Tag: internet history

• Push the button for a sweet treat

  I had grand plans of posting something about Godzilla today, but that will have to wait for these delightful rats. These tiny furry folx learned to associate pushing a little button with getting a sugar treat. As time progressed, though, they ended up just pushing the button for fun.

  The results are about as delightful as you’d expect.

  

  

  The project was led by French photographer Augustin Lignier, whose work explores the technography and performativity of photography. I came across the work due to the mighty Kottke, who quotes a New York Times piece where Lignier considers that the rats’ continued button-mashing as a neat analog for our addiction to social media.

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  As platforms morph, shrink, converge, collapse all over the internet, one begins to wonder what the web of the imminent future might look like. While I did mention grassroots movements and community-run services like Neocities in my last post, the network effects that platforms like Substack, X, hell, even WordPress right here, can offer, are often more tempting than a cutesy throwback. That is to say nothing of the ease with which said platforms integrate with other services to maximise attention on their users.

  Substack and X are feeling the squeeze of the real world to greater and lesser degrees; the former as a safe space for Nazis, the latter as a haven for AI-generated deepfakes. But where one platform collapses, another will happily take its place, unless we all decide to opt out together.

  The internet of the future will be several interweaved different platforms, modes, nodes, devices, personalities, and communities. In a way it has always been so, but with its sheer ubiquity, the way it layers over and enfolds so many aspects of existence, thinking ‘the internet’ (or even ‘the Internet’, as autocorrect seemed to cling to forever) as a monolith is now a waste of time.

• The handmade internet

  

  A fragment from random notes over the last few days, weeks…

  There seems to be a return to an idea, philosophy, or practice of “just make stuff!” or “just do it!”; “just write something, ffs!” (Maybe that last one is more for me…)

  I noticed this most recently with Rick Rubin’s odd but intriguing Squarespace tie-in promo for his book; he’s seeking to spawn or to gather online folx who are just doing cool, interesting, intriguing stuff. At least that’s how I saw it in my cursory glance over the copy:

  A collaboration with Rick Rubin to build tetragrammaton – an online world of curated materials – and a new website design, Transmission, to inspire your creativity.

  From “Co _ Rick Rubin“, Squarespace, accessed January 22, 2024 (archived).

  It’s all a bit corporate, a bit woowoo, a bit odd, but it plugs into a broader conversation about how the internet has evolved and changed, how platforms have scorched much of the landscape that was previously a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more grassroots, more personal, more creative, perhaps.

  There are other offshoots of this movement, like tiny-internets, and lovely lite micro-blogging services like bearblog and Plume, even Neocities. Larger companies like Automattic, for all their faults, are (at least at a surface, front facing level), trying to champion this kind of crazy, personalised, creative internet.

  Whether this is a return to the internet of old, or a new evolution entirely, remains to be seen.

• Reorientation; tides; houses and rivers; databases and archives; a new moment to sit and think

  

  It’s a real back to the future moment, this. Where I’ve headed off for a year or two on a journey of personal inspiration, seeking new knowledges, grand new themes, new looks, new designs, new vibes, only to come crawling back to the place where it all started. It’s all very Joseph Campbell.

  My very first proper blog ran on a website called Blog-City, and for some insane reason I remember that my first post was on the 15th of July, 2003. This followed many years of experimenting with all sorts of web hosting and design services (all completely free) including GeoCities and Angelfire. I had websites for myself, for my made-up career, for imagined airlines and businesses and all sorts, not to mention links outwards to rudimentary social media services and websites like Neopets. The internet was simpler then; maybe it will be simple again some day, but probably not.

  Once I started working properly on my career, I tried to separate out all the different parts of my life into different web presences. There was social media, of course, and since 2007 I’ve had Facebook, Twitter, and the rest (most of them are private or deactivated now, apart from Mastodon, which I’m enjoying playing around with). I had separate sites for my filmmaking, for my work and profile as an academic, for my photography stuff, as well as a blog archive just kind of floating around. When I registered danielbinns[dot]net back in 2014, I thought ‘right, time to link everything up’, but I never quite got there in a way I liked. Everything was still floating, still nebulous.

  Part of this was the technology, maybe, but primarily it was due to my trying to force things to fit in a particular way. This is personal and psychological as much as it has anything to do with a particular host or platform.

  Several things have happened in the last few years to make me reconsider all of the above. The pandemic was a player, for sure, but it also took me reading stuff and watching videos and learning about different ways of managing my time, my notes and knowledge, my skills and expertise, and just figuring out who on earth I was and accepting that person.

  Long story short, we’re back here on WordPress, under a new domain, The Clockwork Penguin. TCP isn’t a business, necessarily; for now, I still like making stuff under the Deluded Penguin moniker. TCP is more of an ethos, a place to play and experiment, to reflect. To look back over some notes and some things I’ve been thinking about; to post fragments, or more developed work, works in progress, or just some cool links I found. I don’t know if it’s a cozy place or a mysterious place; if it’s a house sitting next to a river, or a garden where I can plant things and watch them grow. But I look forward to finding out.