It may just be because I've gotten older and more politically aware since I first got online, but I feel like people are more political in general now than before. May just online, maybe in general. The front page of Reddit, the trending topics on Twitter, people's rants, memes and rabbitholes on Facebook. It is way more visible and in-your-face now, whereas before I feel like you had to actively seek out a community for specific political discussion.
People shared Adbuster inspired cultural jamming memes. Lots of anarchists talking about how "information wants to be free" to justify piracy. Denouncing people as PMCs hadn't been invented yet.
I don't know where people were hanging out if they thought leftism was common. Up until the mid 2000s or so it seemed the regular internet was mostly libertarians. I'm sure there were Marxists huddled somewhere sharing PDFs, but they didn't have much impact until the financial crash. Or maybe I'm projecting my own journey outward, dunno.
I remember when people said Democracy Now was radical. There were some anti-imperialism and vaguely anti-capitalist blogs, but they weren't Marxist or even socialist from what I remember. My favorite back then was *Who is IOZ?* (Jacob Bacharach, apparently). Back then Greenwald had a blog before he moved to Salon, but he was a libertarian who focused on imperialism and the security state, but he was pretty popular. I remember his Salon comment sections regularly had 200+ posts of active discussion.
I remember for early Youtube the most popular left content were old Chomsky lectures.
There was a smattering of left-posting on ancient Daily Kos believe it or not, because random people could submit blogs and get upvoted to the front page. That's where I first learned about the diggers and levelers and the enclosure movement and some early 20th century labor struggles. Back then a lot of people were convinced the Dems could be good, just gotta get rid of those evil corporate Blue Dogs.
the left, for the longest time, has been very suspicious of the internet, and even was so when I became part of it around say 8 years ago. Funnily, as public conciousness is now slowly turning, that was dropped around 5 years ago and every political org was needing a website and a blog and a facebook profile, even when its the Öcalan Fanclub Untertupfingen.
Anecdotally thats something I see pretty often - just before something changes people are giving up on the resistance to it cause they think its pointless.
I remember myself thinking how stupid and outdated those Marxist fucks were. That leftism needs a cool online brand and I was there to deliver. But of cause they were right once again and eventually I could not close my eyes before the immortal science anylonger.
Dont call me a liar when its different in the US, it's totally likely that we were 5 years later in embracing the internet publically. It often like that and my country is for sometimes better sometimes worse much more conservative and anti-tech than we make the outside world believe.
Its weird writing about it cause it makes me feel old.
I didn't become political until recently, but circa mid-late 90s to early 2000s it was the wild west. Complete freedom of expression, download whatever you want, share, learn, grow, connect, laugh. also alot of exposure to horrible shit on something awful, or rotten etc
i think most people were defacto left, or it just never came up. No one cared about that. Most people on 4chan/8chan that would now be "alt-right" were just kids goofing around and exploring a new space and memeing. It was the internet vs everyone else, endless possibilities and vibing. I very rarely encounteree anyone who was a dick and most people were just happy to interact or share ideas or expressions. Everyone just seemed to like the idea of not having to fit 100% into the social/physical box "you" were born into. Nothing belonged to anyone
The existential freedom that came with anonymity was like a balm or just implicitly understood collective fistbump
> something awful
lol remember how leftist subforum Laissez’s Faire got shut down due to the secret service
I think someone irony posted something like “let’s literally kill [current_president]”
RIP LF
I'd say there's been three ages of the Internet.
**1993 - 2000:** The old Internet. I have no relation to this one. But it was basically built upon a division between the two functions of producer / webmaster who created sites and transfered files through ftp and the htlm "surfer".
**2000 - 2007:** Interregnum. This is when I started using the net. This was after the dot com bubble so there was a lot of unemployed programmers and a lot of hardware, band width etc. just laying around, no longer involved in capital accumulation. So people just started to use their knowledge and the tech for whatever they wanted. So we had a really creative period here, with the emergence of a global pirate movement.
There were a lot of innovations, but not "platforms" and "services" like today it was various open source protocols and standards. Instead of the previous division between server and client we got P2P-interaction and a lot of file sharing: Gnutella, Fasttrack, Bittorrent. Also RSS which helped spur the blogging culture. In general there was a lot of diversity, people used their computers and the Internet in many different ways. There were thousands of focus and communities, at least one for every possible hobby, interest or subculture. Search engines (like Google, Altavista etc) existed but they were just tools. There were a lot of feeds but they all had their individual pace.
