The decline and fall of the internet
I recently read this article about the ways in which Chinese authors deal with censorship of their work. I liked this description of the early days of the Chinese internet, before the Great Firewall and the crackdowns of recent years:
This general openness coincided with the popularization of the internet, which was new enough that it largely eluded outmoded print-era censorship. For much of the first decade of the new millennium, the Great Firewall — the infrastructure that bans an ever-growing list of foreign websites — hadn’t yet been erected. Chinese citizens could access Facebook, Wikipedia and Google somewhat freely, and the state had yet to develop a robust mechanism to track sensitive words as a way to curb the spread of inconvenient information. By the end of the decade, scholars and writers debated public affairs on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. Elsewhere, vibrant communities emerged around niche passions. The poet who writes under the name Xiaoyin remembers the new poetry websites of that era as chaotic and fun spaces. On sites like Poetry Life, his peers quarreled daily over matters like the possibilities of colloquial poetry writing. “Anyone could start their own bulletin boards,” he told me. “It was like bandits occupying hills and claiming to be kings.”
It makes me think of a few things. One: this book, which I received as a birthday gift and have yet to read. And two, the way that the internet is undergoing a similar shift in the United States.*
Obviously I don’t want to hold up the past (my half-remembered glimpses of The Internet That Was) as some kind of objective standard. I was just a kid when I first got online. For every person like me, there was a) somebody who had the technical wherewithal to make much greater use of it and b) someone who was not yet served by the internet or had no use for it and therefore no connection (literal or figurative). Maybe that’s what made my perspective of it so awe-inspired: I wasn’t jaded enough to see the whole enterprise as doomed to fail, nor did I completely miss the point of what made it interesting.
I just remember logging onto BBSes; then making a Geocities page; finding random websites that weren’t that interesting, but which somehow enthralled me; playing bizarre and offensive Flash games; knowing that, outside the internet in which I resided, there were even vaster happenings occurring, like whales dimly glimpsed in the distance; and connecting with people, actual people, whether on Quake or Unreal Tournament levels or on message boards–rarely having the temerity to post or comment, but still absorbing what they said.
* I have no deep knowledge of the other regional internets. Obviously everything is connected to some extent, but VKontakte, for example, is not something I can accurately assess. But I suspect that it’s no better than what we access here.
Now the good parts continue to disappear, and the bad parts multiply and scar the facade of what remained worthwhile. Apps and websites barter down what they give out for free in hopes of coercing readers into becoming subscribers. We seem to be returning to the bad old days of internet advertising, where fresh variants of pop-unders and other ad junk make websites unreadable in the hope of getting accidental clicks from naive readers. And the new trend, at least to me, is the mainstreaming of racist, eliminationist rhetoric, from the rafters of old-media publications on the web to the gutters of social media.
I’m reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which is about video games, but the atmosphere of the novel really reminds me of how the internet used to be–and makes me hope for its return. Surely it’s hiding in there, somewhere?