I'm Bullish on Gatekeeping and IRL Parties
thought digest, 10.14.2024 + a piece by yan castaldo
Read to the end for a piece by Yan Castaldo
“Internet localism,” though I’m sure I actually mean another, more precise phrase here, isn’t just back, it’s been back.
No, I don’t mean the rise of the micro-celebrity. I mean the renewed importance of the physical world.
The Internet’s present (future and recent past) is pockets of social influence anchored in physical world cities, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London. These are then bolstered by curated, gate kept centers of legitimacy, like legacy media or successful alternative media outlets. And then surrounding all this — complicating the picture to an untrained observer — is a sea of people who are popular but lack real influence, creating an illusion of a social hierarchy that’s more broken than it actually is.
Something few people seem able to accept is that all those popular creators you’ve never heard of, the ones with hundreds of thousands of followers but no cachet, are actually insignificant in an important sense. That doesn’t mean they’re not successful. What they are is successful small business owners. But they are not “celebrities” the way a high follower count used to make someone a celebrity. Quality of supporters matters more than quantity of followers, at least, underneath a certain threshold.
One of the many consequences of Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition is that follower count has become less socially relevant than ever, even if there are still business opportunities to be found in that type of growth. TikTok and Instagram already made a huge dent in this years ago, but Musk dealt the final blow. Reaching that 100,000 follower mark doesn’t matter as much as who cares about and shares your content.
I think Substack has also contributed to the ultimate nullification of numbers. With everyone publishing content now, and much of that content doing serious numbers, getting in front of the right eyes is more powerful than the number of eyes. It used to be that consistency was enough. That’s not true anymore.
You need to differentiate yourself. And my suspicion is that differentiation is most easily found first in who you know, second, in the physical world, and third, in the quality and placement of what you produce. People’s appetite for screen time is shrinking and the opportunities to produce new things are growing.
Contra my own article about culture last week, something I’ve noticed in the last few weeks is all of my IRL friends are talking about movies. Everyone I know has seen The Substance. I’m not completely doing a 180 here and saying, “Wait, maybe Hollywood isn’t dead after all.” What I am saying is that everyone I know wants to focus on one thing that everyone else knows about, whether or not it’s good. People’s ability to tune out the noise, anecdotally, appears to be getting better. This squares with the other (long awaited, at least on this blog) vibe shift towards tech-skepticism.1
As people accept that Internet culture is just culture and start actively trying to move away from that, writing about the Internet is now…sort of soul-crushingly oversaturated. It’s not just the never-ending essays about girlhood anymore. It’s everything. I don’t think there’s ever been a worse time to make writing about Internet culture your sole source of income. (I’m not saying stop talking about this stuff — just talking about the $$$ aspect.)
Anyway, at any rate, back to the positives.
It is a great time to start doing things IRL and make a name for yourself in your city, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. On this topic, here’s a condensed version of an article I wrote this summer, about the real importance of Dimes Square:
The true novelty of Dimes Square wasn't its politics. It was its emphasis on physical presence. In an age of virtual everything, where isolation had become the norm, these artists, writers, and podcasters were doing something radical. They were hanging out.
The Internet, which during Covid had become a replacement for real-world interaction, was a supplement to their scene, not the scene itself. This hunger for tangible, in-person experiences wasn't, and still isn't, confined to a few New York City blocks. Other digital-first subcultures have made the leap from the screen to the physical world. On the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), TPOT, or This Part of Twitter, transformed their online friendships into a real-world gathering. Vibe Camp is an annual Burning Man-esque festival where members of TPOT participate in workshops, dance parties, and crucially, meet their online friends face-to-face. Vibe Camp is so popular that tickets are distributed through a lottery system, with hundreds of attendees each year.
Back in New York, the Dimes Square phenomenon spawned more than just outsized media attention. It also helped popularize Sovereign House, an events space that has become a nexus for all sorts of events. From book and magazine launches to meet-and-greets with public intellectuals to plain old parties, Sovereign House embodies the fusion of online and offline worlds. Its cachet lies not just in its events, but in its connection to online subcultures. Sovereign House isn't alone in capitalizing on this energy. Venues like Index Space have emerged from other scenes, and are, as at least one person put it, “always busy.”
Simply put, people are sick of screens.
[...]
Along these lines, we’re also seeing a surge in conferences springing up from online communities. The controversial pro-natalist conference held in Austin, Texas last year is a prime example. What was remarkable was not the event's contentious subject matter or associations—though they did ruffle more than a few feathers—but that it happened at all. This was a group of people who had primarily connected and communicated online for years. Their ability to organize and convene in-person, and at scale, speaks to a broader trend: online communities increasingly seek tangible, face-to-face connections.