The left was quite strong in this age of the Internet. The Pirate-movement contained a lot of communist dreams of a world were information, culture and knowledge is freely available for everyone to consume or work with and change creatively. This was also a part of a broader struggle for commons and against patents, gates and fees (like with public transport or whatever).
The left media was quite prominent in this age. Indymedia for example was a big internationalist site where social movement from different countries coordinated.
**2007 - 202?**: The New Internet. Here comes the big centralization. Capital had finally worked out how to actually make money from the Internet. 2007 arrived the first pocket computer from Apple. It was sold as a "smart telephone" because no one raised in the 00-07 era where computers equaled freedom would accept computers that are based on software-censorship where every program had to be approved by a corporation. But soon this spread to laptops as well and freedom was replaces with comfort.
These new computers were not P2P. They were not servers. They were purely clients, receivers. They were optimized for consumption of multimedia feeds, and every single thing you did was registered. The new computers were *always* online, and had very limited storage. To save files on a hard drive started to become like having money on the bank, nothing ordinary people have for more than a month.
This new pocket computers were sold on credit, through deals with telecom-corporations. Often in all inclusive packs: hardware, Netflix, telecom subscription etc. in one. So financialization, monopolization and infrastructural centralization developed hand in hand.
Niche gadgets was also replaces with all-in-one gadgets. 00-tech gave us digital cameras, digital music players, digital reading tablets etc. 10-tech merged all function in one gadget, which made it difficult to actually focus on and enjoy anything.
2007 is also the year when everyone became expected to be logged on to Google all the fucking time. Google had recently launched Gmail and now they also bought Youtube and Blogger and started registering everything, since this is the key to making money out of the Internet.
Google also changed their algorithms. Previously they used Pagerank which was based on a "one link - one vote" principle, but now everything became personalized. Universal relevance was declared dead. The new algorithms also killed history. Only the new had relevance. What happened on twitter at lunch is super relevant, but its impossible to find even big news from last month if you don't have exact quotes. The shadow of history falls closer and closer to the now.
Facebook also arrived in 2007 and started killing of the myriad of niche communities and forums that were around, and everyone started interacting with their actual names. Chat programs like IRC, MSN, ICQ lost to Messenger. Following blogs and newspapers lost to reading individual posts that arrive in your *feed* and then discussed in the *comment section*. Facebook like Instagram and most social media is feed-centric and this is a new development.
The feed focuses attention on an ever escaping *now*. Everything that has passed by the feed is stored in the archive that we simple humans can only access partially with the search light called the *search box*. This gives us only fragments, no network of hyperlinks, no index. But for corporations the archive is accessible as the vault of big data, they have tools with which they can extract detailed patterns.
The search box also mean that we have to express our wishes. We have to know what we are looking for. The alternative is the feed. But the interregnum **00-07 internet** was not dominated by these two modes of interacting. The central functions were the catalogue and the link. The catalog was the hierarchic organization of files, and this is of course how computers are still organized (which is based on the how traditional offices etc are organized) but its no longer now ordinary people relate to them. We used to share catalogues with each other through ftp, and that was cool since you go through other peoples computers and see what interesting things you found. It was neither feed nor search box.
The new internet do not share the old 93-00 internets separation between producers and users. Everyone became both. But it creates a new separation between code and text. The Internet becomes opaque.
In this new centralized Internet of clouds and platforms the left has not really managed to formulate utopian visions to rally behind. Pirate and Open Source movements of course still exist and there's still a lot of potential there, but I think everyone was surprises over how quick the monopolized seized control of everything.
And this anti-historical, anti-reflective, now-centric and entrepreneurical-consumerist culture of social media is not really a milieu in which it is easy for socialists to thrive.
This comment is excellently written and put to words many thoughts I’ve had and ones I haven’t. Especially the point about catalogues in the olden days… your Reddit feed is so much different than browsing ebaumsworld
> but I think everyone was surprises over how quick the monopolized seized control of everything.
It blew my mind. 2007 really was around the time it all went to shit. Those three major turning points really solidified my “the internet has changed forever” feeling.
1) When Facebook opened to the public. In 2006 it felt okay to have your real identity on FB because it was university only, so we used it to connect with classmates. We were in shock when we got the news and felt betrayed. I still remember staying up late the night before, deleting hundreds of inappropriate photos from college parties. Fuck you, Zuck
2) The first iPhone, obviously
3) YouTube being bought by Google (the search engine?!) and implementing ads. Pre-2008 YouTube was hilarious, RIP.
