It seemed like there might be value in containing our meta-conversation stripwise. I'm not entirely convinced that this is an internationally recognized form of well - I don't think IEEE has established a framework around this.

I was thinking about Waypoint going down, and Launcher; these weren't sources of news I actively used, but the Internet I come from allowed for things I didn't personally utilize to flourish. It did this by braiding media with a traditional funding source for media, which is advertising. I'm not saying that advertising is the best or whatever, but it does enable people to pay their rent, which I ultimately believe is a social good. What isn't a social good is when the lion's share of every advertising dollar on both sides of the equation goes not to publishers or creators but to the middleman.

It's something I think about a lot, because I live precisely at the nexus of that tension. I think about the fraudulent pivot to video. I do return to the idea of Nostalgia, which I recently discussed in this sacred space. Before the scheme became fully operational, I knew a lot of people paying rent with nothing but an audience. Ryan North even made a parallel advertising model altogether. That was reality. Now, you don't get to have a business of any scale if you don't fuck these algorithms. The carving of the Internet into megacorp fiefdoms I think is just sort of intrinsically bad, but there are those who don't agree, either because they're stupid or they work there.

I often complain about this sort of thing on Twitter, an arena which has become increasingly psychotic and annoying, and whose denizens spend a nontrivial amount of time simply watching the service rot. But the fandom content space is utterly overrun with a few endlessly repeatable forms, whose calculated, mercenary virality beggars belief. I saw more than one venue last week run stories about the ninth episode of The Mandalorian, in one case even calling it a Bonus Episode. Where can you find it? Why isn't it up on Disney Plus? The answer, which these blackguards get around to after stuffing every crevice of the page with pornography for search engines, is that there is no ninth episode because the season is over.

So, that's what we get instead of Waypoint or the other shit you like. In precisely the way that the map is not the territory, this Internet is not the content. It's a series of monopoly fattened cartels who have simply agreed to own it together. Their business determines what can and cannot exist.

(CW)TB out.