In 1995, Robert Metcalfe predicted in InfoWorld that the internet would go ‘spectacularly supernova’ and then collapse within a year.

It did. This was the mythic "Eternal September" of 1993 and 1994. Metcalf was a year late. The internet as it existed before America Online and similar early ISP portals was wiped away in a few years and while it might still be hiding in very obscure corners of the network the broader internet has never been the same since.

But when I’m listlessly killing time on the internet, there is nothing. The mind does not wander. I am not there.

Idk about you but this is exactly why I am addicted to the internet. It's cheaper than alcohol or heroin and you don't have to think about how much you hate being alive when you're fifteen articles deep in to the biology of rabbits on Wikipedia.

More numb, more blank, more nowhere. A portable suicide booth; a device for turning off your entire existence.

Yes. Exactly. You have perfectly encapsulated how I escape from the existentially crushing horror of living with bipolar disorder.

In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible.

Dude. We've been saying this about Capitalism for like 200 years. The Internet didn't start in 1968 when the US realized it needed a better way to send intelligence information back and forth between Vietnam and Langley so they could more efficiently murder and torture Vietnamese farmers. It began in the 1840s with the wide scale deployment of the electric telegraph. It will probably outlive everyone currently alive, though it's form may change again and again.

There is simply nothing there online.

True. The commercialization of the net and the ruthless optimization of skinner box programs that attack our attention has crowded out all the neat, weird shit that used to be out there. Reddit is a shell of what it used to be, Facebook is nearly useless and largely unused by young people, and the vast, colorful tapestry of personal website, forums, bulletin boards, and blogs that existed before then have all been crushed by ad driven content platforms

this thing is nearing exhaustion.

:doubt: People use the internet because there's less and less else they can do. Everything is too expensive, the environment, at least in America, is constantly being made more hostile to human existence, whatever is left of society is being pounded out of existence by the brutality of modern work culture. The internet is the only escape left for many people. It can't stop because there's nothing else for people to turn to in order to maintain some pretense of sanity. It took us a thousand years to kill Feudalism. What does that say about the potential longevity of this hellish place?

And this was, remember, a year in which millions of people had nothing to do except engage with great content online

No, dude. This was the year when, maybe for the first time in years, millions and millions of people could not work. Their businesses were shut down. They had free time. They went outside. They baked bread. They spent time with their families. They got sick and died. But what they didn't do was come home with their brains obliterated by 8 or 10 or 12 hours of mindless drudgery, completely unable to do anything but destroy time with mindless scrolling on the web.

‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.’

We are still headed aggressively in this direction and giant rent seeking conglomerates will not let it stop simply because we are bored with tikotk. Also, we will not be happy.

They were betting that this would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff that rules the world. They were wrong

Okay but hear me out - Global panopticon used to control all movement, production, and every moment of our lives until death in order that the ruling class can efficiently and ruthlessly protect themselves while they slaughter billions of now superfluous workers on our rapidly dying planet.

that user data could power a system of terrifyingly precise targeted advertising—was a lie.

Yes, but have you considered that it can power AI driven robotic machine guns?

This is what sustains the entire media, provides 80% of Google’s income and 99% of Facebook’s, and it’s made of magic beans.

As far as I know this has been widely known for at least 5-6 years now. I have to say It will be interesting to live through the collapse.

it’s true that the internet has changed some things: mostly, it’s helped break apart the cohesive working-class communities that produce a strong left, and turned them into vague swarms of monads.

NAFTA, globalization, Reaganomics, J-I-T logistics, suburban sprawl, inflation, declining real wages, and cable news did this. If the internet had any effect it was small, and happened after most of the real damage had been done.

his game only works within the internet, and only when everyone involved agrees to play by the internet’s rules.

Lol swatting

At the time, I worried that the mass street movement risked being consumed by the sterile politics of online; this is exactly what happened.

Dude I was there. Democrat political agents took over the protests and the speeches and called the cops on anyone who suggested we all go get our guns and solve the problem

a oozingly digitised political current whose effective proposition is that people should welcome a total dictatorship to prevent corporations posting rainbow flags on the internet. You can guess what I think of its prospects.

Dude Hilter rose to power by blaming the Jews for World War One. Come on. Even the Russians are whining about "Globohomo" like they don't have any actual problems to worry about.

If anything interesting ever happens again, it will not be online.

This I agree with, but that hasn't really been important to the continuing life of the internet for years now.

I have no idea what kind of demented pervert is actually reading this stuff, when you could be lying in a meadow by a glassy stream, rien faire comme une bête, eyes melting into the sky.

Sir I have a variety of rare, exotic, and untreatable mental illnesses.

I’m interested in the forms of writing that were here long before the internet, and which will be here long after it’s gone. Not thinkpieces or blogs, but the essay, the manifesto, the satyr, and the screed. Ludibria, pseudepigrapha, quodlibets. Or folktales. Prophecy. Dreams.

There's no going backwards, dude. Future Shock is still real. Things are still changing too fast for anyone to manage or make sense of. Brand new horrific beasts that we can only see the vaguest outlines of are emerging too fast to count and leaving broken bodies in their wake. There's nothing behind us, and nothing ahead but nightmares.

Every few weeks, there are ads for some new band plastered over the Tube. The acid, whipsmart voice of twenty-first century youth! Then you listen, and they’re just ripping off the Fall again.

Spider Robinson wrote a short story about this called "Melancholy Elephants" back in 1982

the new world of barbarian kings

Europe was an unimportant cultural and economic backwater. All the cool stuff was happening in Baghdad, which was as vibrant and innovative and corrupt as Rome ever was. White people just fixate on Rome because they're racist and they don't want to learn Arabic.

But for true exhaustion, you need to know that everything that could be is as empty as everything that is.

I feel like this guy really understands bipolar depression, even if he doesn't know he's writing about that.

When I was younger, my brother and I had a running joke about a lemon that could connect to the internet.

I'm pretty sure that someone made a computer that could run DOOM out of potatoes.