#-where you get so deep into a hyper online discourse cycle that you end up reproducing mainstream sentiments from scratch | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

anettrolikova · 4 years ago

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Digital databases are unparalleled memory machines that have radically transformed how information and stories flow between grandparents and children, students and teachers, politicians and voters, journalists and citizens.

Digital media serves up an inhumanly large corpus of data that becomes raw material for new subcultures, ideologies, and alternative histories. In today’s chaotic media environment, not even a global pandemic.

IN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES, innovations like the telegraph, time zones, radio, and television led to new patterns of mass connectivity and synchronization. Time was subdivided into smaller and smaller units, allowing us to achieve unprecedented levels of coordination at scale.

We had grid-synchronized electric clock time, which was an important move because we went from producing time in clock towers and sun dials to producing time in a central location and distributing it via a grid, so that it was piped into your home like water or electricity. By the 1940s, we were distributing time over the oceans. By the 1980s, we had GPS … This trend has come to its logical conclusion because we all live inside a cage of time made up of 32 satellites orbiting Earth.”

Having trouble with the flow of time? Maybe it’s not just the pandemic. Maybe it's because we live in the Database and in the Database ordinary time is irrelevant.

Before the invention of the telegraph, there was no way to instantaneously synchronize timekeeping devices across long distances. No time zones, no universal standard against which clock towers could be evaluated for accuracy. Timekeeping was more an art than a science.

With nearly all of recorded history at their fingertips, they can cherry-pick interesting scraps of information from the archives and construct new grand narratives with unprecedented ease. And so, digital media has enabled a wave of “deepwater drilling” for obscure texts and long-forgotten histories — fueling an explosion of new political coalitions that bear little resemblance to the party lines of the last century.

If you were a kid looking to get into politics then, you couldn’t find these incredibly fine-grained sub-groupings to become part of and then start meme-ing yourself into a community with.

These memes are extremely dense cultural talismans that accumulate layers and layers of meaning/allusion over time. Like the jargon of academia, memes look like nonsense to outsiders but facilitate deep communication between members of a subculture.

The “gravity” or “current” of social media algorithms pulls people into orbit around ideological sub-groups. Algorithms are the riverbed, and users are the water.

In the early days of the internet, the Web’s surface was relatively smooth and its “gravitational force” was weak. You could random walk without getting sucked into any black holes. During the 2010s, social media platforms “dug into the Web surface, dragging activities down their slopes … As a result of this magnetic-like attraction, caused by the web slope, Internet users slowly slide down the slope in a digital drift.

People who spend a lot of time exploring these subcultures feel like they can see into the future, and for good reason. What happens online often shows up in the headlines weeks, months, or even years later.

Online conversations and mainstream newspapers/TV reveals that 20th century institutions no longer set the pace. They're getting sucked into the subjective time zones of internet subcultures.

As the line between “internet culture” and “Culture” gets increasingly blurry, Old Media gets increasingly confused. Online tribes are basically proto-political coalitions, sprouting in the graveyard of America’s zombiefied corporate media. This is, of course, a huge gravitational shift in the landscape of power.

The conflict between old and new media is in many ways a dispute over who gets to control the “clocks” we live by; who gets to set the pace; who gets access to the technologies that make it easy to synchronize (or de-synchronize) large groups people.

The conversations of internet subcultures often feel substantive and expansive compared to the shallow discourse of presidential debates, op-ed pages, and cable TV shows. Mainstream news cycles rarely last more than a few hours, and their narratives are constantly shifting.

Media and internet subcultures are getting increasingly out of sync, despite attempts by the former to get out ahead of the latter. And the clocks and narratives of 20th century institutions lose influence in a media environment where everyday people can have the kind of reach that was once reserved for elites.

The explosion of alternative histories hasn’t just eroded the influence of 20th century media institutions, it’s also damaged our ability to build collective futures. We’re lost in the garden of forking memes, and the idea of linear progress along a single historical time line seems like a quaint artifact from a much simpler era.

If we want to make sense of how we got here, we have to understand how the vast archive of the internet disrupted the feedback loop between memory & imagination.

