- Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Shutterstock.com
- Would you join a book club with this man?
With every year, the internet becomes more and more boring. It makes sense, of course: the internet is where the money is, and when big money arrives, things get predictable and safe and boring. (See also: Hollywood in the era of globalization, television from the 1960s through the 1990s). Marketing experts and brand managers have quantified the entire internet experience to the point where it’s basically surprise-free. That’s what Wall Street likes; investors hate surprises. This interpretation reflects my biases, I’m sure—I prefer text to videos, and so much of the internet is turning away from text and toward video that it’s not really aimed toward my interests, anymore—but I have yet to find someone who can successfully argue that the internet is a more interesting place now than it was ten years ago. Bigger, yes. Faster, yes. But fun? Surprising? Not so much.
John Herman’s 2015 predictions at The Awl strike me as almost entirely spot-on, especially this one: “Big savvy internet publishers will spend a lot of money posting things directly to social networks that they do not own or control.” He also alludes to “an increasingly television-like internet” and “a social media discourse nightmare” brought on by self-serving explainer sites and niche-filling content farms. This year will bring the refinement of the buzz-fed internet that rose to ubiquity last year and like all processes of corporate refinement, certain important aspects of the human experience will be removed from the equation, to everyone’s detriment. At some point, the customer service aspect of the internet stops being aimed at the users and starts being aimed at the customer service providers. This Fast Company story about the creation of Amazon’s disastrous Fire Phone is a perfect demonstration of this problem: The Fire Phone was created to please Jeff Bezos, not potential customers. For a man who made hundreds of millions of dollars based on the idea that a company lives and dies on its customer service, this is a troubling account. Will Bezos be able to refine his product—Amazon itself—without losing sight of what people want from his product? The future of Seattle rests on the answer to this question.
Speaking of internet giants, I’m interested in the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is starting a book club. It feels old-fashioned, like an attempt by Zuckerberg to push Facebook away from the content farms and toward human discussion. Of course the book Zuckerberg chose, The End of Power by Moisés Naím, seems to serve his pre-established libertarian worldview. He describes it like this:
It’s a book that explores how the world is shifting to give individual people more power that was traditionally only held by large governments, militaries and other organizations. The trend towards giving people more power is one I believe in deeply, and I’m looking forward to reading this book and exploring this in more detail.
Facebook may provide utility, but it doesn’t provide much by way of empowerment. Facebook is about the illusion of empowerment. Really, you’re offering content for free in exchange for a limited amount of communication with friends and family. But that’s a piece for another time; right now, the thing that interests me is that Zuckerberg is trying to return his social network to a more human scale by taking his readers offline, and into a book. Maybe he realizes that the internet is becoming a wasteland, and that it needs to be refreshed with something real from time to time. Maybe this will be the year we all realize the exact same thing.