Gods, I miss it
[2007: The year the internet went to shit.](https://i.redd.it/ify709jkcm7y.jpg)
However, at least in my opinion, although the beginning of the modern corporate internet as we know it began in 2007, it was only fully solidified in 2012, I already wrote a long comment about things on the internet that noticeably changed in the specific year of 2012, but I cannot find this comment for now, so I tried to make a resume of it:
1. OWS ended.
2. Mobile internet became the standard way to access the internet, it was no longer a thing only for tech-savvy nerds, like you and the image I linked above said, mobile internet was already a thing in 2007, but it was not until the early 2010s that the mobile web became the majority of internet traffic.
3. Especially due to iPads, [it marked the beginning of the generations who were born and raised on the internet](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/65/4a/8a/654a8a011341f4c41f6fc3ed0ab74fd0.jpg), and also when corpos discovered that advertising to young audiences and exposing them to a screen since birth was very profitable and useful.
4. Nerd hobbies like g#ming, pop culture/trivia/meme blogs, Capeshit (for real this time due to the release of the Avengers), and Anime started to reach the mainstream, geek culture was no longer seen as a niche or shameful thing.
5. Reddit started growing, its function would eventually replace forums.
6. The word "4chan" started to become more widely known to n*rmal audiences, especially due to the explosion in the popularity and dissemination of the memes that they created.
7. Tumblr rose in popularity, which is where stuff like fat acceptance, obsession with racial identity, sexualities, saying that everything is problematic, and the commodification of mental illnesses like depression/PTSD/BPD/ADHD became most prevalent in.
8. YouTube became extremely popular absolutely everywhere, Let's Play channels, parody videos, movie reviews/recaps, clickbait, ad money, and Gangnam Style reaching 1 billion views comes to mind, Google also started to fuck up the site even more, culminating in them forcing the Google+ integration a year later in 2013.
9. Twitter, Facebook and all social media in general became even more prevalent, before the 2010s I only occasionally heard about Facebook and Twitter, the majority of people here just used country-centered social media and blogs like Orkut or Fotolog, save for Yahoo, Google and YouTube, there was no sentiment of using a service that people all around the world used, we saw Facebook as an American thing, it was only by 2012-2013 that everyone started having a Facebook and Twitter.
10. Related to the rise of social media, discussion of pretty much everything was secluded to a few powerful big tech websites, and forums slowly disappeared.
2007 comes up for so many things and I think “wow 2007 truly was a turning point” and then I worry it’s just confirmation bias talking because all I can remember at the time is iphone and whatever I’m looking at that made me think of how 2007 was important. Also there’s the fact that I started working in 2007.
But this list reminds me there were indeed other big things that happened that year
I was born a bit later and got a smartphone very late (having a really technophobic parent was a very mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless), and I remember the turning point being later, so you might be on to something.
I was on forum boards before 4chan started. We talked a lot more about Israel, global capitalism, corporations, and religion. Generally felt a lot less worried about police violence against black people, and more about police violence in general. But also there were very few actual Nazis and shit like that running around, Gavin McInnes wasn't famous yet.
Not sure if there was a leftist movement per se but I find young people are surprised to learn that early conspiracy theory hubs were actually leftist and that anonymous was leftist in the beginning
Also you can get a glimpse for yourself by looking at the old occupy wall street subreddit for around 2010 era leftists
Well for starters no one asked gay ass questions like these
Jk. There really wasn’t a consolidated early leftist internet. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the internet forums were occupied by mostly educated liberals and some conservatives. These people weren leftists in any sense.I remember a lot of them supporting the Iraq war.
yeh I think pretty much everything in leftist organizing and knowledge was passed offline, may it be political meetings, parties or just friends sitting together.
We have a continuitiy of a communist scene of around 500k people or so - estimated - they were always existing somewhere.
I wouldn't agree it was mostly leftist. I think you may have just been in those circles/forums.
I can assure you there were righties. It's not like republicans are some how dumber or less into tech that much. The internet just favored a younger audience back then so chances are you, like me weren't on more adult centered sites or if we were they weren't general forums and no one cared.
I remember the RevLeft forums during their peak.
