So now that the decade is kinda coming to an end, I've been thinking of how the internet culture has developed, especially the promises of fame, influence, inclusion and novelty.

I just can't help feeling like that the biggest difference was that posting in 2010 was mostly about connecting to your real life friends or a hard core, even fannish audience - a politician keeps a blog mainly for supporters to read or post their op eds or whatever, a feminist blog circle which appears to really be a mix of socialization between like minded peers and sublimated desire of wanting to be noticed by the big league publications. Now we have Trump posting bizarre memes of himself and there are super sophisticated campaigns for astroturfing. Communicating with friend circles is quite possibly 100 times more sophisticated than it was when my sole platform was the friend feed of Facebook where the same updates were posted for uncles, mates and crushes alike.

Of course the political influence of the internet started already in the 90's with events like The Drudge Report breaking the news on Monical Lewinsky affair, but clearly we're in a point where the internet is the place influencing does its day job. It is not a place for influencing some subset, a risky diversifying investment or a route to notoriety for those who haven't succeeded through conventional routes. It is the conventional route.

The novelty here is not the change itself, but rather the change of how utterly banal it has become. Disliking aspects of social media platforms is often not techno- or neophobia anymore but rather like disliking the design of everyday things, housing, traffic arrangements or what's on TV.

Now, of course it is possible to say that nothing is new under the Sun, but it's worth noting that it is as often a sentiment of conservatism as it is stated in its opposition. I by no means do not miss much of the old internet. A lot of the supposed golden-age-of-blogging was motivated and justified by the brightness of the future of the internet that the bloggers had promised themselves. Now that it has arrived the lustre of the golden age is clearly much dulled: if this is their prophecy, the prophets were no prophets at all.

Another reason why being critical of social media is not neophobic anymore is that it's been commodified. There are new apps, yes, but Tiktok is a reborn Vine with a better business plan and Discord is IRC for the app age. Choice is more akin to choosing between brands of soda. To choose between Facebook and Discord is less like choosing between a rotary phone and mobile phone but between wisdom tooth extraction and getting teeth fixed to prevent old age heart infarcts. Different demographics but equally contemporaneous.

Now, the fear of the new has not disappeared at all as we can gather from boomer behavior. But the bad and disappointing things are by now so familiar that they can't be excused by their novelty anymore. Obama was a cool geeky gadget uncle who befriended everyone on Twitter, but that now seems as quaint and oblivious to social media's realities as Hillary's campaign was.

The biggest lesson of the latest decade of the experiment to connect the world may be that how much we do not need to connect. Connections have become cheap, but boundaries more expensive. We need people to be blocked, we need them muted, we need to unfollow and unsubscribe. We even need to ghost some people and share our block lists. We need reply guys to chill out a little. We do not need to track karma or likes or even see them. The platforms are not our friends and neither are most of our digital neighbors. Filter bubbles and echo chambers need not be all bad as long as you often step outside, but I do insist of having a chamber made for no-one but me into which I can descent and feel respledent.

But until then! May we raise a glass for a brave new decade of posting. To its horrors and wonders.