> While not deliberately concealing his identity, the flâneur preferred to stroll incognito.
...
> However, anyone entertaining such dreams of the Internet as a refuge for the bohemian, the hedonistic and the idiosyncratic probably didn’t know the reasons behind the disappearance of the original flâneur.
If the flâneur is operating incognito ... how the hell can you be sure he is actually gone? Maybe he just upped his flâneurism game and dropped off your flâneuradar.
People do still just surf the web instead of trying to only get stuff done---that's how we get interesting submissions on HN and why we are here to rummage through them.
Twenty years ago I might have surfed the web for fun, but picked up the phone to get stuff done; now I can just use the Internet for most of that latter thing too.
You are missing the main point, man. I am sure you never experience the internet in the 1990's or early 2000's. You must live in a very parochial place! You don't know anything about arts, films, music.
This website is one example. I like this website because there is something that is "HIS". He owns his individuality.
I'm user #1483 on Slashdot. That still exists, and I hardly ever go there though. Before the Slashdot era, I don't remember having visited some particular site regularly to see updating content.
But, oh, I got one: http://suck.com. That stopped making new content in 2001, but existed for another 14 years. Now the domain seems to have been taken over.
I thought about reddit and subreddits while reading this article (and HN is just an off-brand subreddit), and I can't disagree more.
These kind of websites are funnels that can satiate someone's need for novelty, while exposing them primarily to pages and ideas that a sub-community assembled around and collectively agree upon. The exploration hits a hard wall of very diminished returns once the explorer meets the sub-culture and the ideas they like.
In many ways, the links in my Facebook timeline are a better vector for exposure to new things because my IRL friends and relations are a wider variety of people than congregate in a subreddit (or other specific social forum).
(from the article)
"... the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about."
There is definitely a theme to the articles that show up here. However, I've been visiting this site for a fairly long time and still find it a good starting point for discovering new sites and information I haven't seen before. It is still rather like browsing the windows of shops.
Maybe reading HN alone doesn't make a flâneur, but I don't really see the variety of it as being a problem. Old web rings used to have topics or themes in the same way. Even so, HN is not the only site I browse in this way and I assume the same is true of most of the people here. As it is with this site, the others provide convenient jumping-off places for exploring, even if the kind of content that shows up has a loose theme to it.
Does that collectively build a very similar experience? I think it does. The format is a bit different, but the effect is the same.
Maybe the trouble is that places like HN have a less exploratory feel than browsing used to? Now you have a decent idea of what you're going to be seeing when you click a link. A web ring's "Next" button might have a more exciting or adventurous feel to it, but people used to use BBSes for the same thing as we now use HN and others.
Maybe its that the kind of links that flood the web today are seemingly mostly to websites operated by businesses? Personal webpages seem few and far-between now, and that gives the web a different feel. People still "surf" or explore what's out there like they have in the past, though.
It seems that the thrust of the article is that more people are doing things like never leaving Facebook when on the web. They get their content embedded in a Facebook frame. This is true. People like my mother are on Facebook and are likely not going to be doing any flâneuring. But this is different from saying that nobody does anything other than that.
In fact, I'd bet there are more people than ever doing actual surfing. They just make up a smaller percentage of the overall web user population than they used to because so many people are now on the web.
The joys of the world wild west are still out there for curious surfers. Admittedly it does require a lot more effort, especially for a younger generation who may not remember what the early web is like and how you would traverse it. I still get a thrill finding 'hidden' communities on the internet.
We need a DARE program to warn unsuspecting children about people like you ;) LessWrong is a rabbit hole you'll never find your way out of.
Oh it starts off harmless. "I'll just read a couple", you say. But a year later you're mainlining SSC and pissing off all your friends talking about "virtue signaling". And then a year after that you're living in Berkeley, dating five people, and giving a third of your income to MIRI. Kids, just say no!
Every lesswrong group I've visited - in the US, Europe and India - had multiple polyamorous people present and discussing polyamory, so I'd be surprised if this poll is way off.
Thanks for the links, I enjoy discovering sites with interesting content.
They probably wouldn't be classed as unknown/obscure, but I always seem to find something interesting on Brain Pickings and Colossal, worth a look if they're new to you:
Principia Cybernetica introduced me to pantheism (not really a theism at all). It is wonderful that the internet still allows people to stumble upon things that can positively change their life, even if it is hard to find those things. It was probably harder to find such things before the internet.
I've started collecting my weirdest links, though I'm not sure what to do with them yet. Hundreds of watercolors featuring Nazi war criminal Reynard Heidrich transforming into a female bird, a studio producing sexy anthropomorphized American warships that's started shifting towards Trump propaganda, a network of alt-right teenage girls' tumblrs, mostly based out of Nebraska, subreddits for conspiracy theorists focusing entirely on an unremarkable seeming dude who is apparently at the center of the new world order... the internet's weirder than it's ever been.
I second this. That's really intriguing! I'm imagining that there is some random dude out there that somehow became the focus of some nutty conspiranoids and I can't stop laughing.
I used to enjoy visiting StumbleUpon and seeing what kinds of random places I'd end up. Then one day they asked me what kind of content I enjoyed, and wouldn't let me do anything else until I told them. Stopped going after that. I miss the ease of ending up somewhere totally unexpected that it once gave me.
I mostly find the odd places when searching on and for discussions of old stomping grounds. That usually leads me down a long path of links. Sometimes I discover by joining oddly named and sparsely visited IRC rooms. Occasionally great sites are posted to 4chan.
A recent discovery was made when looking for recent references to Temple Of The Screaming Electron. This search led me to two weird corners (potentially NSFW).
