A Very Long Quarter Century
Blogging was everything, until it was nothing
In my peak years of following new music, I was sometimes so disappointed in a new release from a favorite artist that I would wonder if they had always been bad, and I was only now noticing. It took a nervous return to the catalog to find reassurance (or in some cases, confirmation). I get the same feeling when I see a new Simpsons episode. It doesn’t go away until I stream a good one.
Lately I’ve had this feeling about the internet.
It’s harder to look back on the “good” years of the web. I can browse the Internet Archive for saved sites. I can pick up the book of Suck.com essays that I spent months looking for from used booksellers (I see there’s also a book of posts from The Awl but international shipping is a little too much). These remind me of what was on the internet, but not of the experience of using it. Besides, the goal is imprecise. When were the “good” years? When Twitter wasn’t a sewer? Before everything was video? When Google Reader was still active? (My answers: no, yes, a hundred times yes).
There is no explaining that old experience—logging on and knowing there was bound to be something fun or interesting to look at. Maybe I’ve given it away with my phrasing. “Logging on.” Nobody logs on anymore. We are on. All the time. That, perhaps definitively, is when the web was best—when it was a place you went instead the place everyone lived, worked, shopped, and had nervous breakdowns, all at the same time.
This is the web I’m reminded of while reading the posts in Talking Points Memo’s 25th anniversary collection. It’s a history of the century, told through media—a series of essays about the web, how it changed, and how it changed us.
It’s no nostalgia trip, though a few posts made me feel wistful. Jeet Heer writes about the blogs that shaped public opinion against the Iraq War, a media and technological convergence that happened just as I reached voting age, and an era that is burned into my mind the way anyone’s late teen years are. Elizabeth Spiers’s piece captures what was so exciting about that time, beyond politics. “Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication,” she writes. These two pieces give a good picture of the web in the first decade of the century. The technology was transforming the world, yet using it sort of felt like goofing off.
A few other posts in the collection document what happened to blogging. It wasn’t the advance of technology that destroyed a world that was imperfect at the time but seems utopian now…It was money. Social media took the traffic and destroyed the incentive to start a blog (while also siphoning off writers’ thoughts as soon as they formed, rather than giving writers space to sit and coalesce their thoughts into something more than a funny tweet). And the most interesting sites went away for the same reason local newspapers did—private equity bought them and treated them like “widgets, endlessly interchangeable in the service of maximizing shareholder value,” Megan Greenwell writes.
Where there weren’t buyouts, there was buy-in, specifically to the business model of big tech (which we called “big” at the time, though compared to its world-conquering size today, it was tiny). In his series-opening piece “The Original Sin of Digital Media Was the Belief That Digital Journalists Were Part of the Tech Business,” TPM founder Josh Marshall writes that news doesn’t work like tech or finance:
There just aren’t network effects and there’s no lock in. There’s no feature of news consumption by which one news source gets better or cheaper or more useful because everyone else is already using it. If anything, quite the opposite. There’s always a different way to cover the news, a different style, a higher or lower tone, a different ideological outlook. You’re never going to invest in the right news start up and it totally explodes and suddenly it owns news like Google owns search or Stripe owns credit card payments.
Out of the ashes of so much odd investment and reader distraction came the internet we’re in now. And there are two pieces in the TPM collection that lay out the equally unavoidable pros and cons of our current state. Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket argues that independent journalism online is like the alternative media of previous years, though it’s focused on individual writers instead or organizations. This creates “something of a petri dish for narcissism,” Kabas writes, but it also ensures accountability:
The thing about going it alone — on journalism as a personal brand — is that there is no one to hide behind: The buck starts and stops with you. If you screw up, it’s your reputation and your livelihood because the product you’re selling isn’t just words; you, for better or worse, are the product, as well. There are many who might find that prospect horrifying — and there are certainly days when I wish I lived in a cave with no Wi-Fi — but in the end I’d rather answer to the regular people paying for my work.
There is power in an individual. This was a lesson of the early blog years, too. But the biggest difference now is that writing online is necessary for anyone who wants to write, and asking for money for that writing is necessary for anyone who doesn’t have a day job and wants to eat (hello, it’s me.) Ana Marie Cox makes the case that the patron system isn’t enough. For one, it pushes individuals to pay a la carte for what they might’ve had in a bundle before. There’s just not enough subscriber money for every writer to live five-dollars-at-a-time, unsupported by editors, colleagues, and insurance plans. Second, it too easily pushes writers to do the same kind of click-chasing that made the years of the social web so annoying. A person isn’t a site, and the chase can lead a writer to become a caricature of themselves—a distorted personal brand streamlined for salability instead of trust, information, or any of the other reasons people read news (or used to read news, anyway). “In a system where your income depends on performing as yourself regularly, at scale and on schedule, the temptation to shape yourself to what’s rewarded is impossible to resist,” Cox writes.
For every journalist like Kabas who maintains their integrity, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who aren’t interested in being journalists and never had any integrity to begin with. They’re extremely popular. It’s still possible to find the good writers and reliable sources, follow them, and support them. You have to do this if you want to support writing that matters. It takes work.
Was it always this bad? No. There were bad things and people online, sure, but they were more easily avoided, and they had less power and were less essential to the business model of the platform. Not being confronted with the depraved depths of the human psyche every few minutes surely contributed to the sense of fun and hope of the old web. And regular encounters with people pursuing something other than money or power could restore your faith in other people.
The web gives us everything now, and doing so, it’s erased the sense that it was once possible this platform could give us anything.
That’s the feeling I’m still chasing.