All of digital video — and by extension, all of social media — is poisoned. There’s been so much written about the Dead Internet theory lately, but that’s not what this is. It’s closer to the Clear Channel internet, where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not when it comes to the truly viral content. It’s either being directly bankrolled by a company like Kalshi or downstream of some weird payola agreement a bunch of influencers made with random clippers on Discord. But unlike TV or the radio, our social media feeds continue to look like — and market themselves as if — they’re still powered by real people. And there are really on two outcomes here. One possibility is we just slowly accept that nothing we see online anymore is genuine and accept that social media is just a new worse version of TV now. The other, much more interesting possibility, is that people realize the internet is infinitely big and you can always just make a new version of it.
The Clear Channel internet
Why I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the California condor.
Nice to see other people reaching the same conclusions I did:
What does it mean to restore online habitats? If the internet is polarized between extremes of public fishbowls and private walled gardens, it seems to me the path forward is to rebuild the middle. Anyone who was online in the 2000s will have some intuitive sense of what I mean by this — what I am calling “the middle internet” is occupied by finite, bounded communities. They may vary in scale, but they have defined edges in a way that social media platforms do not. This allows them to have their own unique cultures and senses of identity, as well as to have some control over who is present and what types of conduct are allowed. Although they may have varying private and public elements, they are nevertheless not completely hidden behind closed doors (as the walled garden Discord servers are.) They may have, as their public face, an associated website, publication, archive, project, etc.