1. http://www.popeye-x.com/title123.htm As far as I can tell originally set up by a group of programmers (and I think phreakers, digging through the archives ), based in Texas with a common connection to a niche Austin based radio station. Highly original, deeply buried links, multiple hidden forums.
2. http://nobodytm.com Not even sure how to explain this one! Has a chat room that the owner sometimes frequents with cryptic messages that appear to mean something to other participants.
Deep forum links on weird topics is my goto, but IRC may be something I should get back into.
I kinda miss the web being made of forums, I feel like that's a tradition that's less healthy than it was. Facebook groups or slack channel or Stack Exchange just don't do it for me the same way
Not quite a forum link, but I really couldn't figure out what the purpose of that site was. Some sort of spam/seo seeding operation? Where does the source material come from.
Strange subreddits are good. StumbleUpon isn't useful for much, but permitting tons of categories and going wild with it is a good way to get weird.
Anything that allows chaining is a big help, which is why people get to "the weird part of Youtube" more easily than the weird parts of the general internet. Sometimes you can exploit this by dipping in and out of linkable things (it's like recreating webrings). Try following chains of linked subreddits or tumblr accounts, then popping back out at some odd-looking link they point to.
But honestly, it's hard. I find a lot of 'weird internet' by reading the SlateStarCodex link collections, and otherwise letting other people do the hard work for me.
Sometimes people will deliberately manufacture an experience like this for a creepy story/etc, which can be fun.
Internet mythmaking in general ('creepypasta'/etc) is a fun rabbit hole to go down. Most are mediocre, but a handful of stories are genuinely brilliant:
i feel like a lot of the freewheeling gibsonian stuff is happening on tumblr - it provides a relatively easy way to push content to the internet without overly constraining the form of that content.
The article is totally wrong. The internet is now more than ever a good place for this kind of thing.
> Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore.
Doesn't the whole click-bait "industry" specifically because people are surfing?
What's more, even on social media, things like "Weird Facebook" come into existence. Huge groups form with no clear purpose other than seemingly to be exactly the kind of internet "arcades" that the article is describing.
I'm not sure I agree. I think the whole idea of a flâneur or "surfing" the web is that you choose where you go. There's an illusion of control.
The whole click-bait industry depends on you browsing within walled gardens (facebook, reddit) and being on the conveyor belt of places your attention has to go.
A flâneur or surfer can just go somewhere else. There's only so much physical real estate you can own. There isn't exactly another facebook or reddit to go to...and if there is, BuzzFeed is all over that shit too.
Basically, the internet has driven the minimum cost of advertising/branding down to bit-transmission prices. Anybody basically can afford to throw shit everywhere and see what sticks.
Depends on your circles. Tumblr, like Twitter, is really defined by who you follow. If you follow 'professional', curated blogs where the author is promoting their own content, they will care about SEO and discoverability and they will tag their own posts with topical hashtags.
But most personal blogs don't care about that, they tag their posts with custom, made-up categories or use the tag field as additional meta-commentary. There's a much-reblogged Tumblr post chain [1] that talks about this; ironically the only way I was able to find the post again is because one of the commenters tagged it with topical tags.
So Tumblr is an amalgam of discoverable posts, long chains, and many posts that are completely untagged. If the blog's author has disabled the built-in integration Tumblr has with making search engines aware of posts, a lot of this content can only be found by going directly to the source through a friend-of-a-friend.
[1] (shortened due to NSFW words in url, in deference to those at work) http://bit.ly/2cuwzE0
You can get a similar experience browsing directories of Tor hidden services (I'm sure there are other darknet equivalents). There's a little bit of everything in those lists, including the illicit, inexplicable, and of course, illegal.
The point Morozov didn't make explicit that would have helped his argument: the internet is turning into a perfect Panopticon, a total environment of confinement for control and subjectification as highlighted by Foucault. I first read that for architectural theory in college, and now it only seems to get increasingly vital to understanding everyday culture and identity. When the idea of the web as a terrain for the flâneur to be the main focus, the rival and dominating idea of the web as a terrain of control via total surveillance clarifies which direction the mainstream skews. Sure there are outliers, but emphasizing that to dismiss the wave in the direction of the Digital Panopticon is to miss Morozov's point.
The internet was the place for playfulness and wonder. DeviantArts, Rate Your Music, Geocities were really fun.
Now, the internet is full of BS. Startups are full of BS ("This is a site that spits out whole websites of fake bullshit web companies. Hit "get started" to refresh. http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=243648772317). Reddit is a rare phenomenon because it was founded by Aaron Schwartz and he never got any credit. And I am pretty sure Aaron Schwartz would never go to “Hackathon”, “Entrepreneurial leadership at Stanford”. They are full of BS. No one has a deep passion for truly improving people’s lives. Everything is for efficiency.
Palo Alto becomes a dead place now. There is only one bookstore in Palo Alto area and no students ever visit. Stanford students do not love to learn at all. They are “excellent sheep”.
The dark net is okay and it becomes boring after a while.
...
> However, anyone entertaining such dreams of the Internet as a refuge for the bohemian, the hedonistic and the idiosyncratic probably didn’t know the reasons behind the disappearance of the original flâneur.
If the flâneur is operating incognito ... how the hell can you be sure he is actually gone? Maybe he just upped his flâneurism game and dropped off your flâneuradar.
People do still just surf the web instead of trying to only get stuff done---that's how we get interesting submissions on HN and why we are here to rummage through them.
Twenty years ago I might have surfed the web for fun, but picked up the phone to get stuff done; now I can just use the Internet for most of that latter thing too.