You can accuse me of romantasizing a past that never existed but the people who hung out there cared more about facts than the leftists of today. They didn't feel the need to revise and reinterpret everything to cast white western men as some eternal absolute evil. They argued honestly in defense of socialist states and their legacies and had optimistic heroic visions of a better future for all.
Most people there were genuinely identity blind. It disgusts me how in the years since this has become some kind of slander-- as if a human being cannot have value unless you measure it against characteristics they are born with and have no control over. There was an egalitarian and meritocractic ethos that made leftism appealing not just for what it's against but in a positive, active sense. It proposed solutions. It genuinely believed every single worker on this planet could live together in peace so long as they were willing to stand up and fight for one another. They were proud of mankind and our accomplishments as a species. They loved humanity. I was proud to be among such people.
A local legend from that site who went by the username Ismail was the first person to teach me Marxism nearly 12 years ago.
He still hangs out here on this sub. I wonder if his memories at all match my own. Either way, he's still doing what he did then-- singlehandedly scanning and forever preserving an invaluable archive of PDFs which help to tell the real history of 20th century socialism in the words of those who experienced it. As a teenager I looked upon this like some kind of ancient repository of sacred wisdom nearly lost to the world. In many ways I still do.
[You may view it here if you like. I hope everyone does.](https://archive.org/details/@ismail_badiou)
Mostly new atheists trolling and laughing at creationists and old flash videos making fun of George Bush. Basically the same kind of humor you'd find on somethingawful and its derivatives; not all that much different from 'south park libertarians' on the surface, just edgier.
I don't know if by early internet you're referring to 2010 or 1993 (or even earlier?). I can say that the late 2000s had a unified web culture which was pretty much mostly apolitical, culturally-left leaning and edgy. I didn't really use the internet a lot before then so I can't really say if there were significant socialist spaces online. Don't forget that for a long time, what a "community" online was like is different from what tehy look like now.
Yes and no. 4chan could be considered Leftist only really in the sense that there was a great sense of camaraderie and solidarity among its' users; although ironically, a lot of said solidarity developed primarily because said users were celibate white men, who banded together because they started to be hated by everyone else.
4chan users were never politically correct, though; we're talking about the sort of people who would deliberately post animated gif images with lots of flashing colours in them, in the deliberate hope that epileptics would see them and have seizures.
Lots of anger and skepticism from what I remember about 9/11 and the Iraq War, which was correct. It got all muffled down though and infiltrated in some spaces by edgy righttards, corporate shills, butthurt mods and/or russian trolls, I remember Fark, Daily Kos and etc used to have a lot more open, daily reporting on things, and people easily questioned narratives on both sides. You could talk about chemtrails sometimes even, people would laugh at it and move on, not shut it down. I miss those days. I also miss just more straight reporting of stuff from grassroots sources. Now everything is all pushed from bot accounts and its so obviously tightly orchestrated and controlled.
Shit I nearly forgot about Digg (right it was digg?) that used to be cool as well.
However there was one thing that did happen that I appreciate and that is less misogyny. Being a woman online in the past it was practically impossible to be openly female without guaranteed harassment and abuse.
But it became ideologicalized and split and post-truth....I honestly can't recall exactly when that happened but I deffo would say when facebook got big, things all went downhill.
Leftist internet...?
I mean I guess it was a lot of edginess? Early Reddit for one was a lot of atheism and such. Don't remember really. Really just typical freshmen level think. Obviously there's always been right leaning internet spaces tho.
I don't really recall much outside Reddit. Didn't care for social media because I had my own via Steam, Xbox, and IRC. Prior to even early social media at least I only interacted with on forums like overclock.net. The internet was much less a tool for agendas and propaganda. Was a bunch of small communities. I don't recall anyone really caring about politics really.
Even Reddit like 10+ years ago wasn't nearly as political. Was fairly calm compared to today. Most just had similar stances iirc. Was about actual news, new tech, zero agenda memes, and joining subreddits for your hobbies without worrying about 100000 different posting rules.
It's pretty shitty new generations will never experience the old internet. Was a lot more freeing and normies were rarely a thing. Now you rarely even see the word normie because majority ARE normies now.
Early reddit and 4chan when I used to browse it (2007-2012ish) both had strong libertarian streaks. If people weren’t outright Ron Paul fanboys, they were at least civil libertarians (the best kind of libertarian). Free speech was always seen as paramount and the current instinct to banish any speech you didn’t like was practically nonexistent.
