A Brief History Of Internet Culture

WAAAAHHHH I MISS BEING SEVEN WHEN THE ONLY INTERNET I USED WAS THE CBBC WEBSITE there now you don't have to read the post, you're free :)

Some housekeeping before we begin. Firstly, here's Alan Shearer taking like one sentence to say what I took a few paragraphs to. Secondly, in case you were worried, Freedman DID pull the trigger and bring in Batshuayi.

David, this internet thing will never catch on... 🤦‍♀️ #davidbowie @timberners_lee pic.twitter.com/XKoSBVqZGU

— BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) January 13, 2019

To business, then. When I first had the idea to blog, I thought this post would come a lot later, as a sort of grand finale, but it's come to my attention that I can't do a lot of what I want to in the near-future without explaining what I believe. Perhaps I will do something a lot more in-depth, more well-researched, and less bluster-and-bullshit focused in future, but hopefully this will suffice. Samzdat has to walk us through Plato and mathematics to get to his endgoal, I have to teach you lot about Youtube, Messi, and what actually went down with that whole Gamergate shenanigan. Essentially, I believe that there are distinct eras within internet culture, that correspond pretty well to the US presidency. These eras aren't particularly clear while they're happening, but in retrospect the difference between the internet of Bill Clinton's premiership and that of Obama's is as bait as the difference between the Cambrian period and the Silurian. Understanding this makes it way easier to understand why certain things have waxed and waned. Usenet could never work in 2019, and Insta could never work in 1993; Cracked was able to thrive on Obama's internet but fucking imploded on Trump's; you man already know how I feel about YouTube. Let's dive in.

Clinton's Web, 1991-1998

i actually lived through this era and still feel like i’m looking at daguerreotypes of dyspeptic civil war vets.

— Jess Harvell (@cheaptrickrules) February 23, 2019

I can't tell you much about this period because I did not live through any aspect of it. All the hallmarks of it are completely alien to me. There's a lot of "the medium is the message" going on throughout this history, because the content on the Internet is inextricable from its media in a way that McLuhan could only have dreamed of, and because a lot of the tools we used back then are gone now (AOL, AskJeeves, GeoCities, etc), the content doesn't make any sense to me, just as a TikTok video doesn't make sense without the existence of smartphones or apps or whatever. Despite me knowing next-to-nothing about the 90s, here's a vague, quick rundown anyway:

• You use the internet by connecting to AOL (pronounced "owl"), which is an all seeing eye that looks deep into your soul in order to decide which website to send you to. Search engines do not exist, and as such, only rich people with incredibly knowledgeable service staff are able to access vast swathes of the Internet by calling upon their chattel to point them in the right direction (after bypassing AOL, of course). This ends up being known as "asking Jeeves" in the vernacular.
• As compensation for AOL being incredibly faulty, people are allowed to make their own websites on something called GeoCities. GeoCities resembles something like a primitive MySpace, or a usable Tumblr (we really need to stop talking about SJWs and start talking about how atrocious that website is from a design standpoint when Tumblr is brought up). People can customise it as they desire, and everything from trains to (mostly) D.C. emo bands to tits recieve tributes and dedications on the site. This upsets AOL greatly, but there is nothing AOL can do except caw into the void. (By the way, those links are from a successor site, which is technically unrelated but similar enough that it represents the kind of content we were dealing with at the time pretty well.)
• Something I did not know until a cursory Google just now is that GeoCities was bought by Yahoo! in 1999, just after this era ends, and just before the dot-com bubble burst. Two years later, no one was sure that GeoCities had ever made a profit. There are three important things to take from this, which follow along from one another. The first is that despite people's utopian dreams, profit has always been a concern for certain companies working on the Internet. There were people, like Big Dave up there, who truly thought the Internet would revolutionise things in an anti-capital direction - after all, there's literally no physical product, right? These people were wrong, because the second thing is, even though it doesn't make any fucking sense, there is definitely money SOMEWHERE in the Internet but it has taken everyone a long time to work out where, and it still feels somewhat random. Something like GeoCities can be incredibly popular and not net Yahoo a single dime, whereas something like YouTube can be incredibly popular and give Google all the money it wants simply by changing everything about itself. I suppose this is true to real life, too. Sometimes you spend big and get Eriksen, and sometimes you get Roberto fucking Soldado. The third thing is that Yahoo has literally never gotten this coinflip correct. Yahoo bought Tumblr in my jeunesse and completely cocked that up too, and considering that I know Tumblr is just shit GeoCities and I don't use either of them, the fact that Yahoo hasn't imploded under the weight of its own inability to make a good decision is honestly quite impressive.

