In her essay, Kate Wagner offers her perspective on the evolution of the internet and how it has become an integral part of the evolution of society. One of the main concepts I gathered from this essay was how the internet started as an open space for people to create and share information but is now controlled by a handful of tech giants she calls the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) who have found a way to commodify user information. Through this commodification, the shared dream of an open and communal platform for useful information that was the early stages of the internet has been drastically turned around.
The current state of the internet is loaded with advertisements that are designed to keep people’s attention and in turn reel in a higher profit. Reading this in the essay made me think of the evolution of human attention spans. Video content seems to be getting shorter and shorter, and it’s getting harder to filter the things that are intended to do good from the purely monetary standpoints of all these tech giants. I can’t be on the internet for more than 10 seconds without seeing directed advertising and unnecessary content. It’s become a problem, and I’m not sure if there is any way to stop it. But I do understand Wagner’s point that the internet is essentially “eating” itself to death.
Many websites require access to users' personal data in order to function, and this data is then used to tailor the content we see based on our behavior. The internet’s start as a space for stored information has mostly been replaced by the priorities of these corporations – profit over everything else.
I wasn’t around for Myspace, but reading this essay definitely gave me a better glimpse into the world of the pre-current-social-media-internet. In this essay, Kate Wagner is reflecting on her nostalgia for the internet’s early days. Web 1.0 enabled all users to basically “own” their little piece of the internet, code it and make it as personal as they wanted. It was janky and silly, but it was honest as people tried to code and program on their own. The late 90’s came with the rise of the dotcom era. The FAANGs started to take over the internet and make it look “pretty,” and impersonal, to “optimize” it. And suddenly users had to fit into the narrow boundaries of what the tech industry could create for their sites, rather than users being limited only by their own curiosity and learning about programming on their own.
The irony here is that the tech that “ate” up those sites now seeks to kind of mimic them. An example of this is shown in the vaporwave section, where she says the kitschy ugly designs of the “old” internet are now used as gifs and stickers on Instagram. I thought this quote from the end of the subsection Breaking the Vaporwaves put it in perspective well: “What is not so obvious is the way Instagram recycles the original aesthetics, indeed the political ethos, that arose from vaporwave and even the early internet itself, into a decontextualized set of images: the internet has become nostalgia in search of a platform.”
This essay made me think about how I view the internet’s culture today. People are chronically online, and unfortunately the way it is set up doesn’t look out for the user. It is instead run by these big-shot tech companies that try to milk the user base for money. I think the concept of the vaporwave was a crazy development in human culture. “The producers of culture [big Internet companies] have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles [glitter graphics, Geocities].” It's all about nostalgia here, but I feel like the world should be looking to the future rather than trying to recreate the past in an inauthentic way.