[Unformed Golem]

2012 was Tinder. I think this was probably the killer app for smartfoams: you can get laid on the internet. Why go anywhere else?

There's an esoteric side to the internet's "evolution", which is centralization and mass surveillance. On the business side, this includes automatic feedback loops to "maximize engagement". The sensor data/"analytics" that you need to power engagement optimization are of course dual use for state and para-state surveillance. Logging, too. In the very early days of 4chan, when something fell off of page 15 it was gone for good, for real. Mapping these onto the internet epochs in the OP (which I agree are generally correct), in the primordial age there was none of this; in the "Golden Age" with images and Flash video you did have to start monitoring server loads more carefully than with the primarily text-based internet that had come before.

One thing about early social media was that was initially just an incremental evolution of sites like angelfire. Myspace let you run arbitrary Javascript! There was no infinite scrolling "feed", you had to actually navigate to your friends' pages to see their poasts/swimsuit pics. According to Wikipedia, Facebook created the "News Feed" in...2006. This was the first major roll-out of heavy mass analysis/surveillance I think as the basic loop was Facebook figuring out what to show you next. 2016 was when secret police cells and committees of spook cutouts started systematically subjecting the coefficients on these feedback terms towards achieving political outcomes like stopping Orange Man and demoralizing white people.

[JohnnyRomero]

The internet is already over

I remember that I forced myself to read that in its entirety when Niccolo "The Canadian Journalist" Soldo first shared it on his Substack digest. I remember thinking at the time that it was the sort of thing that only an extremely internet-addicted Moron could write. Once you pass a certain degree of "eternally online," you begin coping. "I'm not addicted! The Internet Is Not Real Life! I shall Touch the Grasses!" This guy is basically just Logo_Daedalus but somehow an even bigger wordcel blowhard.



This is not a face abounding in great insights.