As a “subsidiary of one of the tech giants,” IMDb (Amazon) remains indispensable. An early nerd site for movie and TV fans, it now sometimes heats up my computer as it furiously attempts to interest me in new stuff. But it has everything you’d ever want: complete lists of everyone who ever worked on a production, reviews by “Critics” (meaning anyone with linkable posts, even me), and “User” reviews, and those honest if repetitive comments by actual viewers. Can’t do without it. And while there are “community” alternatives (TheMovieDB), they’re ghost towns by comparison.
Yeah, you're right. A weakness in my essay is that the line between "poor" and "rich" internets can get a little blurry - and, very often, sites are "poor" until they're bought up by some "rich" entity. But that's the case in real-world economics as well. No question that the rich internet provides services that "the poor" cannot - Google and Apple Maps being a significant example - but there is always the danger of monopoly (Google Books has turned into a disaster) and it's vitally important to retain some sort of balance if the internet will in any way be beneficial to us collectively.
I love archive.org and I really like your division of rich and poor internet. You are right, archive.org really has everything and I wonder why it does not get more visibility! But thank God for the free web of knowledge. Wisdom? That’s the human transaction of how knowledge is processed and I hope more and more people use knowledge for good!
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.
Thanks so much Josh! I agree with all of that. I think what's been missing in this era of the web is any real sense that the web represents a commons and public space, which, by now, is clearly what it is. The web was largely developed by private companies looking to maximize revenue and, at this point, their incentive is to chop into the quality of their own output in order to generate profits on the margins. What I suspect will happen (and am sort of surprised it hasn't more) is for government to step in and either take over or regulate some of the more public-facing sides of the web. I'd see that as being a bit of an historical inevitability - as in the way that government, in the early part of the 20th century, reined in the Gilded Age barons and took an ever-greater control of Industrial Revolution entities. The arguments for this are pretty clear: the US government drove the initial development of the internet, etc. Over time, different tech figures (Jack Dorsey, Chris Hughes, etc) have called for government to treat the internet as more of a utility. Only now - with Lina Khan, with the TikTok ban - is government actually taking a real interest in thinking this way. So I think that things like Wikipedia and Archive.Org are very healthy in pushing towards a non-profit side of the internet. But, probably, in terms of some of the internet's main offerings of public concern (search results, etc), there will come a time when government intervenes more than it does now in laying down a basic architecture and some principles of maintaining the public good as opposed to maximizing shareholder value.
Interlibrary loan is essential to small town libraries like the one here. Order a book online, pick it up a couple days later. Supported by a sliver of property taxes. Looking at the most recent property tax summary, I see that the local library cost our household $28.03 last year. A pretty good deal.
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/
Very interesting. Thanks! I wasn't aware of that essay.
As a “subsidiary of one of the tech giants,” IMDb (Amazon) remains indispensable. An early nerd site for movie and TV fans, it now sometimes heats up my computer as it furiously attempts to interest me in new stuff. But it has everything you’d ever want: complete lists of everyone who ever worked on a production, reviews by “Critics” (meaning anyone with linkable posts, even me), and “User” reviews, and those honest if repetitive comments by actual viewers. Can’t do without it. And while there are “community” alternatives (TheMovieDB), they’re ghost towns by comparison.
Yeah, you're right. A weakness in my essay is that the line between "poor" and "rich" internets can get a little blurry - and, very often, sites are "poor" until they're bought up by some "rich" entity. But that's the case in real-world economics as well. No question that the rich internet provides services that "the poor" cannot - Google and Apple Maps being a significant example - but there is always the danger of monopoly (Google Books has turned into a disaster) and it's vitally important to retain some sort of balance if the internet will in any way be beneficial to us collectively.
I love archive.org and I really like your division of rich and poor internet. You are right, archive.org really has everything and I wonder why it does not get more visibility! But thank God for the free web of knowledge. Wisdom? That’s the human transaction of how knowledge is processed and I hope more and more people use knowledge for good!
I know! It's the best. I just can't believe how much is on there.
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.
Thanks so much Josh! I agree with all of that. I think what's been missing in this era of the web is any real sense that the web represents a commons and public space, which, by now, is clearly what it is. The web was largely developed by private companies looking to maximize revenue and, at this point, their incentive is to chop into the quality of their own output in order to generate profits on the margins. What I suspect will happen (and am sort of surprised it hasn't more) is for government to step in and either take over or regulate some of the more public-facing sides of the web. I'd see that as being a bit of an historical inevitability - as in the way that government, in the early part of the 20th century, reined in the Gilded Age barons and took an ever-greater control of Industrial Revolution entities. The arguments for this are pretty clear: the US government drove the initial development of the internet, etc. Over time, different tech figures (Jack Dorsey, Chris Hughes, etc) have called for government to treat the internet as more of a utility. Only now - with Lina Khan, with the TikTok ban - is government actually taking a real interest in thinking this way. So I think that things like Wikipedia and Archive.Org are very healthy in pushing towards a non-profit side of the internet. But, probably, in terms of some of the internet's main offerings of public concern (search results, etc), there will come a time when government intervenes more than it does now in laying down a basic architecture and some principles of maintaining the public good as opposed to maximizing shareholder value.
Interlibrary loan is essential to small town libraries like the one here. Order a book online, pick it up a couple days later. Supported by a sliver of property taxes. Looking at the most recent property tax summary, I see that the local library cost our household $28.03 last year. A pretty good deal.
Haha! That's $28.03 you wouldn't have to spend on archive.org! But, yes, that's not to take away from the beauty of the public library system.