Brands and major corporations are taking notice of this shift. The short-form video app TikTok has partnered with Eventbrite to simplify the organization of real-world events. The value of in-person meet-ups isn’t just social: companies see that they can benefit from this energy.
Universities are also noticing—or at the very least, doing their part to stoke the flames. I recently spoke with a person from a university that’s developing an e-sports center on campus, aiming to transform the often solitary activity of gaming into a vibrant, in-person community. This isn't unique, though, they’re taking a cue from universities around the country. Institutions like DePaul University in Chicago have already established successful esports centers, not just taking gaming seriously as a sport, but as a community-building activity.
This trend echoes an older model of Internet use.
In the web’s early days, online interactions often preceded or followed in-person meetings at conferences and conventions. The Internet served as a tool for niche communities like furries and neo-pagans to connect and organize, with face-to-face interaction always being a key component. Today, we are rediscovering this approach, using the Internet as a starting point for real-world connections rather than an end in themselves.
As AI-generated content floods the Internet, the landscape is evolving unexpectedly. Public online spaces become increasingly less appealing, while private, more intimate digital spaces gain more value. These “cozy,” human-centric online spaces are also incubators for in-person events. People have a desire for authentic connections in an increasingly artificial online world.
This shift might explain the resurgence of personal ads on platforms like Substack, or the growing popularity of initiatives like Shreeda Segan’s Offline, a dating service emphasizing in-person connections, as opposed to the swipe-crazy, app-based model.
[…]
“the revival of the internet” by Yan Castaldo
THESE 👇👇 ARE THE TOP 🔼🔼 SIX WAYS 😉💫 WE CAN 🔫 SAVE 👐📑 THE 👧👨 INTERNET🛜🛜!!!!!!!!!!!
the internet is over. you know it, i know it. substack’s resident clairvoyant sam kriss rang its death knell years ago. the rest of us are all mourners at its protracted wake, clad in black, bleary-eyed, moaning. nothing online is fun anymore. facebook is a substrate for covert ops run by russian bots. twitter has become an identity evropa meeting room. dating apps are dead and have castrated entire segments of the population. snapchat is for children or men that look like kip from napoleon dynamite. media is dominated by digital high-fructose corn syrup in the form of short form video. i could go on!
however, instead of continuing to lambast the good ol’ net for failings it can’t control, i want to help it! i’m a caring man, and i grieve for the internet. i feel its pain, and seek to restore it to its former glory. like the great phoenix from the ashes, to be reborn is to be molded under fire—the internet cannot return as it was. as an homage to the internet, i’m using its preferred literary format—a listicle—to explain how i, when elected supreme leader, will fix the internet to resurrect it from its deathbed. keep 🥵 reading 📕 for 🍆 the 👏 watchmojo 💫 TOP🔝SIX 🔼 ways 💫 to 🔫 save 😈 the 🌐 world 🍑 wide 🌍 web!
all internet must be dial-up, and cannot be accessed from mobile devices.
the problem :(
you don’t use the internet to use the internet. you use the internet to escape from whatever you’re actually experiencing. you want to avoid the tedious weather conversation with your neighbour in the elevator. you’d pay anything to avoid looking like you’re not sure what to do with your hands. you couldn’t bear to sit with your own thoughts for the three minutes it takes you to use the bathroom. none of these reasons (which you and i both know comprise the majority of reasons you actually use the internet) involve you making a deliberate decision to scroll twitter dot com. the glacial pace of dial-up made it such that you had to really want to use the internet to tough through it. when dial-up was around, you had to carve out time from your day, and go to the family computer to watch stuffed animals eviscerate each other on newgrounds.com, or download kiss_me_thru_the_phone_souljaboy.mp4 from limewire, or to go back to limewire to download kmttp_sb.mp3 instead because you didn’t understand file formats and kiss_me_thru_the_phone_souljaboy.mp4 turned out to actually just be pornography. the internet (except for ridesharing, maps, and a few logistical exceptions) should only ever have been accessible from a corporate office, computer room, or public library. we weren’t meant to have the entirety of human experience—real, imagined, and everything in between—perpetually weighing down our pockets. the metaverse was a laughable idea not because it’s stupid, ugly, offensive, vile, dehumanizing, unsustainable, inefficient, superfluous, unnecessary, gauche, charmless, unchic, unasked for, malevolent, noxious, insidious, etc., but because we already live there. let the internet once again be a place you go, not a place you live.
