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The End of an Internet Era

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 04 › buzzfeed-news-internet-era › 673822

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The internet of the 2010s was chaotic, delightful, and, most of all, human. What happens to life online as that humanity fades away?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Silicon Valley’s favorite slogan has lost all meaning. Too many Americans are missing out on the best kitchen gadget. Elon Musk revealed what Twitter always was.

Chaotically Human

My colleague Charlie Warzel worked at BuzzFeed News in the 2010s. He identifies those years as a specific era of the internet—one that symbolically died yesterday with the news of the website shutting down. Yesterday, Charlie offered a glimpse of what those years felt like for people working in digital media:

I worked at BuzzFeed News for nearly six years—from March 2013 until January 2019. For most of that time, it felt a bit like standing in the eye of the hurricane that is the internet. Glorious chaos was everywhere around you, yet it felt like the perfect vantage to observe the commercial web grow up. I don’t mean to sound self-aggrandizing, but it is legitimately hard to capture the cultural relevance of BuzzFeed to the media landscape of the mid-2010s, and the excitement and centrality of the organization’s approach to news. There was “The Dress,” a bit of internet ephemera that went so viral, we joked that that day might have been the last good one on the internet.

Charlie goes on, and his essay is worth reading in full, but today I’d like to focus on the point he ends on: that the internet of the 2010s was human in a way that today’s is not. Charlie doesn’t just mean human in the sense of not generated by a machine. He’s referring to chaos, unpredictability, delight—all of the things that made spending time on the internet fun.

Charlie explains how Buzzfeed News’ ethos emphasized paying attention to the joyful and personal elements of life online:

BuzzFeed News was oriented around the mission of finding, celebrating, and chronicling the indelible humanity pouring out of every nook and cranny of the internet, so it makes sense that any iteration that comes next will be more interested in employing machines to create content. The BuzzFeed era of media is now officially over. What comes next in the ChatGPT era is likely to be just as disruptive, but I doubt it’ll be as joyous and chaotic. And I guarantee it’ll feel less human.

The shrinking humanity of the internet is a theme that Charlie’s been thinking about for a while. Last year, he wrote about why many observers feel that Google Search is not as efficient as it used to be—some argue that the tool returns results that are both drier and less useful than they once were. Charlie learned in his reporting that some of the changes the Search tool has rolled out are likely the result of Google’s crackdowns on misinformation and low-quality content. But these changes might also mean that Google Search has stopped delivering interesting results, he argues:

In theory, we crave authoritative information, but authoritative information can be dry and boring. It reads more like a government form or a textbook than a novel. The internet that many people know and love is the opposite—it is messy, chaotic, unpredictable. It is exhausting, unending, and always a little bit dangerous. It is profoundly human.

It’s also worth remembering the downsides of this humanity, Charlie notes: The unpredictability that some people are nostalgic for also gave way to conspiracy theories and hate speech in Google Search results.

The Google Search example raises its own set of complex questions, and I encourage those interested to read Charlie’s essay and the corresponding edition of his newsletter, Galaxy Brain. But the strong reactions to Google Search and the ways it is changing are further evidence that many people crave an old internet that now feels lost.

If the internet is becoming less human, then something related is happening to social media in particular: It’s becoming less familiar. Social-media platforms such as Friendster and Myspace, and then Facebook and Instagram, were built primarily to connect users with friends and family. But in recent years, this goal has given way to an era of “performance” media, as the internet writer Kate Lindsay put it in an Atlantic article last year. Now, she wrote, “we create online primarily to reach people we don’t know instead of the people we do.”

Facebook and Instagram are struggling to attract and retain a younger generation of users, Lindsay notes, because younger users prefer video. They’re on TikTok now, most likely watching content created by people they don’t know. And in this new phase of “performance” media, we lose some humanity too. “There is no longer an online equivalent of the local bar or coffee shop: a place to encounter friends and family and find person-to-person connection,” Lindsay wrote.

I came of age in the Tumblr era of the mid-2010s, and although I was too shy to put anything of myself on display, I found joy in lurking for hours online. Now those of us looking for a place to have low-stakes fun on the internet are struggling to find one. The future of social-media platforms could surprise us: IOS downloads of the Tumblr app were up by 62 percent the week after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, suggesting that the somewhat forgotten platform could see a resurgence as some users leave Twitter.