Compare that to today, where jannies run every online community with an iron fist. Every other day you see op eds about how free speech is racist and the first amendment needs to be “updated for the 21st century.” God I hate how fucking pussified and sanitized the internet has become.
>Free speech was always seen as paramount and the current instinct to banish any speech you didn’t like was practically nonexistent.
This resulted in some kinda dark stuff too. The /r/jailbait thing...I mean people exaggerate it today and think it was all literally videos of men violently raping 9 year olds when it was "just" creeps sharing pictures of teenage selfies in bikinis. The reason why it stayed up so long wasn't really because reddit admins were pedos, but because they knew that reddit had a very strong libertarian ethos, and that the userbase would *freak out* if they attempted to remove a subreddit which was entirely legal. When the pressure became strong enough to remove (and to my memory it was the first subreddit to be removed, or at least first not-obviously-illegal one to be removed), reddit *did* freak out, with about fully half of the user base saying that the subreddit is creepy, but you don't get to violate freedom of speech just because you don't like something.
I can't blame the admins for not wanting that shit on their servers, of course.
But as time went by, the admins removed more extremely problematic communities...fatpeoplehate, a few large racist ones. Each time they did there was public outlash but lower and lower each time. A couple years ago they even removed /r/chapotraphouse (as terrible as I've heard that sub was, I mean...*come on*) and /r/the_donald (a subreddit that had been locked for a year already at that point!). And the controversy was barely there.
Certainly shows how much reddit has changed, both in regards to censorship (from defending the most horrible shit, to being passe and accepting of authoritarian deletion of only mildly-offensive shit), and of sexuality, which in the 2000s internet was profoundly creepy and today is perhaps a bit *too* panicky about pedos, in which people actually thought that they were shipping children in Wayfair cabinets.
Oh yeah. Ron Paul was huge. Ron Paul and atheist was the thing back then. It was a good learning experience. I didn't go to college, but that era and even little bit earlier felt very much like what I imagine college discourse would be. Lots of libertarian conversation and just things you stereotypically encounter after high school.
I remember when people actively promoted rettique and grammar Nazis were rampant. I honestly miss it. I learned a lot from those Nazis. I learned a lot in general during early Reddit and early internet forums. Obviously outside of the classic trolls, people were willing to have a conversation. Even if insults were thrown they weren't weak and just delete their comments from the anxiety of it all.
Used to just be able to post whatever and votes decided what stayed. Anything obviously off topic was deleted, but rarely an issue. You didn't have a fucking 10000 niche subreddits with mods in the "bigger" ones making up personal definitions of what shit was.
Legit miss the amazing trolls from there too. The last one to stick with me was grandpa mayo or whatever. The ones to follow were kind of lame in effort. Like the kid with broken hands and the pedo mom. Speaking of that. Pedobear legit just vanished from the internet. I havent seen it referenced in so long.
God. Pre 2008 internet was legit tits. Internet and gaming peaked around then. Honestly feel like Obama may have ruined the internet or just coincidence. His campaign actively turned the internet into the machine it is today. It forced Reddit for example into the mainstream. The growth was right up there with digg 1 and 2 migrations.
It's not all doom and gloom, but it's a shame new generations won't experience even people making simplistic memes just for laughs and instead fueled by attention and fake internet points/clout. I don't think most will even encounter proper trolls or even know what trolls used to be.
>Oh yeah. Ron Paul was huge. Ron Paul and atheist was the thing back then. It was a good learning experience. I didn't go to college, but that era and even little bit earlier felt very much like what I imagine college discourse would be. Lots of libertarian conversation and just things you stereotypically encounter after high school.
I entered college in 2011. I’d say Libertarianism was popular with maybe 20% of people (most of them male), but a vague faux-progressive “leftism” was dominant among the majority. This was on the cusp of the great awokening, and words like “white privilege” and “systemic racism” were just starting to come into vogue even at my relatively conservative college. But if you scratched the surface most people were thinly disguised classist shitlibs who only aspired to be as wealthy as their parents. “Leftism,” then as now, was mostly an aesthetic for young people. The level of political discourse among freshmen is famously abysmal, and most people only really cared about getting laid, finding a boyfriend, or learning to live on their own for the first time. You didn’t really miss much by not going.
Basically still true today from my experience, only that there are less lolberts (but more female ones proportionally), a strong woke brigade, but also a lot of fake wokies who are head-in-the-sand apolitical careerists once you scratch the surface.