  

  If I had a GeoCities, I would post this, which it is OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE for you not to forget.

• To go back to Clinton's web, this period of time is characterised by niches and nerdery - despite the more widespread appeal of operating systems like Windows 95, only 17% of people in the developed world have access to the internet, and the vast majority are either college students, massive computer geeks, or both. The culture is therefore defined by things like usenet groups and discussion forums with ridiculously narrow scopes but, weirdly, enough influence to warrant wikipedia pages, like alt.tv.simpsons. Another newsgroup that warrants discussion is talk.origins, which I will come back to in due course. The first webcomics begin to flourish around this time too, and develop their own foibles that eventually make them a completely different prospect to newspaper comic strips or Marvel/D.C.-style comic books, the way that we accidentally left Old Norse in the fridge on some remote islands and found Norn and Old Gutnish when we came back. The most notable thing about webcomics is their freedom. You can publish anything, by which I mean porn, and of course one of the first webcomics is furry shit, but it also means you can take incredibly long hiatuses, have a wildly erratic posting schedule, or just never come back.
• Online content is still defined by offline content at this point, and the way this manifests itself is the first rumblings of the Culture War. The Culture War had just begun to take shape in meatspace, with things like Tipper Gore and her campaign to get "Parental Advisory" on explicit albums, thereby making them even cooler, or Pat Buchanan, codifier of the culture war idea, and his ramblings on the more extreme end of things. The aforementioned talk.origins, devoted to discussion of creationism and evolution, is an example of a real-life skirmish that hopped online. Keep this in mind.

This era ends around the time of the dot-com boom-and-bust, and we move into the second (technically third or fourth, but pre like 1993 the Web is such a different beast, that I know even less about, that I shan't bother) era, the era of Bush.

Bush II's web, 1999 - 2006

I don't REMEMBER this one per se, but I'm a lot more familiar with it. By the way, I am aware that Bush was not president from 1999-2006, but going from the start of a president's election CYCLE to the start of the one for his successor makes sense to me, and this will be especially useful when we get to le orange man.

• This period is where we see all the elements that were established in Clinton's internet coalesce into an archetype: that of the neckbeard. I'm perhaps being a little broad with this, but the neckbeard of Bush's internet is atheist and vehemently so, vaguely anti-authority (maybe he - and it is a he - skews libertarian, maybe anarchist, the point is that it's not Bush/Mom), and probably the first type of person to prioritise the online over the offline. The Culture War is of great importance to him, and this is why his views are unimportant as long as they are in opposition to his parents'. Heavily conservative Republicans were into Bush, so this lot fell in with, like Ron Paul, and other anti-establishment figures. Videogames are an important part of his life, anime almost certainly figures into things, and from this you see the webcomic industry boom. Things like Penny Arcade, CTRL+ALT+DELETE, and MegaTokyo typify this kind of person. There are comics for other niches, like Questionable Content if you're more of a Massachussetts hipster type, but "two gamers on a couch" dominates style-wise.
•  Early Questionable Content is a fantastic time capsule for the concurrent hipster aesthetic, by the way; they work/hang out at a coffee shop that defines itself in opposition to Starbucks and make impenetrable layered pop-culture reference jokes (which I, of course, never do). The artist/writer (he does both, to this day, which is probably why he's had a breakdown or two (scroll to the bottom) over time) was into Arcade Fire back when they were THE Arcade Fire, it's honestly a mad one. The comic is about robots or something now, I don't read it anymore. This is a harbinger of things to come, though; once a trend has made its way from the literal and figurative basements of our world to the art school kids, it's only a matter of time before complete normies get on board and ruin what the neckbeard has going for him.
• All this is not to say that the neckbeard was the only development in this time period. Just as Questionable Content's arrival at this point suggests, if you want a single word to describe what has happened to the internet between 1991 and now, try "normification." This time period sees the advent of a lot of social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace. Social networking provides the perfect platform for things like Cracked and Buzzfeed to thrive. Our neckbeard stereotype much prefers the nascent 4chan, and all the in-jokes, filthiness, and antisocial behaviour contained therein. 
• This is also the heyday of the blog, spiritual successor to GeoCities, where everyone decided that their particular brand of drivel was exactly what the world was missing. Can you imagine the arrogance involved in thinking people want to read your bullshit? Seriously though, I'm so upset with the lady that owns sprezzatura.blogspot.com because she did like three posts before cutting and I've done like SIX now it's not FAIR
• A brief aside: a website I intend to write about in future is TVTropes. I spent a disproportionate amount of my time on there in the mid-2010s - you can tell because I've written things in this post like "Spiritual Successor" or "Pat Buchanan codified the concept (i.e. trope) of the culture war" or the fact that I know a fucking stupid amount about a webcomic that started in 2003, but it is truly a product of the Bushian Internet and explaining it explains a lot about the Internet in turn.