I may not have personally known the bloggers I was keeping up with on Tumblr, but my time there still felt human in a way that my experiences online have not since. The feeling is tough to find words for, but maybe that’s the point: As the internet grows up, we won’t know what we’ve lost until it’s gone.

Today’s News

Less than a year after overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court is expected to decide tonight on whether the abortion pill mifepristone should remain widely available while litigation challenging the FDA’s approval of the drug continues. The Russian military stated that one of its fighter jets accidentally bombed Belgorod, a Russian city near the Ukrainian border. Dominic Raab stepped down from his roles as deputy prime minister and justice secretary of Britain after an official inquiry found that he had engaged in intimidating behavior on multiple occasions, one of which involved a misuse of power.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: America has failed the civilization test, writes Derek Thompson. The Books Briefing: Elise Hannum rounds up books about celebrity—and observes how difficult it can be to appear both otherworldly and relatable. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explores how the gender debate veered off track.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

National Gallery of Art, Widener Collection

Vermeer’s Revelations

By Susan Tallman

Of all the great painters of the golden age when the small, soggy Netherlands arose as an improbable global power, Johannes Vermeer is the most beloved and the most disarming. Rembrandt gives us grandeur and human frailty, Frans Hals gives us brio, Pieter de Hooch gives us busy burghers, but Vermeer issues an invitation. The trompe l’oeil curtain is pulled back, and if the people on the other side don’t turn to greet us, it’s only because we are always expected.

Vermeer’s paintings are few in number and scattered over three continents, and they rarely travel. The 28 gathered in Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum’s current, dazzling exhibition represent about three-quarters of the surviving work—“a greater number than the artist might have ever seen together himself,” a co-curator, Pieter Roelofs, notes—and make this the largest Vermeer show in history. The previous record holder took place 27 years ago at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and at the Mauritshuis, in The Hague. Prior to that, the only chance to see anything close would have been the Amsterdam auction in May 1696 that dispersed perhaps half of everything he’d painted in his life.

Read the full article.

Elon Musk’s Disastrous Week

found Apr '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 04 › elon-musk-twitter-spacex-tesla › 673808

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The tech world’s most attention-grabbing man had a very busy week. Elon Musk launched a rocket, dealt with bad news at Tesla, stoked fear that AI could end humankind, and rolled out another controversial change on Twitter. Through it all, Musk exemplifies the danger of what happens when technology and ego collide.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

When the media bow to Trump - A crucial character trait for happiness The internet of the 2010s ended today.

An Explosive Week

Earlier today, a SpaceX rocket exploded in the skies over the Gulf of Mexico, detonating itself after the booster failed to separate from the upper portion of the vehicle after launch. Watching the clip, from start to fiery finish, I was struck above all else by the sound of applause—routine during such launches, of course, but marked by a different timbre this week.

SpaceX is one of Elon Musk’s many projects, a private transportation company with ambitions to serve “Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.” As CEO, Musk splits his attention between this lofty mission and his duties as CEO of both Tesla and Twitter, the latter of which he acquired in a frenzy for $44 billion last year. Through these roles he has secured his spot as one of America’s most transfixing subjects, a polarizing man for a polarized age, whose accomplishments are slopped over with failure. The rocket blew up; Tesla’s profits are down more than 20 percent year over year; Twitter is, well, Twitter. No surprise, then, that Musk has grown to embrace the role of performer, as when he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday for a lengthy freak-out about artificial intelligence. In this environment—at least for a man like Musk—value and substance are secondary concerns. What matters is that people are paying attention and reacting.

No wonder then that he promised yesterday that his electric cars would become fully self-driving as soon as this year—an application of AI technology that has already been implicated in a number of deaths—just days after he warned on Tucker that AI is “a danger to the public.” There is no ideological consistency, just bluster and unyielding demands for attention. My colleague Charlie Warzel has called it the myth of the tech genius: After years of growth and innovation in the tech industry, many people lionize the supposedly great men at the center of it all, without reason.