Memory is the link between past and future; it allows us to learn from our previous experiences and extend our “narrative runways” beyond the immediate present.

The history of utopias is the history of rear-view mirrors. Every utopia is a picture of the preceding age.”If your memory gets scrambled, your ability to envision a coherent future is severely hampered. When the past feels slippery or shifty, you lose the “footholds” that give you the stability to think a day or even a few hours ahead at a time.

The “perfect memory” of digital media has given rise to a kind of collective dementia that is scrambling our shared memories and messing with our shared imaginations/simulations of the future. The graveyard of data at our fingertips is not really memory as we’ve known it, and it’s not really history — it’s something new and chaotic, something eerily trans-human. The internet is like a time machine that’s bringing back the ghosts of our ancestors.

"We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and all futures that will be are here now. In that sense, we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of the varieties of human expression re-constitutes the mythic type of consciousness, of once-upon-a-time-ness, which means all-time, out of time."- Marshall McLuhan

The line between present and past is getting increasingly blurry now that we all carry around a miniature Library of Alexandria in our pockets. We can’t agree on where we’re headed because we can’t agree on when we are.

As Ezra Klein noted, there are already so many time travelers that the cultural and political landscape has been permanently transformed. We’ve stirred up old ghosts at Silicon Valley scale and find ourselves re-enacting age-old conflicts along age-old fault lines.

Before television and computers, information about the past felt more inert and static — sometimes literally set in stone. In the digital media environment, history is constantly being re-animated, re-mixed, and re-heated in the extremely molten medium of software.

Digital media has done away with the very thing that created our sense of history: imperfect memory. The process of creating a historical narrative (or any story, for that matter) involves discarding an enormous amount of information. It’s like chipping away at a big block of marble until you’re left with a captivating statue. Forgetting is a feature, not a bug.

Our memories evolved to surface emotions, stories, and information from the past that might help us survive. We don’t have complete control over what we remember and when — there’s a subconscious system that “finds” old memories and “projects” them onto our mind’s eye.

History ends not when the stream of apparently historic events ends,” writes Venkatesh Rao, “but when the world loses a sense of a continuing narrative, and arrives at what psychologists call narrative foreclosure” — a hollowing out of the collective imagination, a sense of the future being cancelled. The ghosts of yesteryear float around the Cloud, hoping we’ll continue to embody their trauma, fight their battles, and live out their dreams and memes.

Back then, television was promoted as “essentially live, as offering a direct connection to an unfolding reality ‘out there. But the multiversal collideorscope of digital media has made us hyper-aware that television does not really broadcast an un-edited view of reality straight into your living room. There’s always a producer and a camera and a frame and a cutting room floor, all of which determine what and how you see.

Just as the early viewers of television sometimes forgot that they weren’t seeing an un-mediated stream of Reality, us early users of digital media sometimes forget that social media algorithms are not showing us the world as it is. A recommendation algo is a “frame” that can be hacked, gamed, and messed with. More than anything, it’s a funhouse mirror that reflects back a warped image of whatever you hold up to it.

We’re transitioning from a world of linear narratives and time lines to a garden of forking memes that we’re free to explore and tend to. The gardening games with the richest soil, the deepest roots, and the most interesting characters will attract the most people.

But if we continue to crop the earth (and the ecological crisis) out of the frame, we’ll soon cut off the very branch we’re sitting on. Without sustainable infrastructure, the digital garden will decay and disappear.

In the past, our timekeeping systems were synchronized with the systems of the earth.

Digital media has warped our subjective sense of time and thrown us into a state of atemporal confusion. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is blind to the natural cycles that shaped us and continue to sustain us.

Our earliest timekeeping devices linked us to the stars and the sun and the moon. Our digital time machines link us to an infinite supply of data and a multiverse of “subjective time zones” that are increasingly out of sync with the old, natural clocks.

Conventional calendars and time lines seem awfully out of date now that we are lost in a multi-temporal garden of forking memes. This dissonance between felt time and measured time gets more confusing by the day, and it’s beginning to feel unsustainable. - Kei Kreutler

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