I can't pinpoint a specific event that would mark the end of this era and the beginning of the next. Among any of these eras these are the two where the distinction is blurriest. We can all tell that the Internet's of 1999 and 2014 are different, but 2006 and 2007 is a different prospect. Unfortunately I've already committed to this format so we're gonna have to keep going and just say that Obama running for president changed things somehow. Calm? Calm.

Shoutout to SMBC for consistently being the GOAT webcomic

Obama's Internet, 2007-2014

This attempt to cancel 19th century dandy Beau Brummell is an incredible artifact of internet culture. It's Eric Garland tweetstorms, callout culture, Epic Rap Battles of History, and Reddit, all mixed together. https://t.co/hXP4u2FfbU

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 26, 2019

He is referring to this thread:

Okay you know what, I'm pissed about some stuff so that means it's time for another thread about fashion history. This one is for all my boyes suffering under toxic masculinity. Thread af.

— Alexandra Rowland✨ (@_alexrowland) February 25, 2019

That post happened in 2019, but it's a perfect distillation of the Obama era style-wise, which is why it felt so weird. I didn't even really notice it was written in that confrontational way until I had it pointed out to me because that's honestly just how people relay information if they're from this time period, but once people started dunking on it I realised how bad it was. I don't even disagree with her goal here, boys should feel pretty too, I know I do, but this style is unforgivable.

The culture of the Obama era contains things like crowdfunding (that's how he became president, after all), the growth of smartphone usage, and the creation of the sites/apps that we know and tolerate today. It becomes more and more normal to be on the internet, and we are all on it more and more frequently. When I said that the neckbeard was the first person to prioritise the online over the offline, he was really the only archetype to be able to do that. Whereas before about 2010 the internet is best understood as an augment, or an alternative, to real life, this decade, the internet and real life are inextricable. We all know this, it's not like I'm the Moses of Mitcham providing you with fascinating new information that will surely save you from hell, it's just important to have it written, it might make some things clearer. The point is that "internet culture" is really no longer a thing - if not by the end of Obama's term, definitely by now. I have friends who, when I go to theirs for a brew, will delight in showing me the latest memes they've seen on various sites. I've had some of the most important conversations of my life on Messenger, which is pretty fuckin' sad, but true, and my relationship with my schoolfriends is conducted almost entirely on WhatsApp. Didn't the Arab Spring happen on Twitter or whatever? That was the line we were fed, at least. The Internet IS real life, which means Internet Culture is just culture now.

That said, internet culture does still exist in Obama's internet, and I can point to a few specific sites that defined the time. I'll leave that for after the Trump's internet section, because I think their arcs make more sense that way. Obama's internet is ultimately destroyed, not by the 2016 election cycle, which was terrible, but by Gamergate. I intend to write about that debacle in detail one day, but if you don't know, everyone got very upset about videogames, it was fucking dumb, the feminists were in the right and the neckbeards were in the wrong, and it has set the tone for the way things happen on the internet since. This represents the final death knell for our Bush-era neckbeard, and his anti-conservative politics, and takes us straight into...

Trump's internet, 2015-oh god when will it end

i still think about that thread that tried to cancel the Greek Gods for being problematic....this is how i know you people don’t go outside

— mahamed (@mahamed_1210) February 9, 2019

I made the point in the Obama section that real life is increasingly conducted online. This is not to say the people who prioritise online life ever stopped doing that. If anything, that trend has gotten worse with time. There's a universal trend towards More Internet For Everyone, and for some that means now they use snapchat from time to time, and for some, that means they try and do Hephaesteus callout posts or whatever the fuck.

The plight of the Extremely Online, as they (who am I kidding, we) call themselves, is one thing. On the other side of things, Instagram represents the ultimate normification of the internet, and is the ultimate symbol of the Trump-era internet. From a place where nerds could hide from the real world and bitch about the Simpsons in peace, the internet now plays host to what is essentially a marketing platform where the prettiest of pretty people give us all body image issues that, they claim, can be assuaged if only we would by tons of shit. I am aware that meme pages and cool arty shit exists on there, but that's not what anyone means when they think of Instagram, so I will disregard. This internet is Hell because corporations are now beginning to understand how to monetise things - which is always a big problem - and politics has seeped into our every debate, for whatever reason.

