Culture x Capital: Make the Internet Weird Again
The web is being optimized into sameness. A weirder, more human internet is fighting back.
At the end of 2023, Anil Dash predicted that the internet was about to get weird again:
The stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.
We are pro-weirdness. Weirdness is where non-consensus ideas, new behaviors, and enduring advantages tend to surface before they are obvious (or optimized away). As we approach the end of the year, we thought it would be worth checking in on how this worthy, distributed project is going.
First, what we are up against: a set of economic, system, and cultural forces that steadily squeeze weirdness.
The biggest impediment is enshittification — the familiar arc where platforms start user-friendly, then gradually exploit users and businesses to maximize their own profits.
Its insidious cousin is overoptimization — when “a given digital technology enables at least some players to leverage its systems in a way that provokes negative social consequences for most.”
Layered on top is a broader “recession of mischief” — less risk-taking, less experimentation, fewer strange detours — mischief being an important element of weirdness.
The result: digital and physical flatness, where everything — cars, coffee shops, AirBnBs, book covers, corporate logos, social media influencers — looks and feels the same. Culture has come to a standstill (“a cultural dark age”, even). We killed cool.
What’s to be done?
To start, maybe a rethink of our relationship to the web, as outlined by Katya Ungerman:
Adapting begins with seeing the internet for what it actually is — not a drug, nor a set of behaviors, but a place we travel to, with its own geography and customs. ... If we hope to travel wisely, the old instructions still apply: mark the threshold, remember that time moves differently there and know that every gift from the otherworld carries a price.
As Sarah Davis Baker argues, not only did The Internet Used to be a Place you would deliberately travel to, but “we didn’t question the boundaries between spaces because we assumed they’d always be there. ... The internet lived in a room, and that room had a door. It took a long time to notice when the door went missing.”
We can get back to that place, and people are starting to build it.
Yancey Strickler coined the “dark forest” theory of the internet, the idea that as our feeds fill up with ads and brainrot, we need new “non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments” where “depressurized conversation is possible.” He’s working on the Dark Forest Operating System to power it.
The Verge heralds the return of the “indie web” (i.e. Neocities and Nekoweb), the disaggregated collection of sites “pushing back against algorithms and AI and calling for a more creative, personal internet.”
And look no further than our AI Residency to see what happens when technology and emergent cultural behaviors combine to create new methods, means, and modalities of weirdness: Danger Testing drops experimental apps each week in response to cultural moments (i.e. software as media); Poetry Camera is a point-and-shoot device that composes and prints poetry based on what it sees.
In a post imploring us to Make the Internet Fun Again, Packy McCormick says “The internet today seems almost like it’s broken beyond repair. But it’s at this point – according to Carlota Perez, Joseph Schumpeter, and Clayton Christensen, among others – that the conditions are ripe for new and better solutions to emerge.”
“Not everyone will have the discipline or capacity for this, but those who do or can will shape the future,” argues W. David Marx in his Atlantic book excerpt, Make Culture Weird Again. “The past 25 years have taught us that the contemporary economy and media will not prioritize creative invention. The question is: Will you?”
In searching for where all the weirdness has gone, and how to find it again, Adam Mastroianni reminds us:
As we tame every frontier of human life, we have to find a way to keep the good kinds of weirdness alive. We need new institutions, new eddies and corners and tucked-away spaces where strange things can grow. All of this is within our power, but we must decide to do it. For the first time in history, weirdness is a choice.
We’re looking for, and inspired by, anyone who chooses weirdness.
Got an open tab we should see? Reply with the link and why it matters. Header image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.
The idea of the human web coming back feels very real. My sense is that the next wave won’t be bigger platforms, but smaller trusted spaces. I’m building VERA in that direction: verified humans, no AI content, no vanity metrics, more like a room than a feed.