Whenever I log onto the internet now I have this voice in my head that I’m choosing, constantly, between the ‘rich internet’ and the ‘poor internet.’
The rich internet is either the web-facing portal of some prominent institution (The New York Times, etc) or a subsidiary of one of the tech giants (Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon). These are almost inexhaustible in their offerings. They tend to have beautiful sites, a viable for-profit model, and — every time you’re on them — you have the sense of your soul slowly being sucked out of you. The problems are, at this point, well-documented. Basically, what it is is that your attention is captured and then canalized through the effective use of algorithms. Famously, your attention is diverted into ads that are tailored specifically for you, but, also, the algorithms route you around to other points of interest on the rich web. My YouTube algorithm seems always to be giving me recommendations for the same ten or so songs — all of them mega-hits. Google is stocking its search responses so that a handful of the same sites turn up no matter what the search query is. Analysis of the ‘rich internet’ turns often on ideas like the Pareto Theorem — the idea that the winners will always keep winning, that dominance is inexhaustible.
Side by side with the ‘rich internet’ — always a click away, and sometimes hosted on the same sites, is the ‘poor internet.’ You always sort of know you’re in the poor internet the same way people in an unfamiliar city will feel that they’ve wandered down ‘the wrong street.’ The sites seem to take a little longer to load. The search bars are imprecise. There are the schlocky, questionable ads. The appeals for money. Every so often the rich internet will intrude to warn you, “Uh-oh headed for danger. Go back to safety?”
The poor internet, though, is also wonderful. Everybody loves Wikipedia. Everybody loves Craigslist. I’ve spent the last six months pretty much living on archive.org — and I’m amazed that it’s not more in public consciousness. Everything is there, organized pretty much exactly the way it would be in a junk shop. Memoirs, papers — just about anything in the past that was ever digitized. The rich internet makes its raids every so often on archive.org — more and more, the newly-released titles have a ‘removed’ label next to them — but, for my project, which involved reading many dozens of books, I paid for about two titles and barely ever ventured away from my computer. For the rest, it was a team effort between archive.org, Scribd, and pdfs randomly strewn around the web. There is no way that a project like this would ever have been done without these resources.
A sort of common sense holds that the poor internet is not sustainable, that it’s an artifact of a fuzzy utopian thinking of the ‘90s and ‘00s and never figured out how to be financially viable. Jimmy Wales’ fundraising e-mails always seem like a scream from the void. The chess database that I avidly pore through (with every master chess game ever played assembled and easily accessed) is now overrun with ads for cheap cars and mail-order brides.
But I suspect that that’s not the whole truth. The arbiters of the poor internet have, basically, just decided to operate in a way that’s not capitalistic, that’s not beholden to boards or to ‘shareholder ethics.’ Craig Newmark — although apparently personally worth hundreds of millions of dollars — claims, “By monetizing Craigslist the way I did in 1999 I probably gave away already 90% or more of my potential net worth.”Archive.org functions through donations and grants and positions itself in a sort of non-profit space. Wikipedia shows no signs of slowing down.
Simply put, the poor internet never allowed itself to get greedy. There was an understanding that if it ever sold out, then all kinds of terrible things would start to happen — algorithms ratcheted up, private data sold, content moderation installed, etc — and that it was just better to not make so much money, to stick to a core mission even if that involved being gradually relegated to the fringes of the internet, left out of Google’s SEO, etc. The overall result, I suppose, is something similar to what there’s always been — the new market and the second-hand market, with the archive.orgs of the internet in the position of second-hand bookstore or vintage shop. The second-hand markets never have the buzz or glamour of the first-hand, but savvy consumers know to shop there. And — more crucially — it’s the second-hand market that really preserves cultural continuity: nobody ever loves their Barnes & Noble, but they do love the second-hand bookstore in their neighborhood. Martin Gurri notes that the chief tragedy of the internet, or of our era in general, is the way that technological churn cuts off continuity. “New devices, systems, and media now succeed one another at an impossible pace,” he writes. “Old technical knowledge quickly degrades and becomes useless, like the floppy disks and audiocassettes which clutter the dusty corners of our homes.” The ‘poor internet’ is the way the cultural continuity reestablishes itself. It’s not just viral posts turning into 404 messages; websites coming down with no trace left (where are the Gawkers, the Jezebels of yesteryear?). Something of all of that gets preserved in the poor internet, which becomes a vast, society-wide junkheap.
That’s all I really have to say in this post! The tech mandarins have pushed a narrative that there was once a scattered, anarchic, trollish internet that couldn’t turn a penny; and then there’s a civilized internet that replaced it (aka the Web 2.0). But it may be better to think of the internet of the 2010s — the era of consolidation — as a lot of noise and a lot of buzz, with profits for a handful of tech companies and a long trail of social ills in their wake. Meanwhile, the old web has survived as a storage place for a tremendous amount of human knowledge and wisdom (for anybody who can be bothered to come looking) and empowers users rather than cramming algorithms down their throat. It’s a better way. Long may it last!
Sam Kahn writes
I love the way you make me think about history, Sam. This post took me back to the earliest days of the web, when I used DOS-based email and free services like Juno and split my time between engines like Ask Jeeves and Dogpile. It was a relief to think of Google as the one-stop shop for searches after all of that stumbling around, but it's now well documented that search results are getting worse. Everyone's trying to game SEO, and even lower budget sites are trying to mimic the algorithm domination of the big sites.
I had a depressing conversation recently with a friend and fellow writing coach who explained why he'd left a fairly prominent coaching firm. Part of his job (and he held a senior position) was churning out daily content on the site's blog, to boost their ranking in Google searches (since Google rewards sites that constantly update their content). That was an unsustainable task, so he had to fall back on AI to produce the daily grist, but he admits that it was basically shit content -- it didn't offer anything of value in writing instruction, even though it was featured on a site expressly devoted to that purpose. Its only function was SEO. I think we're all weary of that Internet. I don't want to have to wade through a dozen sponsored results to get to what I was looking for. And as someone with a professional website I don't want to play an algorithm game to be discoverable.
At the risk of growing too windy, I'll indulge a final thought. The underlying premise of the poor Internet is similar to the foundational ideology of higher ed, in that its primary function was not to generate revenue so much as to share knowledge. When budget management took over as the foundational ideology, it meant that libraries started falling back on things like interlibrary loan, rather than ordering their own copies of books. That has had ripple effects on university presses, who could once count on libraries for a critical mass of purchases for new releases, but who can't do so any longer. And this then trickles back to academic authors, who never made any money on their books, but who are now given fewer opportunities to create knowledge, since university press catalogs are shrinking.
So I think the old model was that everyone paid enough into the pot to make sharing knowledge possible, and this allowed knowledge to be the focus. Now that budgets are the focus, we are much poorer in the quality of book offerings. This makes archive.org more than a repository of older texts -- it is also a kind of archeological site for a lapsed ideology, which once served us better.
Among the many things this brought to mind was Hito Steyerl’s prescient essay, In Defense of the Poor Image: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/