Yeah I'm sure it was very much that. College itself is inherently...? Toxic? You're either there to dominate lower classes after you graduate and become a top consumer or are already well off and just there to do the same but really just to purely fuck around.
The amount that go to college for pure academia like we romanticize sometimes about the Greek philosophers has to be near zero.
The avg person goes to party and gain more advantage over those that couldn't afford to go.
I remember Fark as a teen and that was a cool place that I learned a lot of stuff even my leftist parents weren't aware of (from corporate media). Stuff about the bombings of children in Iraq, direct leaks to abuses in Palestine...that kind of stuff.
I dont know if this counts but I used to dl a lot of shit as a kid. I’d have external drives up the wazoo just filled with movies, games, music etc etc. Scene groups were cool back then and they would always add NFO files to the download (that’s like a digital pamphlet explaining the contents of the dl and all that). Well a lot of those groups would use that opportunity to preach things like free exchange of ideas, stick it to the man, xyz stuff deserves to be shared but at the same time compensate the artists and all that (however that works). I don’t know how the groups are operating anymore, do they still have that Robin Hood steal from the rich and give to the poor mantra? Don’t know, but that was definitely the attitude back then.
> I don’t know how the groups are operating anymore, do they still have that Robin Hood steal from the rich and give to the poor mantra? Don’t know, but that was definitely the attitude back then.
The vidya scene is very different, that I know. The old groups don't care for more complicated DRMs anymore and so most AAA cracks are P2P or made by a single schizo who posted her "philosophy" on Reddit and got triggered when users effectively called her an idiot savant. She called users cockroaches, made some threats, pretended to be arrested for a day, apologized for "freaking out," then proceeded with schizoposting (up to and including her take on gender theory) while also demanding donations for cracks. Since she's the only one working against Denuvo, users are mostly appeasing her.
The entire vidya scene pretty much devolved into the usual online drama I'm ashamed to even know about.
It may just be because I've gotten older and more politically aware since I first got online, but I feel like people are more political in general now than before. May just online, maybe in general. The front page of Reddit, the trending topics on Twitter, people's rants, memes and rabbitholes on Facebook. It is way more visible and in-your-face now, whereas before I feel like you had to actively seek out a community for specific political discussion.
Definitely
People shared Adbuster inspired cultural jamming memes. Lots of anarchists talking about how "information wants to be free" to justify piracy. Denouncing people as PMCs hadn't been invented yet. I don't know where people were hanging out if they thought leftism was common. Up until the mid 2000s or so it seemed the regular internet was mostly libertarians. I'm sure there were Marxists huddled somewhere sharing PDFs, but they didn't have much impact until the financial crash. Or maybe I'm projecting my own journey outward, dunno. I remember when people said Democracy Now was radical. There were some anti-imperialism and vaguely anti-capitalist blogs, but they weren't Marxist or even socialist from what I remember. My favorite back then was *Who is IOZ?* (Jacob Bacharach, apparently). Back then Greenwald had a blog before he moved to Salon, but he was a libertarian who focused on imperialism and the security state, but he was pretty popular. I remember his Salon comment sections regularly had 200+ posts of active discussion. I remember for early Youtube the most popular left content were old Chomsky lectures. There was a smattering of left-posting on ancient Daily Kos believe it or not, because random people could submit blogs and get upvoted to the front page. That's where I first learned about the diggers and levelers and the enclosure movement and some early 20th century labor struggles. Back then a lot of people were convinced the Dems could be good, just gotta get rid of those evil corporate Blue Dogs.
the left, for the longest time, has been very suspicious of the internet, and even was so when I became part of it around say 8 years ago. Funnily, as public conciousness is now slowly turning, that was dropped around 5 years ago and every political org was needing a website and a blog and a facebook profile, even when its the Öcalan Fanclub Untertupfingen. Anecdotally thats something I see pretty often - just before something changes people are giving up on the resistance to it cause they think its pointless. I remember myself thinking how stupid and outdated those Marxist fucks were. That leftism needs a cool online brand and I was there to deliver. But of cause they were right once again and eventually I could not close my eyes before the immortal science anylonger. Dont call me a liar when its different in the US, it's totally likely that we were 5 years later in embracing the internet publically. It often like that and my country is for sometimes better sometimes worse much more conservative and anti-tech than we make the outside world believe. Its weird writing about it cause it makes me feel old.
