It was my college days, one of those late nights, for some reason i got hyperfixated about aircrafts, one thing lead to another and i started reading up about Tejas and then I discovered about Kaveri project, while searching through the internet i landed on some Indian defense forums from there i reached BRF - one of the early defense forums of India. There was a section on Kaveri and i remember spending entire night reading through the discussions over it. Information which was not even available on wiki was there, details which mainstream or social media will not focus untill 2024-26. BRF is now mostly deserted, old crop is gone, veterans too have mostly left few others just checkin' in once in a while. This is a story which can be found for many other forums - the present state of internet culture.

Long back I read an interesting article, "Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks"1, it begins with discussion about culture, quoting,

“What’s the Culture?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “it’s kind of hard to explain.” She settled in for what looked to be a long conversation.

“In Thailand, they have this thing called the Dog. You see the Dog wherever you go, hanging around by the side of the road, skulking around markets. The thing is, it’s not a breed, it’s more like the universal dog. You could take any dog, of any breed, release it into the streets, and within a couple of generations it will have reverted to the Dog. That’s what the Culture is, it’s like the evolutionary winner of the contest between all cultures, the ultimate basin of attraction.”

Though one can extrapolate on various accounts, I am more interested in the interpretation of it in terms of the internet as a whole. Before we begin, we should talk about the idea of higher culture, a higher culture - "is a forms of culture that are thought to cultivate depth, discipline, and long-term meaning rather than immediate pleasure", something which is more coherent with the idea of delayed gratification. We will stick with this definition for the sake of simplicity.

Early internet, late web 1.0 and early web 2.0, used to have pockets of such higher culture - which would later seep into the normal discourse, affecting the larger culture as a whole. Those pockets were generally dedicated forums - usually specialized format - pixel art, tanks, weapons, generalist defense forums, space flight forums, maths, science forums so on or a set of personal blog site run by hobbyists. In parallel were systems like IRC for chat, even file sharing, etc.

It was not uncommon to find actual scientists, artists, veterans there and conversations were kept on topic, detailed, slow but informative. The restrictions on forums generally would keep people on topic, result was condensed set of information and discussions.

Every culture needs young blood to sustain, and usually there was enough entry to sustain those.

The case was that - the cultures were segregated, developing, enriched with information at different pockets of internet in the form of forums, hobbyists blogs. Incubation hubs of ideas.

Slowly the result from these would drip into the reality, but the life cycle of any of these events was longer - so what regular people got was refined late stage information and had little effect on the original development on those cultures.

With eventual rise of social media and compared to effort required to have dedicated blogs, discovery of it alone, connection with wider audience it was way easier to just have an account, get easily noticed - it provided relaxation from the tyranny of the forum moderators, a win for individualist people, normal people who didn't want to deal with all those 'nerd stuff'. Bonus you could easily chat, make friends so on.

Then came 'communities' on social media, or enticement of followers, like, appeal was way more compared to forums - lesser rigidity, more individualist success and rules.

But it was reddit which actually killed the forums, soon anyone could create community, reddit blew up among normies and anyone could barge into any community. customization was removed, so on. At earlier period of boom those communities were well run then top down hammer of reddit came and destroyed all of those communities, bots were another reason - but damage was already done - once live cultural kitchens - forums were barren now. Dying, with mostly old users lurking around - not enough new young blood and old users leaving lead to loss in the culture making machines.

Reddit failed to create another set of cultural hubs, rest of the social media also failed. Twitter even though along with other forums may have caused the decline on hobbyists blogs but thanks to the twitter simcluster it almost reached there but then elon came, destroyed the algorithm, turn it into slop machine with monetization and twitter was now just pure - slop culture at the end. artists leaving, guys who build no longer building just sucked into the ragebait engine. so on. Even though it has the resources - people - twitter is extremely bad to the point it discourages any culture of discussion or conversation.

With forums gone, reddit in shambles, social media 'ai' optimizations any specific cultural hotspots are dead - decaying - withering. We are now the at 'culture' stage of the internet.

Forums itself were abstractions - tbh internet - of what was happening in real life - sharing and all. Eventually digital space became move lived than the reality itself.

The digital reality, the places which propped new age of such people are no longer strong enough, there's no 'higher culture' anymore it's just 'culture'. You can no longer build a culture which was possible in places like dedicated forums, nor you can find the hobbyists or connect with them using dedicated blogs - thanks to google search enshittification. The conversations moving back to places like bad is extremely bad thanks to their lack of posterity.

Now regarding late gratification, the current crop of social media which thrives on instant gratification, making users addicted to clicks, optimized for seeking attention through algorithm trickery instead of content quality has made situation worse. Forums were not perfect, powertripping mods is not something uncommon to hear, ease of usage of internet was a carrot for normal people now when one thinks about it. The lack of discoverability of such places is another issue.

All combined, our meta heaven is now meta hell, people who tried to escape reality to live in this are now trapped, addicted to dopamine hits. Even if they want they can't escape. We need a reset, returning to the nature is more required than anything. With advent of AI things are going to get worse.

References

  1. https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2017/11/12/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/