Everyone is overusing the internet, but there are normie ways to do that, like scrolling through facebook mindlessly or constantly taking selfies, and there are neckbeard-y ways to do that, like frequenting WizChan or dragging Dionysus (I really cannot get over that tweet omds). This is where the dichotomy lies now - not between the people who use the internet and the people who do not, but between the people who use it normally and the people who use it weird. I will now look at the arc of some of our favourite sites to explain this phenomenon, and that shift, in light of all we've talked about.

• Twitter is the medium I have chosen to ruin my life with, so let's start with that. Time was, Twitter was where people posted about breakfast. Remember in like 2011 when every hack comedian had a little bit about "I DON'T CARE ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE EAT FOR BREAKFAST, WHY DOES TWITTER EVEN EXIST!" In light of Trump-era twitter I think we would all prefer it went back to BreakfastChat instead of tweets like "here's why sanders can still win against macron AND may in one fell swoop, all you liberal scum are ignoring france outside of l'hexagone: introducing the guadeloupe strategy (tweet #1/TREE(3))." It's no longer for breakfast, it is for the president, it is for politics. Here I pause for the obligatory "Shame And Society" quote: "Hey, why is Instagram our accepted proxy for status? Open to suggestions, but I think it’s the visual medium. Not only is harder to fake tagged restaurant selfies than knowledge of @dril​ tweets, status-by-text is insufferably obvious. On Twitter, you can see the seams where someone is trying to act cool, Instagram lets you hide class markers like a travelogue Kubrick (n.b. this also makes it better for advertisers)." Because Twitter is the main text-based medium, it attracts a certain kind of bellend, of which I am a prime example, that just likes to OPINE about literally everything that comes their way, and since the personal is political, the stakes are incredibly high. Words like "The Discourse" and "Cancelled" loom large, and make basically everyone upset. I am not one of the people that believes the nasty SJWs are infringing on my right to post utterly abysmal sprite comics where there aren't any blacks and I finally, FINALLY, get a gf, but I really do feel like the Discourse has a life of its own, and no one person that takes part in it actually enjoys it very much. Sure, it's fun to dunk on people having normal ones, but you'd prefer not to know in the first place, right? Twitter - at least my Twitter, it's important to remember that I chose who to follow - has a weird atmosphere where everyone hates it but no one can leave for some reason, as a direct result of The Discourse ("I hate every aspect of this but I NEED to know what's happening", which is also my reaction to Hollyoaks, funnily enough).
• I have talked enough about YouTube but the movement from actually broadcasting oneself to famous YouTubers like Shane Dawson to Pewds, endless gaming streams and reposted television content is textbook Bush -> Obama -> Trump.
• Reddit set out to be the front page of the internet, with a uniquely "nerdy" outlook. Reddit's culture is actually just a reheated version of 4chan's culture, which is why I'll talk about them in tandem. 4chan was a product of Bush's internet, a neckbeard (figurative term btw, conjures a not-necessarily-accurate physical image but a perfect mental one) emulating the Japanese way of doing things and producing something fundamentally anti-establishment and pro-fucking-things-up along the way. When we think of 4chan now we probably jump straight to nihilistic racist shitposting, but 4chan is the true home of things like "EPIC WIN", cat-based internet humour (LOL @ "It has since spread throughout the internet to include other websites as well as other days of the week."), and that aformentioned confrontational faux-badass style. Unfortunately, the times have changed, and because Reddit's format is conducive to posting other people's content rather than creating one's own (not that 4chan is MUCH better but it's the express purpose of reddit), it ended up absorbing a lot of this humour. It is really difficult to explain exactly what it is about this style that rankles me, or give you a way of identifying it, but the moment you see it you know it's "reddit as fuck" as a modern 4chan user would say disparagingly. Videogames have always been important to both sites - the neckbeard archetype is not truly dead, though it is dying - and anime is the reason for 4chan's being, whether they want to acknowledge that or not. Politically, reddit leans milquetoast liberal (hire-more-women-guards-style), but also all those centrists thinks that the site leans hard right (I'm not saying places like TheRedPill don't exist, but they're not the majority). 4chan used to be mostly apolitical - like I said, they were just pro-fucking-things-up regardless of whom - but by 2014, when Gamergate happened, people felt the left had achieved supremacy, and this led them to become a hotbed of the new alt-right, which is essentially what happens when Neckbeard gets a copy of the Bible and rejected by one too many thots. I am aware that they profess a more storied lineage than this - if I hear classical liberal one more time I'm going to kick off - but this is the truth. It's interesting to see how they square the fact that they are theoretically conservative with the fact they browse 4chan, which has spent 15 years becoming a place conservatives would hate. Also interesting to note is that 4chan once attacked a prominent white supremacist back when it was anarchist (CTRL+F hal turner), and ever since I have been convinced that /pol/ is direct retribution from Stormfront for that attack.
• Tumblr is just girl 4chan and neither party will admit it. I think gender is a meme, but you know exactly what I mean when I say that. There was this whole period where they "went to war" with each other and every sane person was like "Can you lot please just fuck and become this hallway couple/ this weird poly couple and leave us alone???" Anyway, Tumblr has its own set of memes, its own sort of denizens (most males my age, myself included, are of the opinion that the words "tumblr" and "feminism" are interchangeable), and its own weird system of usage. I've been ragging on this a lot, so let me quickly explain; I don't mean shit like how bad the video player is or isn't, I mean the fundamental mechanisms of the website - reblogging and liking - are just all wrong. You can't comment on anything without reblogging, which means even things you dislike get forced onto your 'stream', and on a site where everyone dislikes a lot of things, for a lot of complex reasons, that must get terrible. Tags don't seem to work as intended either, and once you add that to all the other problems that Yahoo causes with its misrunning and you have a website that I refuse to go to. It's for girls, anyway. I do think it has more influence on internet culture than just "reeeeee radfems took my ghostbusters" though, the art-school counterculture types have adopted tumblr-esque ways of being for themselves and vice versa - seapunk, for example, is the kind of dumb-yet-actually-fashionable injoke that only tumblr-y people would come up with.
• Facebook is where old people get radicalised now? At the end of BushWeb, Facebook was only just in the process of transitioning from an actual college-centred online yearbook into the monolith it is now, but I doubt anyone could've predicted it'd overshoot, oversaturate, and end up not being cool. Wait, here's the Last Psychiatrist doing exactly that. What, you really thought I'd get through a post without sucking his dick? You thought wrong, sweetheart. Point is, Facebook has gone from being a trendy way to stay in contact with your college (i.e. high status) friends, to the place where literally everyone is in one way or another, to a place content mills produce garbage that poor, old (i.e. low status) people do not have the wherewithal to check, and political agents have made light work of exploiting that fact. Somewhere like Cracked, another future article subject, doesn't stand a chance against youngers from Macedonia, man. Unfortunately, TLP kinda fucked it, because it doesn't really matter that Facebook is no longer de rigeur among people my age, because they already have the entirety of the developing world on a hook - "many new users are convinced that Facebook IS the internet" - and in any case it's 20 degrees in February, the world is going to implode, and Zucc is moving to Mars with Bezos and the rest of the gang, so why would he need to advertise to me?
• Blogs are gone  - no GeoCities, no LiveJournal, no Blogger (wait, no, still that one) - you do not create content, you consume it. Vlogs still exist but only if you're cute in a non-threatening way and are willing to get your followers to consume things.

