Web nostalgia is predicated on a series of miracles that happened in the late 90s and extended a little past the early two thousand. If you lived through this period, you probably have collected your own, as they arrived in rapid succession, and in a way were held up by the golden era of Steve Jobs. In fact, I’m specifically talking about the experience of millennials, since we were too young to really experience the dot-com bubble crash. The internet was like our sibling that grew up alongside us, blossoming into something powerful and impossible.
This makes us the digital natives. Perhaps not the most fully fluent because we can remember a faint echo of another time, when the dial-tone of the modem rang over the dust in that spare room, or a parent’s attic, and we did something random, like played a math game or pajama sam, or miniclip.com or god forbid, the hard stuff, runescape or WoW. As our brains were developing and our social understandings unfolding, the experiments of tumblr and Myspace were spreading their sweet, pro-social wings, allowing people to share thoughts and music.
There is an early youtube video of someone taking a camcorder video of their friends at the mall in middle or highschool I saw last year, a video I watched in 2025 that was taken in maybe 2011. And I was stunned by the behavior of the people in the video. They regarded the camera like a new and fascinating creature when they regarded it at all. Like people in front of cameras forever and always, they changed once they felt the power of its bit-broadcasting rays upon them, and yet did not understand it yet. They were weird, authentic, unafraid and often didn’t really care. They behaved entirely differently than people do on instagram today.
I’m recalling this different time, this in-between time, to set the stage. This was a time when people were excited about the social experiments that technology was conducting. We thought it would bring us closer. I think it was hard not to believe in some sort of global village. And in some ways, that happened; it just ended up with many more dark alleys than we ever foresaw as a species, as a global culture, and like all economies, became ruled by the powerful.
If the infrastructure of the physical world is pipes and asphalt and airports, the infrastructure of the internet world is attention. I don’t know if Jenny Odell coined this idea; she probably didn’t, but I heard the term “the attention economy” for the first time as the subtitle of her excellent book “How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy”. It’s a strange book, an imperfect book, as dry at times as it is mind-bending at others, to the point of revelatory euphoria. And yet I still thought of “the attention economy” as some sort of buzz word that Odell’s editor helped her dream up, until recently, when my brother pointed out that all the big tech companies are really just advertising companies, and all advertising companies are really attention companies. And that attention somehow has become a valuable commodity like steel, or coal, to be shipped and sold in massive quantities.
The early internet was optimistic. In our era, new nuclear power plants are being built to fuel the inexhaustible thirst of LLMs that are emulating and replacing labor with knowledge workers in white-collar jobs. But in that era, Moore’s Law was still going strong. Xerox was just trying to keep printers from jamming because people still read things on paper, and games like Zelda inspired thousands of people with a 128-kilobyte disc image, 25 times smaller than the images I take on my iPhone today.
And so the early internet made things for free. Open source was born, and naively, those sweet sweet pioneers thought, this Martin Luther all over again - we are liberating information. This time, we won’t lock anything away.
I think the best explanation of where this went wrong is Steve Jobs. A force in his own right, and responsible by one token for catalyzing the era’s techno-idealism, he was ultimately a salesman. He worked on an apple farm, absorbed the ideals of the counterculture, named his personal computers after the simple nature sweetness of the Macintosh apples he harvested as a hippie in rural California, and then built an empire around it. An empire that, with it’s philosophy of closed end-to-end integration, engineered some of the most powerful consumer technology that the world has ever seen, yet did so while spitting on the true free-love and open-source philosophy that the existing tech movement in Silicon valley espoused at that time. This summary is undoubtedly reductionist. If it hadn’t been jobs, it would likely have been someone else. The vultures of capitalism see a cash cow from a thousand feet up. And to his credit, Job’s legacy has left behind more personal privacy than most other tech companies. While Discord pipes your info straight to the CCP, Apple has at least refused a couple times to unlike phones for the FBI.
But I’m conflating hardware and manufacturing with attention. These are the pipes, attention is the juice, and Zuckerberg was really a key opportunist here. He built a Trojan horse that looked like a pro-social movement on its face, only to create Cambridge Analytica firehouse of personal data right into think-tanks that would subvert our public information to influence elections. In other words, the attention economy grew up. It was always willing to sell to the highest bidder, and that economy of higher bidders eventually materialized.
In the modern attention economy, it’s no longer a secret that we are all the product. It’s an interesting loop. Our thoughts, feelings, opinions - arguably the gestalt of which is our very souls - fuel this machine of likes and media and videos and posts. And the machine metabolizes the most engaging parts of that input, which are often the rawest and least civil components therein, and uses them as bait to capture our peers’ attention. And so as a commodity, attention has an interesting two-part composition. It’s sort of like milk, where you can skim off the fat and make one product, then sell what’s left. The milk is hate, sex-appeal, passion, dreams, anger. This is that good, powerful fuel that pulls in attention like a black hole (sorry mixing metaphors - cosmic milk). You can use that to fuel the machine, to get more attention. What you have left, you harvest. The cream pulls in the masses, and then you flip the attention of the masses for advertising revenue. Done. Billions of dollars of investment to build this machine out of microprocessors, server farms, engineering teams. Two or three decades or work, and maybe the most complex and enormous machine humanity has ever built. And it’s main purpose is that attention redirection.