the solution :)
it’s time to restore dial-up internet. i understand that returning to actual dial-up may sound unreasonable, so we will instead put our best and brightest computer and software engineers to work developing a solid approximation. much like our phone cameras make old-school shutter sounds when we take photos, we will make all computers play back mp3s of dial-up internet sounds while they force you to wait the requisite amount of time (somewhere between thirty and sixty seconds) to log on. loading each individual page will have a similar lag. let’s hang ten and surf the net, people. mahalo!
on top of the mandated dial-up, we will also institute a meme sharing delay.
the problem :(
the immediacy of the internet has extinguished its initial appeal. the fun of the internet always lay in its novelty. look at this video of the boy biting the other boy’s finger! isn’t this fresh and exciting? laugh! the internet now moves too fast for its own good. as it approaches the speed of light it acquires infinite mass—it’s just too cumbersome. as sam so eloquently puts it in the article above:
without even passing out of date, every mode of internet-speak already sounds antiquated… can’t you hear, under the chatter of these empty forms, a long low ancient whine, the last mewl of that cat who wants to haz cheezburger?
this exhaustion is inescapable offline as well, having bled into conventional media. films—which are literal carbon copies of their predecessors—are created to generate ten second sound clips. music is created to be autoplayed for the split-second consumption of barely listening infants with emmental brains. journalism is published to spike one’s cortisol enough to be clicked, spit at8, and immediately closed. the internet is an ouroboros of derivative, self-generating nonsense, and we’re trapped somewhere in its digestive tract, simmering in hydrochloric acid. all of this nonsense is just too fast to be processed. no matter how competent we consider ourselves in “media literacy” or “critical thinking”, there’s only so much Content a human brain can handle. the shadows on that cave wall sure as hell feel real to me!
memes move too quickly to be fun. “very mindful, very demure” was stillborn; it arrived as a matted pulp of lifeless digital afterbirth. it was trite the second that girl clicked “post!”. remember the thrill of emailing your grandchildren the funny picture from The Facebook comparing your wife to a prison warden? bring that back. you deserve emancipation from pretending you haven’t already seen the meme your friend just sent you. memes are nothing more than ersatz inside jokes, giving people the illusion of Being Involved—a crude imitation of friendship. anyway, you’ve already seen every meme before it’s even been published. memes exist outside of time, residing in our collective unconscious. at once ancient and yet-to-come. concurrently eternal and ephemeral. like the library of babel, except you’ve already somehow Read. Everything. In. It.
you’ve become a consumptive. you convalesce in your sanitarium library and scan the same four texts infinitely rescrambled in syntactically distinct yet semantically identical ways, waiting for the infection to kill you or die. we want content! we want content! we want content!
the solution :)
to reinstate novelty to the internet we’re instituting a one day meme distribution delay. memes must sit in internet escrow for 24 hours before they’re passed on to the next party, or publicly posted. this will hopefully return some of the joy of asynchronous communication (i.e., letter writing) to the internet. we hope the additional time to reflect prior to sharing memes will enable people to go say hi to someone they can reach out and touch.
every content-generating agent must prove themselves to be human in some way or another.
the problem :(
dead internet theory is right—i don’t believe this garbage is being made or disseminated by humans anymore. are you telling me that “brat summer” made its way to the literal white house off of raw organic support? without the help of some yakub-like figure, pulling strings and generating clones to push the narrative? when you gaze into the fetid, gaping Maw of the Internet, you are witnessing interminable gladiator stage fights between bots, choreographed by psychopaths in the bay area. you point and jeer at the galli below, hacking and slashing with barbs of predictive text. foolish barbarian prisoners of war! filthy gauls, vile thracians; serves them right! you say. the combatants are not the prisoners, you are. one with your seat, you’re unable to wake up and realize you’re spectating intellectual rock ‘em sock ‘em robots. you could be hugging your grandmother (because how much time does she really have left, after all?) but instead you’re choosing to watch “hasan piker” argue with “elon musk” online. the colosseum receives payment in blood—your blood—and it always comes back to collect.
the solution :)
we will first institute a minimum two year meme moratorium, time enough for the internet to catch up with its own shadow and figure out what the hell is going on. after this moratorium ends, posters must prove their humanity by mailing us a card with a saint of their choosing, upon which they’ve placed a pinprick of their blood. the ministry of defense (which now consists of me and two interns and has been repurposed to manage online slop) will manually sort through and test the blood samples. if approved as human, you can proceed with your post. we do not guarantee a quick turnaround.
