Why the internet isn't fun anymore + A.I. and magic

Self-promotion for the holidays

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In lieu of a regular column this week, I’m going to share two other projects I’ve been working on recently, with some commentary. The annual year-in-review post for 2023 will drop next week (I’m still soliciting suggestions!), but otherwise posting is likely to be slightly erratic from here through the end of the year--there may or may not be recommendation roundups this weekend and next, but if you have an emergency need for a 7/10 action movie feel free to email.

Allow an annoying reminder, given the erratic schedule, that this newsletter (and most of my life generally) is funded entirely by paying readers. I can write about the things that interest me (and you) instead of assignment editors, on schedules dictated by me (and you) instead of news cycles, because nearly 2,000 people support this project. If you’ve found any value in Read Max this year, I hope you’ll consider joining them:

Now, some links:

I have a piece today in the opinion section of the New York Times with the headline “The Year Millennials Aged Out of the Internet.” It’s a (light) response to the “death of the internet” discourse that seemed to dominate popular tech criticism this year:

It’s indisputable that we are living through a transitional period in the short history of the internet. The end of the low interest-rate era has shaken up the economics of startups, ending rapid-growth practices like “blitzscaling” and reducing the number of new internet businesses vying for our attention; companies like Alphabet and Facebook are now mature and dominant businesses instead of disruptive upstarts. But I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.

For more than a decade now, millennials like myself have effectively (and, in the case of our cohort’s richest member, Mark Zuckerberg, quite literally) run the internet. We were the earliest adopters of smartphones and we once consistently (not that I’d brag about it) led the generational pack in screen time. Over that period we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and molded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.

This now seems to be changing.

As I hope is sort of clear, I am putting on a little performance in the piece--I still have a lot of fun online, in group chats and Discords and sometimes even while writing this newsletter. But I know that the idea that “fun” is harder to come by online than it used to be is one to which a lot of members of my cohort respond, and I think a lot of what people are complaining about is less about objective conditions or structures than it is about the feeling of “aging out” of the dominant culture.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the internet hasn’t become objectively worse at various important tasks (finding relevant and reliable information, e.g.). But I also use the internet differently than other people, and reduced performance on some axes could be as much a sign of shifting audiences and use cases as it is a sign of total deterioration.

Anyway, I don’t want to seem like I’m arguing that the internet of 2023 is “fine” or “healthy”--it’s obviously not. Rather, I’d like to make the case that the internet of 2010 (or wherever you would place the peak of “fun” internet) wasn’t particularly healthy or fine, either, and it’s easy to mistake a sense of ease and comfort under bad conditions with objectively good conditions.

Last week I had a really enjoyable conversation with

Tara Isabella Burton

and

John Ganz

for an

Interintellect

Zoom panel called “Is technology magic?” in which we discussed “the religious and spiritual implications behind contemporary Silicon Valley culture, from the ‘postrationalist’ turn to the influence of 19th century spiritual movements like New Thought on contemporary politics.” Tara has been at the forefront of writing and reporting about small but influential “postrationalist” crew, and John writes often about the strange beliefs of the new tech right. John’s piece on reactionary modernism has been particularly useful to me in thinking through the cultural and social politics of Silicon Valley’s embrace of A.I. (bolding mine):

This is the tradition identified in Jeffrey Herf’s 1984 book Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Herf noticed that what typified the thought of the Conservative Revolutionaries and a set of right-wing engineers in Weimar and then the ideologists of the Third Reich was not a rejection of modernity so much as the search for an alternative modernity: a vision of high technics and industrial productivity without liberalism, democracy, and egalitarianism. Technology in the service of a hierarchical society and an authoritarian politics, or rather, hierarchical society and authoritarian politics in the service of technology, as the correct pathway to unfettered progress and development. Herf extended the concept to include the futurist Marinetti in Italy, Wyndham Lewis in Britain, and Henry Ford in the United States. We can see many of the themes of the reactionary modernist tradition popping up in the contemporary tech world, from what the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch called Ungleichzeitigkeit—non-contemporaneity—the coxistence of the archaic and the futuristic, in Curtis Yarvin’s techno-monarchism, to what Klaus Theweleit called the “utopia of the totally mechanized body” in the so-called “rationalist community,” transhumanists, and sadistic A.I. fetishism.

A subset of intense, Twitter-famous accelerationists really loves to play up the mystical unknowability of LLMs--the way we still can't quite reverse engineer how, e.g., GPT-4 arrives at its “answers.” You can see this as a kind of anti-modernist desire for re-enchantment, but it’s also a kind of capital-F Futurist Modernism--a total belief in power and truth of the machine beyond human comprehension. (Meredith Whittaker’s term "enchanted determinism" reflects this same dynamic.)

Lord knows I have a lot of patience and affection for all kinds of quasi-mystical crank esotericism around tech, but something about the recent accelerationist/post-rationalist rendition of it really grinds my gears. I suppose is that I don’t really buy that any of these guys (roon, BasedJeffBezos, etc.) believe what they’re selling--it all feels like a Twitter performance and rhetorical strategy, embedded in and subservient to a fully non-mystical political economy dominated by venture capital, the national security state, etc. As much as I’d like to join in the sci-fi fun of treating LLMs like magic objects or pre-modern oracles, the particular faux-jocular tone of accelerationism on Twitter turns me into a high modernist. If we can’t figure out how these work it’s not because they’re magic, it’s because we’re just not trying hard enough! We built them!