of the Internet’s past characterized by failures of technological achievement (Gibney, 2011). (The manifesto was written by Founders Fund partner Bruce Gibney but authorship is often misattributed to his fellow partner Peter Thiel.) At the time of the essay’s publication, journalists covering the tech industry were especially likely to quote a sentence that did not actually appear in the body of Gibney’s essay: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” (2011). Coming from a firm closely associated with Facebook, industry insiders interpreted this quip as an attack on competitors and it led to a staged debate between Thiel and Twitter investor, Marc Andreesen (Horowitz, 2013). To the general public, however, the sentence neatly captured a feeling of bitter disappointment.
Reactionary narratives of decline mistakenly blame the loss of the Internet as a way of being on the growth in the size and diversity of the online population. In the 2013 debate with Andreesen, Thiel elaborated his dismissal of Twitter’s “140 characters” by targeting the players of casual games and users of social media:
You have as much computing power in your iPhone as was available at the time of the Apollo missions. But what [is it] being used for [?]; It’s being used to throw angry birds at pigs[;] it’s being used to send pictures of your cat to people halfway around the world; it’s being used to check in as the virtual mayor of a virtual nowhere while you’re riding a subway from the nineteenth century. (Horowitz, 2013)
These examples reflect Thiel’s evaluation of certain Internet applications as low value and undeserving of “computing power.” By this logic, the decline of the Internet was caused by an overindulgence in technologies of pleasure, entertainment, community, and kinship.
The resentment evident in narratives such as Thiel’s have real consequences for people who have come to rely on the internet. Men like Gibney and Thiel invest financially as well as emotionally in the future of the internet. Their personal feelings, preferences and priorities shape the terms by which they deem new technologies worthy of support and enable them to flourish. For this milieu, the internet of the 1990s provided more than a way of being. Thanks to the irrational exuberance of the dot-com bubble, a mastery of arcane computer technology translated into political power and economic capital. As beneficiaries of that brief ←30 | 31→moment, industry elites are uniquely positioned among long-time users to act on their narratives of decline.
Weaponized by capital and privilege, narratives of decline can empower dangerously regressive visions of the future. The embittered dotcommer—no longer part of a technical vanguard, bored by an early retirement, alienated by an internet population that better represents the full range of humanity—wants to recapture the openness and optimism they felt when the early internet was their way of being. When this nostalgia gives way to frustration and anger, long-time users may be drawn to arguments like Thiel’s, convinced that the decline of the Internet is the fault of new users, new practices, new interfaces, and new techniques. Ironically, in grieving over the sense of novelty they felt on the Internet of the past, they risk missing out on what is exciting and new about the Internet of the present.
ways of being on internets of the future
At the conclusion of her fieldwork, Markham noticed that her own experience of life online had begun to settle down into the realm of familiar. After three years exploring the Net, she was surprised to touch the boundaries of a system that had once seemed so limitless. “I am amazed that I don’t find more weird stuff and more exotic transmutations of the body and mind online” (p. 222). In this moment, Markham anticipated the challenge facing us today: to imagine a future for an unremarkable internet. In a final interview, interlocutor Terri Senft offered a concise portrait of a mundane way of being online: “Sometimes blown away. Sometimes bored. Sometimes angry. Often, I have to pee” (p. 223).
Every vision of the internet’s future contains a vision of its decline. Since the publication of Life Online, the Internet has become the infrastructure of everyday life, suffused into the most quotidian social exchanges and financial transactions. More people in more places have more of their lives mediated by Internet communications. The predominance of young, white, English-speaking men from Europe and the U.S. with money and education has steadily waned. Yet, over the same period, as the Internet shed its exclusivity, it also lost some of its novelty. The mere act of getting online and interacting with other people through a screen no longer inspires the same popular fascination or moral concern that it once did. Long-time users who experienced the frisson of technological mastery or the industrialized hype of the Internet of 1997 may feel some melancholy at the Internet’s transformation. But to carelessly remember that older Internet as a virtual Eden is to indict the millions of users who were structurally excluded from participation. The society of the Mind was a dream of computer-mediated colorblindness; an indifference to difference.
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Facing down powerful narratives of decline, long-time users committed to justice must recover alternative memories of the internet’s past. One small step in this direction is to narrate the past two decades in terms of a dramatic expansion in the size and diversity of the internet-using population. For many of these 21st century users, the Internet itself is a taken for granted feature of their media environment. Indeed, this mundane Internet may not inspire the same outrageous dreams as the Net of the 1990s but its infrastructural futures are not necessarily any less radical. We have language for the internet at its most mundane—an overgrown garden, or a ship in need of repair. But those who struggle for justice must also capture the internet at its most transcendent. How can the Internet of today—ubiquitous and mundane—inspire new senses of wonder, feelings of possibility, and sparkling visions of better tomorrows?
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Workplace-Making among Mobile Freelancers
nadia hakim-fernández
April 19, 2017
11:45 am. Talking to my mobile phone’s camera.
I have news. The cable that connects my computer to the power source is breaking, and the cables are sprouting out of the plastic sleeve,
Figure 4.1: Screencaptures of author. Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
See?
Figure 4.2: Broken cables. Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
I had to put special tape around it, and if I move a lot, it will break apart. Another reminder that I have to buy another computer. But it’s 1200 € and I am not sure if I’ll be able to spend that kind of money now … I have some savings, but I have bills to pay. This is why I’ll have to stay here [at home] for a while, and, you know … speak to myself as I am doing now instead of being in a real workplace with co-workers.
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This is part of my auto-ethnography1 of what it feels like to be a precarious, mobile, freelancer life. Right now, I’m actually—Sorry, I was interrupted by my mobile phone prompting me to download a new operating system.
21 April 2017 12:43
I have been working from home since Monday, so for 4 and a half days in a row,