cryptocurrency is now backed by monopoly money, and mirrors its value. individuals who amassed vast wealth as a result of crypto will be held accountable for their decadence.
the problem :(
crypto is fake and the worst person you know became a billionaire as a result
the solution :)
a set of 420 bills of monopoly money can be purchased online from hasbro for $12.99. assigning this as its value leaves a rough value of $0.03 USD per bill. the price of 1 bitcoin is now pegged to this static value—other cryptocurrencies are removed from circulation and no longer legal tender anywhere on god’s green earth.
additionally, if you were able to build an extravagant lifestyle due to a cryptocurrency-associated windfall, you will have to earn back the value of the money you’ve spent through working in the coal mines. tech nerds and frat bros speak too flippantly of cryptocurrency mining, and should be made to experience the reality of mining an actual resource.
screenings and readings of needlessly difficult and overlong arthouse media are now mandatory for children across the world.
the problem :(
something even more shocking about the internet isn’t that it has ruined attention spans, but simply that it ruined taste. kids can’t sit through 128 page hemingway novels but will sit through ten-hour twitch vods of roblox streamers whose development was arrested at fourteen. it doesn’t matter if they’re 35 years old, they never learned to wash tooth blood off their walls. why grow up when you’re being paid the gdp of tuvalu to online gamble in front of maladjusted children whose blood consists of equal parts plasma, corn oil, and red 40?
the solution :)
anyway, it’s evident that the children of the internet are capable of sitting down and consuming some sort of media for extended periods of time. as such, to rehabilitate the collective intellect of our youth, i propose mandatory screenings of needlessly challenging literary fiction, arthouse cinema, and classical music. see a sample curriculum below:
literature
students will be given tolstoy’s war and peace in the original, pre-reform russian. they will be given a tablet bearing the lord’s prayer in both english and russian. they can use this to decipher the russian language, rosetta stone-style.
literacy in russian is considered an antirequisite for this task and results in assignment of another book.
film
students are to watch and analyze all 201 minutes of chantal akerman’s 1975 film, jeanne dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 bruxelles. this is to be viewed in the original french, without subtitles. students are permitted one french-english dictionary, a notepad, and a pen.
verbal fluency in french is considered an antirequisite for this task and results in assignment of another movie.
music
students will learn to transcribe stravinsky’s entire rite of spring in jeongganbo, a system of musical notation developed in 15th century korea. beyond a pen and notepad, no supplementary materials are to be distributed.
literacy in 15th century korean music notation is considered an antirequisite for this task and results in assignment of another task.
discord is now banned.
the problem :(
i find it distasteful.
the solution :)
it’s banned! yay!
hey 🏾 gamer nation! 🏞🏞 if 🙎 you’re 😤 still 🤞👏 sticking 👌👌 around, 🔄 THANKS 🤙🙏 FOR 🌹 WATCHING! 🤓 be sure to like, share, and subscribe ✍ and 👏👏 tell ME 💁😩 in 🎁🌝 the 👏 comments—what did 👆 i 🙋⏮ miss? what 😅 are YOUR 👯 favourite ways to clean 🛁🛁 up 💋☝ the revolting online augean stables? how 🤔 do YOU 👈 suggest 👉 we stave off 😝 all-consuming 🅱✊ digital desolation? until next time, PEACE! ☮✌
Kathy Around the Web:
On the danger of conceptualizing AI as a “non-judgmental” God for The Critic
On technologically-augmented imaginary friends for The Washington Examiner
On whether you can be sexually satisfied by your imaginary friends with Tooky’s Mag
On the true crime community in Tablet Magazine
On whether culture is “stuck” in Wisdom of Crowds
The Computer Room Is Good Now, Listen to It Or I’ll Have a Different Kind of Episode:
First Time Caller: An Art Bell Tribute
From Chicago and the great American midwest, I bid you all good morning… wherever you may be in this great land of ours, from the Hawaiian and Tahitian islands in the West, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south to the Antarctic, north to the Pole, and worldwide on the Internet,
I’ve really got go do an audit of all my predictions.
 | A guest post by
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Thanks so much for sharing my piece :)
My favourite thing about Substack has been how conducive it has been to meeting people IRL. How much of that just coincides with the recent revival of more IRL events, especially in NYC, I'm not sure. But I do think there's a qualitative difference between Substack and something like Twitter, mostly due to Substack's higher barrier to participation, whether it's writing or reading. Not just that, but people take pride in the time and effort they put in (sometimes, to an annoying degree). In contrast, with other social media platforms, the conceit is to act as if you're just winging it in carefree fashion.