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Degrowth… is not a field whose researchers are trying to accurately understand the world. It’s a field where telling grand stories about The World That Could Be gains you status for inscrutable political reasons amongst your peers. The absurdity, the lack of realism… those are features, not bugs. It means the authors can always be pure and never worry about details like ‘would this work’ or ‘what about the horrifying side effects that kill people’ or ‘is this even politically possible’. They’re doing Academia as a Social Club, not academia for the pursuit of truth.
But over the weekend, it leaked that Twitch has secretly banned all Israeli IP addresses from signing up for the site. Above is the screen Israeli users would see if they tried to sign up, and via some right-click-inspect-element magic we can see that the error description is ‘Blocked Country IP’.
This is a wild story. What’s truly astonishing is that this ban has been in place for more than a year and it’s only just now been revealed…
I categorize the social internet’s history into four waves. Those waves can be roughly defined by the first platform you used online:
Wave One: Usenet, IRC, BBS, listservs, etc
Wave Two: AIM, the early blogosphere, LiveJournal, Myspace, etc
Wave Three: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
Wave Four: Instagram, Snapchat, and everything afterwards
And each of these era shifts was a genuine upheaval of what the internet was, what it meant to interact with people. If the current era of the internet is ‘dying’, then the social internet has died and been reborn at a minimum of three times already.
The internet is shifting and changing in important ways. I think we’re on the verge of the 5th internet era, and it’s worth talking about what forces are moving us in the direction of a less global and more splintered internet…
This minor spat between the oldheads and Clark illustrates that there’s not always a ton of logic to when and where virality happens. This applies to women’s basketball, but it also applies to the internet writ large. Why specifically did Logan Paul turn into a mega-celebrity instead of some other vapid moron? Why does one blog grow fast while a similar blog struggles to find an audience? Why does one influencer land deals with Gucci while another languishes in the mid-thousands of followers?
Talent and hard work are always part of the answer. If you discount those factors you’re a fool. But luck plays a role as well. I follow several creators whose careers were launched by a single big break, one algorithmic accident leading to a moment of virality that changed their lives. And they openly admit they have no idea why the algorithm chose that specific video, no idea how they got lucky when their previous content hadn’t gotten any attention. Algorithms are mysterious and inscrutable, life is filled with what-ifs and randomness, and who gets what is to some degree just an arbitrary roll of the dice.
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