Flat, Not Flat, and an Ocean

This post has some pre-requisite reading to get the most out of it:

• Jay Springett’s post about Surface Flatness and how the internet is feeling super flat right now.
• Warren Ellis’s response On Not Being Online.
• Pete Ashton’s response to Warren’s thoughts.
• Jay’s response to both Pete and Warren.

First off, I think it’s great to see some crosstalk across blogs like this. I love to see it.

Second, as you might have guessed, I have some thoughts about the subject. (Usual caveats, this is some off-the-cuff thoughts, maybe I’m missing things, et cetera.)

So, let me preface this by saying a lot of this discussion relies pretty heavily on a lot of metaphors, because ultimately we’re talking about a lot of abstractions and ideas, and frankly all the folks talking about the online space (myself included) are nerds who are constantly flailing around to find the right metaphor to describe these abstractions. It can be a lot, to the point where I started a glossary just to try and keep track of some of them. Sorry in advance.

Jay points out, I think aptly, that the mainstream internet, where most people spend most of their time, is pretty fucking generic and flat, and caters to a sort of lowest common denominator:

I don’t just mean the graphical qualities of software UX that feel flat and minimalist – although they do. But the whole internet. Over the last decade our online interactions have converged on a handful of portals. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, and YouTube or wherever you spend your time. Inside of each of these spaces content is served up with zero effort on your part. Displayed upon a flat surface of dark glass that you scroll or swipe at, like an infant batting away an aeroplane spoon. Much of whats surfaced feels shallow too. 

Chum is driven up by the platform, exposed on a flat and superficial engagement layer called the feed. I fail to comprehend or understand the shape of the platform beneath it. Yet the whole time I’m using an app or a platform I can sense that there’s an infinite ocean of material somewhere below the surface. How you go about exploring the deep is a mystery. 

Jay Springett

There’s depth there, or at least we’re pretty sure there is, but it’s hard to get to. I don’t think it’s out of malice on the part of the companies (at least most of the time), it’s just that breadth frequently ends up antithetical to depth. They lack the time, energy, or inclination towards genuine curation, so they rely on algorithms to surface material, which will inherently trend towards a certain flatness. Even if you’re incredibly vigilant and intentional about what you view and like, it’s still going to round off the rough edges over time.

I do want to note though: the complaints about the feed fall a little flat (heh) to me, because as much as we talk about an open and independent web and doing weird interesting things, we also flatten it all into feeds (RSS, for instance) – in order to keep a sane handle on our information consumption, we aggregate that information into a more uniform experience that loses a lot of the nuance and uniqueness you might get out of an interesting site experience. The only difference is that we’re curating that feed, rather than making some other service decide what to surface for us.

Now, personally I think Warren points out something important here:

Well, look. Television is whatever you’re served up when you turn the box on. This is just what a broadcast medium looks like. It’s just that “the internet” started broadcasting stuff by unfunded hobbyists first. Like if tv had started with the equivalent of public access cable first, and monolithic networks arrived later. (I’m glossing a bit there, but it’s near enough) The internet grew up, got a job and started talking about mortgages at dinner parties while its old friends are still sitting in the pub wondering what the fuck happened to their mate.

Warren Ellis

It’s a useful reminder: those mainstream sites are like all the other mainstream platforms, like television and major record labels and everything else: they’re catering to a mass market, and while we lament the use of algorithms to dictate our feeds on these services, it’s really no different from a television company looking at viewership data and deciding what to produce based on what the most efficient viewership-to-advertising-dollars ratio will be. (Why are there so many utterly inane reality shows out there? Because people eat up the drummed-up fake drama and they’re comparatively dirt cheap to make.)

As Warren points out, like that mainstream TV, we don’t have to watch. There are still a ton of unique, interesting, independent sites out there, people doing weird, interesting, cool things. You can, believe it or not, opt out of the mainstream sites and services.

The issue is discovery. Pete made an interesting comparison to his work archiving old zines:

I was really struck when going through my 1990s zines at the diversity of style and content compared with the homogeneity of whatever we might define as online culture, and I think this comes from a comparative paucity of interconnectivity and shared language across all zines. You’d see tropes evolve in pockets but nothing on the scale of memes like the Wojak characters. The internet is like water – it flows along the fastest route and wants to become an ocean, which is maybe antithetical to sustaining weird edgelands culture.

Pete Ashton

It’s a fair point, and something I think we’re seeing not just online, but in various aspects of culture that gets influenced by online. I’m thinking about gentrification cycles, for example – the notion of a region becoming economically depressed -> artists move in because it’s cheap -> it becomes more vibrant because of all the art and music and other things that happen when people can actually afford to be creative and enjoy life -> others start “discovering” the area -> prices start going up -> artists and other natives are forced out. This has been a known thing to one degree or another, but now that everyone is online and sort of “clued in” for the same things to look for, the whole cycle gets short-circuited and accelerated. (Where does this leave artists and creatives and folks who, y’know, just don’t make a lot of money? Screwed, mostly. Everything feels like a hustle right now because everyone feels like they have to hustle just to survive.)

But that’s a tangent. The point is that things get flatter because everything is flowing together – it’s all going to the ocean. (I do feel that’s also related to the hustle issue – there’s this pressure to make sure whatever you’re making is commercially viable or at least broadly palatable.) But the thing is, there are lots of unique spaces out there, spots that didn’t flow to the ocean (at least not yet). The issue is discovery.

We can’t rely on algorithms to surface anything that feels unique. Especially the less commercially palatable it is. What feels like the solution is curation, but that’s… hard. On a few levels:

• The tools kinda suck: it’s easy to make a list, it’s hard to maintain it. Keeping an eye out for dead links, giving enough information about each link to give others a sense of whether it’s up their alley, having some way to sort and organize it (by keywords, categories, dates, etc). So if you’re just sharing a few links, it’s no big deal, but if you want to take curation seriously, it’s kind of shit, and if we’re looking to solve the discovery question, curation needs to be taken seriously.
• It’s a lot of work. There’s a reason these companies opted for an algorithmic model. You’ve got the question of how a curator finds the materials – if everyone was already clued in, you wouldn’t need a curator in the first place. If you think it’s easy to consistently find interesting new things to share, I encourage you to try it. (I’ve got a lot of respect for folks like Kottke and Waxy and others who’ve been pretty consistently doing this for literally decades at this point.)
• Finding good curators in general is its own challenge, let alone ones whose tastes and interests align with yours. So there’s a sort of a meta-discovery issue around finding the finders.

I’m not really going anywhere with this – I don’t really have an answer. But I can at least recognize and acknowledge some of the challenges in improving the un-flat experience. And I think it’s important we do try to improve it – one of the beauties of the older, more rough-hewn internet was that there was room for feelings of community and camaraderie within these weird little pockets and niches. In a lot of ways, the internet was more social before social media. So if we can make it just a little bit easier to find those niches again, maybe we can make it just a little bit easier to find our people, and feel a little less alone in the internet sea.