The myth is not harmless. AI, and especially generative AI, that newer strain you’ve heard about or seen in the likes of ChatGPT and DALL-E, demands scrutiny. Although the technology currently seems more likely to destroy high-school-English assignments than it is to rend our flesh and blood, there are serious risks to contend with: Misinformation is a big one, and so is a flood of “gray goo,” as the writer Matthew Kirschenbaum evocatively put it—endless junk content written and published by AI.

There are also deeper effects of existing AI systems that scholars such as Safiya Noble, Joy Buolamwini, and Virginia Eubanks have called attention to for years: racial bias and automated inequality. Rather than address these problems, Musk is focused elsewhere. He announced during his Carlson appearance that he would develop something called TruthGPT, “a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” (I suspect we’re a few years out from that, at least.)

Musk exemplifies the danger at the intersection of technology and ego: There are serious problems to be dealt with, but distractions always seem to take precedence. This has already played out on Twitter, which has mutated under Musk’s stewardship into a broken mess of contradictions without any meaningful oversight. Musk has promised transparency into the platform’s inner workings, but has made consequential decisions behind closed doors. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote:

Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has recklessly pulled down guardrails, such as dramatically downsizing teams dedicated to safety and internal accountability and haphazardly opening up its blue-check verification system to anyone willing to pay a fee (while removing the actual identity-verifying part in the process). Major decisions that affect the user experience are made without clear justification … the company pulled the blue check off The New York Times’ Twitter account, and … labeled NPR “state-affiliated media.” Donald Moynihan, a policy professor at Georgetown University who frequently writes on tech governance, noted on Twitter that policies once used to safeguard users “are now being rewritten in obviously nonsensical ways to fit with the whims of its owner.”

Today, Musk followed through on an earlier promise to remove the blue checks from users who won’t pay a monthly subscription fee to the platform. The little icon was a status marker, sure, but it was also a symbol of some kind of higher order on the social network: Gone with it is the final vestige of the Twitter that once was. Still, there is applause. Musk’s adoring fans treat the pay-to-play scheme as part of the CEO’s supposed free-speech crusade, suggesting that the ability to buy a check mark puts everyone on equal footing—but a privilege that can, must, be bought isn’t much of a privilege at all.

Perhaps there’s no need to eulogize the old Twitter. The platform has always had problems, has always distorted conversations and turned too many people toward their darkest impulses. But it was also, at least, the creation of a community. To the extent that Twitter’s downfall represents the end of the age of social media, it is because the platform has abandoned users in favor of the whims of one man.

Still, the social network has its devotees; so will TruthGPT, if and when it launches. Some clapped when the rocket lifted off. Some clapped when it exploded. And somewhere beyond the smoke was Elon Musk, taking it all in.

Today’s News

BuzzFeed is shutting down its unprofitable news division as part of broader cuts at the company, and will concentrate its news efforts on HuffPost, which BuzzFeed acquired in 2020. The House approved a bill that would ban transgender women and girls from women’s and girls’ sports at federally supported schools and colleges. It is unlikely to pass the Senate. SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, launched in Texas for its inaugural test flight and exploded in midair roughly four minutes after launch.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

The End of Recommendation Letters

By Ian Bogost

Early spring greened outside the picture window in the faculty club. I was lunching with a group of fellow professors, and, as happens these days when we assemble, generative artificial intelligence was discussed. Are your students using it? What are you doing to prevent cheating? Heads were shaken in chagrin as iced teas were sipped for comfort.

But then, one of my colleagues wondered: Could he use AI to generate a reference letter for a student? Faculty write loads of these every year, in support of applications for internships, fellowships, industry jobs, graduate school, university posts. They all tend to be more or less the same, yet they also somehow take a lot of time, and saving some of it might be nice. Other, similar ideas spilled out quickly. Maybe ChatGPT could help with grant proposals. Or syllabi, even? The ideas seemed revelatory, but also scandalous.

Scandalous because we faculty, like all faculty everywhere, were drawn into an educators’ panic about AI over the winter … And now, in the faculty club, we professors were musing over how to automate our own assignments?

Read the full article.