• Infrastructure
• Digital Archaeology
• and more on the media of Warhammer and Planet of the Ape

Plus podcast episodes and short-form video?

Take care and have fun,

Dr. Implausible