We Lost

 The other day, I was sitting and reminiscing with an old high school friend passing through town at a lovely old Teochew restaurant in Bangkok’s Chinatown. Somewhere in between bites of crispy duck, we were talking about our childhood – the first ever generation of children to have an online presence and to discover a great many things we probably shouldn’t have – and our youthful passion for the preservation of a free and open internet when we reached college age, our long stoned conversations about open-source principles and our contempt for the corporate overlords and their stooges at the FCC. And I asked him, now that he is fully ensconced in the world of political media… we lost, didn’t we?

“Oh we fucking lost. A long time ago.”

I do my best, I really do. I use a good VPN to keep myself safe, I avoid the more atrocious branded-content machines, and I take immense pride in the way in which I have truly baffled most of the major algorithms through my stochastic behavior – according to various apps, I am interested in real estate investment in Ottawa, gay wedding venues in Florida, dating for senior citizens, Fortnite strategy, and “Afrocentric facts” about how actually it was black people who built the Mayan pyramids.

But the future keeps trying to catch up with me.

This week Youtube decided it wasn’t OK with me using an adblocker. An increasingly common and thoroughly annoying phenomenon, made all the worst by the cloying Joss Whedon humor it’s often delivered with… you know the kind… “We need to talk about your adblocker,” almost as bad as the push notifications with emojis in them.

Funny, I’m old enough now to remember when Youtube launched in my teens, when the very same aforementioned friend recommended it to me, possibly over AIM (also for those old enough to remember). And it seemed, in its early days, to be a prime example of the Wild West internet, with a charmingly slapdash digital folk-art quality and a shockingly good pre-Spotify library of musical rarities. But as we all know, those days are long over, and if you’re unfortunate enough to open Youtube in incognito mode, you’ll see a horrifying ocean of shocked-face thumbnails and gratuitous exclamation marks. This, too, is a prime example of where we are now.

You see where we are in the endless sponsored content that fills your social media scroll, all stock photography and stock audio, the AI-generated, SEO-friendly sludge of Google search results, the lootboxes in your video games, the endless recycled memes and Reddit comments. Once upon a time you bought music or movies, or more likely downloaded them – now you license them. And through your data, you yourself are licensed, a state of serfdom even more poorly remunerated than the gig economy.

I haven’t read Yanis Varoufakis’ latest book, Techno-Feudalism, yet, but I’ve seen enough recent interviews with him to get the gist of it. His thesis is that capitalism has indeed been superseded (I’ll need to take a closer look on that contentious contention), and not by anything more humane. Rather than Joseph Schumpeter’s prediction of capitalism silting up into a corporatist/socialist state through a combination of liberal democratic politics and pressure by the intellectual classes, we get an environment in which, facing finite resources and an increasingly immobile consumer base with minimal disposable income, creative destruction creatively destroys itself. The entrepreneur devolves into little more than a charlatan, the robber baron becomes the robber king, and public intellectuals reduce to neoliberal troubadours, culture-war mudslingers, and hermetic, Jesuitical artists who make claims to radicalism despite their work only seeking to assuage the tastemaker class.

Our new masters seem remarkably incapable of enjoying themselves. Owing to my sneering IDGAF attitude, ability to navigate an omakase course, and habit of hanging out at nice cocktail bars, a number of the elites of our new Gilded Age have assumed that I am one of them, and that I for some reason give a shit about their status. It reeks of insecurity, and at times, when I'm empathetic, I can see into their past, to the socially awkward nerd before he was a startup founder, to the shy, chubby girl before she was a wellness influencer, to countless grand-bourgeois childhoods and emotionally distant parents, to countless generations of Old World repulsiveness that came before, to the desperate panic to justify their own existence.

But it's a flashing moment, and then they go back to braying about which Ivy League college they went to 25 years before, or how much their vacation home cost, and then I start going back to debating whether or not to advise them to kill themselves – and that's the sign for me to get a taxi home and block their number.

I am tempted to say that my meanderings are the early warning signs of kids-these-days syndrome, that I’m just a grump, but it seems that said kids these days are just as bummed out about the present-day internet as I am. Possibly even moreso. And I don’t know what trajectory we’re on, and neither do they.

In 24 hours or so, I am getting on a commercial flight over the Middle East – not intentional, of course, given the current wave of atrocities, but such is life. And somehow that induces far less anxiety than the future writ large.