All in all, it's fucking over. There was a certain optimism to the Reddity, "when does teh narwhal bacon xDDDD" internet, and I'm sure it's just me going "THUS OF OULD", like in the photo at the top, but nonetheless the Internet is a lot more depressing, or at least cynical than it once was. Thirty years ago, there were endless possibilities, so many ways of creatively bypassing the modern day and doing things better that people imagined, and now, it's just another piece of relentlessly shitty media to consume. California was once an open vista of untapped potential (if you ignore the people that actually lived there, which the Manifest Destiny lot certainly did), and now it's Thousand Oaks. No disrespect to Thousand Oaks, this is what the inexorable march of time does, but the possibilities will always remain enticing, especially as we move further along our current path. The people that wanted to free content lost, the PirateBay is closed, even Netflix is eventually going to lose out. Streaming will eventually come to resemble the cable TV situation of the 2000s, where we will have to subscribe to every channel we want to watch separately, and avenues like Netflix and Hulu will cease to be relevant in the same way. Memes are less funny and less permanent - the only meme to truly make me laugh in the past few years has been Slojak, and I'm pretty sure that's ableist, and the less said about Distracted Boyfriend, *DON'T SAY IT* or Man's Not FUCKING Hot the better. I don't really have a final point, I'm just whining. Oxalá things get better. Here's a fucking dumb video.