#network horror

I recently finished reading Jeremy Atherton Li’s Gay Bar, which is a very good, well researched personal and cultural history of its titular topic. In the opening chapter, Lin does a brilliant job of evoking the general vibe of a night where the dark room smelt like “fog machine or nitrites, syrupy lager spilling over thick fists, smoke’s breath, someone’s citrusy cologne, the bleached vinyl seats.” The night is named Brüt; it’s already been established that there’s a rough, almost bullying quality to the interactions. After doing such a terrific job of creating a sense of place, Lin tops it off with the line “it reeked of toxic masculinity,” which did an equally brisk trade in pulling me out of the scene. Why, after creating a sense of toxic masculinity, do you need to turn to the camera, or pull us out of the scene like an artist’s statement next to a painting, and explain it? Why follow the signifier by just straight-up stating the signified, smothering the more complex and alive set of symbols with something much more tidy and much less interesting — something dead?

So the internet broke the other day! Well, not actually the entire internet, but three of the main platforms through which people access its contents: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The worldwide outages were the result of a misconfigured access protocol, but had devastating effects: not just for bored millennials and Mark Zuckerberg's stock price, but for a significant amount of global infrastructure. These platforms are vital platforms for commerce, communication and even public services in many countries which, in itself, is pretty fucked; that a private company's screw-up can have devastating effect on such a wide, varied scale is as good an argument as any for why it shouldn't exist.

The news put in mind of another widely-shared tech-related story from the past month: many current college-age students apparently don't now what files are. It's been shared with, of course, incredulousness and animosity towards generation Z and such. The actual article is much more considered, however, assessing the way in which our mental models of how computers (and the internet) have changed across the past few decades:

"Guarín-Zapata is an organizer. He has an intricate hierarchy of file folders on his computer, and he sorts the photos on his smartphone by category. He was in college in the very early 2000s — he grew up needing to keep papers organized. Now, he thinks of his hard drives like filing cabinets. 'I open a drawer, and inside that drawer, I have another cabinet with more drawers,' he told The Verge. 'Like a nested structure. At the very end, I have a folder or a piece of paper I can access.'

"Guarín-Zapata’s mental model is commonly known as directory structure, the hierarchical system of folders that modern computer operating systems use to arrange files. It’s the idea that a modern computer doesn’t just save a file in an infinite expanse; it saves it in the 'Downloads' folder, the 'Desktop' folder, or the 'Documents' folder, all of which live within 'This PC,' and each of which might have folders nested within them, too. It’s an idea that’s likely intuitive to any computer user who remembers the floppy disk."

This is largely how I think of and organise my own files, inboxes, Google Drive, even the photos saved on my smartphone. I can see also how this is largely outdated, since I grew up with a big boxy desktop PC where you had to know where you saved stuff, bookmarks on AOL browser were a necessity (the painfully slow crawl of the 56k modem meant searching for a page would add another interminable step), and early MP3 players would be impossible to parse were you not obsessive with your organising of albums and playlists. This is a world away from our current tech landscape, with everything mediated through social media, apps and the like.

"Peter Plavchan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, has seen similar behavior from his students and can’t quite wrap his head around it. 'Students have had these computers in my lab; they’ll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized,' he told The Verge, somewhat incredulously. 'I’m kind of an obsessive organizer ... but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that is fundamentally because of a shift in how we access files.'

"It’s possible that the analogy multiple professors pointed to — filing cabinets — is no longer useful since many students...spent their high school years storing documents in the likes of OneDrive and Dropbox rather than in physical spaces. It could also have to do with the other software they’re accustomed to — dominant smartphone apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube all involve pulling content from a vast online sea rather than locating it within a nested hierarchy. 'When I want to scroll over to Snapchat, Twitter, they’re not in any particular order, but I know exactly where they are,' says Vogel, who is a devoted iPhone user. Some of it boils down to muscle memory."

I think this also speaks more broadly to how restricted our thinking around/access to tech and the web are, compared to twenty or even ten years ago. People don't make their own websites, they have social media accounts; if they do build a website, it'll likely be a drag-and-drop Squarespace job, rather than built with code from the ground up. When our laptops or phones give up the ghost, we trade up for a newer model, rather than trying to fix or upgrade what we currently have. In fact, it's often impossible — or at least, will invalidate your warranty — to tinker with these products. It's the idea of products-as-service, rather than something you own and can do whatever you want with, which is prevalent also within film and music (you don't own anything, you stream it for a subscription fee), games, and the platform capitalism model in which in the likes of Uber insisting they're not a company who hires employees; they simply offer a service for drivers to use.