The cable access web we were promised

Two weekends in grade 10 my friends and I did guest spots on Something Awful’s internal community radio station. Our taste in music was pretty horrible and I can’t even recall if anyone was listening, but I do remember how great it felt to blast tunes and shoot the shit with the invisible at large. That’s what it looked like the web was going to be: a constellation of rinky dink media operations. Blogs. Pirate radio. Basement late night shows.

The platforms we have now are just scaled up from Tom Green’s landscape. YouTube. Twitch. Even TikTok rapidly transformed from an advent calendar Gong Show to another clout haven. I asked my partner if it was “normal” that I’ve started making Spotify playlists conceptually around what I’d play if I was Wolfman Jack. She assured me it was close enough to normal. I’m just pining for the web that wasn’t.

It’s good that people can hustle these websites for income but it’s not great how narrow they are. Algorithmic entertainment is just the work of dung beetles. Rolling up any crud, from the interesting to the noxious, and making them identical perfect spheres. If you do not agree to those terms, you are not participating in the exercise of these sites and will be punished. The idiosyncratic web, the space that felt like you could make it your own, has vaporized.

This pandemic, which will suck in most ways, could at least change that. People around the globe will be tuned in to digital entertainment in profound numbers. People who are bored enough to hop off the fence will start contributing. I’ve seen jokes about this being the next baby-boom but I’m more confident we’re just going to get that for podcasts and Twitch channels.

Could be cool! The widescale collapse of corporate media was already in motion. We are overdue for a cultural buck towards local-minded or local-vibe-ed publications. We’re about to get a lot, venture capital backing or not. After a decade of increasingly polished and sharply produced digital content, we’re being forced back to the stone age. Media with available resources in the same vein as trying to fix a 3AM dinner with whatever pathetic food is in your fridge.

I’m not saying we just play musical chairs with aesthetics, just reevaluating the monotony of digital entertainment. Deciding if what we create belongs to us or belongs to the grind.