I consider Venkatesh to be amongst the brightest and insightful thinkers of our times (The Gervais Principle being a particularly brilliant eye opener that I share with everyone who could be interested and ready to benefit from it).

I hadn’t quite appreciated how long he’s been blogging for, nor that we was nearing 50 (the latter point gives me some inspiration in my mid-30s that there’s still time to contribute).

In terms of the article, and this doesn’t injure his main point, but I feel he has been overgenerous about how long the blogosphere has lasted (though there are of course still exceptions eg for me recently Ludic’s blog https://ludic.mataroa.blog/, some old gems like Rands in Repose ticking away, and more focused series like Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money).

To my mind it was well and truly done (in the way that it once existed) before Covid, with the absence of a resurgence during a period with so many locked down and online proving its end.

By that point there had already been the rise of walled gardens, the fall of Google Search, the rise of social media and influencers (and since the subsequent fall post-Covid), clickbait, smartphones as the primary browsing device, constantly online culture, attention exhaustion, (low quality) content saturation, etc. If the blog had survived all this LLMs adding fuel to the attention harvesting noise would almost certainly have sealed the deal.

On the whole “online” feels like it’s falling apart.

The leading apps and sites are buggy and broken with little innovation in years despite obvious low-lying fruit yet still dominantly crowding out (or buying out and shutting down) challengers, websites are a mess of instinctual clicking past popups like your relative’s malware-infected WinXP desktop you had to fix up at Christmas, almost everyone seems to be an influencer cynically pumping out low quality noise that the algorithms seem almost determined to elevate over unloved crafted quality content (and we still don’t seem to be reaping benefits of AI to sort through this), US politics contextlessly infects nearly every platform and channel globally (thankfully usually not here except when relevant), the subscription sites have bait and switched after hooking us all in and continue to turn the screws, the “gig economy” and “disruptors” have done the same continuing to damage broader society with their externalities while skirting the purpose of established laws and norms and now raising prices to higher than what they displaced, our democracy is challenged by the inability to know truth accelerated by the overwhelm of targeted noise (and old media has just as much guilt in monetising then selling out the fourth estate while governments are now racing towards totalitarianism in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle), attention span and ability to think as humans is being fundamentally reshaped in ways that most consider damaging, digital has accelerated (or at least coincided with) the society-consuming and society-destroying elements of capitalism over the last 50 years as it “cleverly” works out how to turn anything and everything (quality, brand value, trust, institutions, connections, spare time, relationships, attention etc.) into $ and destroy them in the process, and it all seems to have turned into walking through a crowded alleyway of people shouting and fighting and exploiting and vying for your attention and and and and.

The fall of Rome analogy feels figuratively rather apt, because it certainly has a sense of that, and maybe this cozyweb is a nice hideaway answer from all this (I haven’t quite found my online cozy place yet).

For those who haven’t seen it and find any of this resonates (especially as a Millenial), Bo Burnham’s Inside brilliantly talks to this all, and he’s the first I’ve come across to really do so.

Is anyone else talking about this in a way that’s helpful, or at least helpfully relays the problem that’s emerged upon us?