So the techno-idealist vision of the internet bringing people together didn’t happen. Instead, it turned into a sort of hellscape. When you enter this world, you literally are in danger of losing yourself. It’s not as obviously malevolent as the upside-down in stranger-things. But wherever you are - on the toilet, with your friends, waiting in line - think about it. You would be thinking about your life, your world. Your friends, your surroundings. Talking to people around you, noticing things. The atomic unit that life is made of, the moment, is being seized from us, little by little. I know it all seems a little dramatic, but
Apple: 200.97 billion Amazon: $716 billion
The average time Americans spend on phones is 5 hours a day, or a third of our waking time. That’s 121 days a year.
The world has changed dramatically. The techno-idealist dream never materialized. Technology has been appropriated by the attention economy, which takes. It employs sophisticated psychological exploits that pull on addictive parts of our brain.
I know it’s an annoying message. It’s just a different world, and I sound like a luddite. And I kind of am. But I just don’t believe this is the only timeline. I don’t know if a techno-utopia will ever be achieved, or if we’ll ever escape the hellscapeishness of the internet blanketing over our world like a shadow realm in this timeline.
But I definitely believe it’s possible. The attention economy is generally interested in reappropriating your attention to resell to the highest bidder. This generally pulls you out of your world. Again, not to be dramatic, but it’s sort of like a dementor pulling out a bit of your soul (oops that was very dramatic).
If it didn’t there would be more soul. We would all have more soul left. That’s the default. That’s a sans-attention economy world. Even better, technology could be used as a tool to elevate. That was the original trap we fell into. But I can’t totally let it go. I think that rather than direct our attention away from our worlds, we can use it to magnify. Maybe the answer is just to use fewer screens, to discard the hubris that made us think that we could improve upon the social and psychological structure of our lives with computers. I can abide by that, too.
But I am not totally done with the cyborg experiment. I want my cake and to eat it too.
Stay with me - I think reddit gets close. For all the ugliness there, there is also a lot of beauty. Reddit gives tools to communities, and some amazing things happen. That’s why Reddit fuels the answers of LLMs, and AEO is being employed to use reddit as yet another attention vector by the next generation of the attention economy, AI. And yet again, the pattern plays out - organic human community building is harvested, and like once healthy soil, it becomes fallow, stripped of real nutrients, and eventually poisoned. Dead internet theory playing out in real time.
So reddit gets close to the techno-idealism of the early internet. But it’s still about a digital world, an abstract world.
Another techno-idealist miracle that caught my eye, and really the collective imagination of the whole world in it’s brief moment, was Pokemon go. Maybe you were part of it, maybe you missed it, or maybe you stood with your mouth wide open from the side-lines, amazed at what you were seeing.
If you missed this phenom, Pokemon Go was game co-created by an augmented reality studio, Niantic, in collaboration with Nintendo and the Pokemon Company. Unlike other video games, it required users to a) leave their homes b) go to new places c) interact with strangers in real life.
Do you know any gamers? This was an enormous liftt. These are like, the three things gamers avoid the most. And yet, it was a hit.
I was a Junior in college at the time, an art student studying at a large college university in the state capital of Richmond. There is a park at the center of my school’s campus, Monroe Park. It’s a pretty nice park. Big Magnolias, grass to lie on. On a sunny day in my freshman year, I’d see maybe 50 people out. People reading, playing frisbee, normal park things.
In the height of Pokémon Go, there were about five hundred people there every day. And not only that, but these people were talking, laughing, mingling. They were energized. I get nostalgic just thinking about it. It was a sort of miracle. I’d estimate that many of those people’s lives were changed. I know at least a few lifelong friendships that occurred during this time. I never participated, but it was a beautiful thing to behold. I’d never seen anything like it.
Pokemon Go is still around, but that energy isn’t. Something ended after that year-long period in 2015 or 2016.
In my mind, it was brief, but it proved that another world was possible. It was available to us, just beyond reach. Reddit, I think, though it is dying, proves the same thing on a broader and less IRL scale - people do crave community and the tools to build it, but on the internet, this is an exception and not the rule because it tends to be subverted.
One of my biggest dreams is to build this alternate world. And again, maybe the best way to do that is just to throw away all our phones. But think there’s a case to be made that this isn’t the most realistic option.
I’m running out of steam writing this essay in one shot, so I will spare you the implementation details, but maybe the purest way to put this is that I want to create the inverse of the attention economy.
I want to create the social infrastructure that, instead of funneling attention away from our worlds, magnifies it within those worlds. In my mind, this is fulfilling a promise we were given that was never really delivered. In mind, if the Facebooks and Twitters and Instagrams don’t do this, they don’t really do anything.
There are a few dimensions that are crucial for this magnification versus extraction directionality:
- social relevance
- freedom of privacy
- geographic relevance
I think that on the plus side, the engineering of the attention economy has shown us the mechanisms, even if its used it for anti-social purposes.
My dream is to take back ownership of these things. It’s obvious that funding it conventionally would sabotage the project. So it has to be built with resources that don’t require exploiting the attention capital running through it. This is an enormous challenge, and I think it explains why many similar projects fail. Foursquare is not a terrible example, which salvaged its integrity by dying as a social network but by selling geographic, and not personal data.
An even more dramatic example is freepiano.pub, a free site created by some beautiful soul at some point, is now so overloaded with ads that it is pretty much unusable. This was once a site that allowed a user to find a public piano they could play music on. There’s something pokemon-go-ey about that, something beautiful. Open it on your phone now, you can barely enter information into the “search” input without clicking on an ad.
But I think something PokemonGo and Freepiano.pub have in common is the interface of the map. Unlike a feed, a map is locally anchored. It cannot take you fully out of your world, because as an interface, it is a symbol of the world.
So that is my manifesto. Build a social map that delivers the promises of techno-idealism and the dream of pokemon go, with the democracy of reddit, to save our souls.