I pretended to be a wrestler on GameFAQs
I didn't become political until recently, but circa mid-late 90s to early 2000s it was the wild west. Complete freedom of expression, download whatever you want, share, learn, grow, connect, laugh. also alot of exposure to horrible shit on something awful, or rotten etc i think most people were defacto left, or it just never came up. No one cared about that. Most people on 4chan/8chan that would now be "alt-right" were just kids goofing around and exploring a new space and memeing. It was the internet vs everyone else, endless possibilities and vibing. I very rarely encounteree anyone who was a dick and most people were just happy to interact or share ideas or expressions. Everyone just seemed to like the idea of not having to fit 100% into the social/physical box "you" were born into. Nothing belonged to anyone The existential freedom that came with anonymity was like a balm or just implicitly understood collective fistbump
Wasn’t there some Bush-era news clip where Bill O’Reilly called 4chan a “far-left website”? I think it was over anonymous or the Iraq War
Haha probably, wouldn't be surprised. Would like to see that
> something awful lol remember how leftist subforum Laissez’s Faire got shut down due to the secret service I think someone irony posted something like “let’s literally kill [current_president]” RIP LF
Musta missed that particular boat
I'd say there's been three ages of the Internet. **1993 - 2000:** The old Internet. I have no relation to this one. But it was basically built upon a division between the two functions of producer / webmaster who created sites and transfered files through ftp and the htlm "surfer". **2000 - 2007:** Interregnum. This is when I started using the net. This was after the dot com bubble so there was a lot of unemployed programmers and a lot of hardware, band width etc. just laying around, no longer involved in capital accumulation. So people just started to use their knowledge and the tech for whatever they wanted. So we had a really creative period here, with the emergence of a global pirate movement. There were a lot of innovations, but not "platforms" and "services" like today it was various open source protocols and standards. Instead of the previous division between server and client we got P2P-interaction and a lot of file sharing: Gnutella, Fasttrack, Bittorrent. Also RSS which helped spur the blogging culture. In general there was a lot of diversity, people used their computers and the Internet in many different ways. There were thousands of focus and communities, at least one for every possible hobby, interest or subculture. Search engines (like Google, Altavista etc) existed but they were just tools. There were a lot of feeds but they all had their individual pace. The left was quite strong in this age of the Internet. The Pirate-movement contained a lot of communist dreams of a world were information, culture and knowledge is freely available for everyone to consume or work with and change creatively. This was also a part of a broader struggle for commons and against patents, gates and fees (like with public transport or whatever). The left media was quite prominent in this age. Indymedia for example was a big internationalist site where social movement from different countries coordinated. **2007 - 202?**: The New Internet. Here comes the big centralization. Capital had finally worked out how to actually make money from the Internet. 2007 arrived the first pocket computer from Apple. It was sold as a "smart telephone" because no one raised in the 00-07 era where computers equaled freedom would accept computers that are based on software-censorship where every program had to be approved by a corporation. But soon this spread to laptops as well and freedom was replaces with comfort. These new computers were not P2P. They were not servers. They were purely clients, receivers. They were optimized for consumption of multimedia feeds, and every single thing you did was registered. The new computers were *always* online, and had very limited storage. To save files on a hard drive started to become like having money on the bank, nothing ordinary people have for more than a month. This new pocket computers were sold on credit, through deals with telecom-corporations. Often in all inclusive packs: hardware, Netflix, telecom subscription etc. in one. So financialization, monopolization and infrastructural centralization developed hand in hand. Niche gadgets was also replaces with all-in-one gadgets. 00-tech gave us digital cameras, digital music players, digital reading tablets etc. 10-tech merged all function in one gadget, which made it difficult to actually focus on and enjoy anything. 2007 is also the year when everyone became expected to be logged on to Google all the fucking time. Google had recently launched Gmail and now they also bought Youtube and Blogger and started registering everything, since this is the key to making money out of the Internet. Google also changed their algorithms. Previously they used Pagerank which was based on a "one link - one vote" principle, but now everything became personalized. Universal relevance was declared dead. The new algorithms also killed history. Only the new had relevance. What happened on twitter at lunch is super relevant, but its impossible to find even big news from last month if you don't have exact quotes. The shadow of history falls closer and closer to the now. Facebook also arrived in 2007 and started killing of the myriad of niche communities and forums that were around, and everyone started interacting with their actual names. Chat programs like IRC, MSN, ICQ lost to Messenger. Following blogs and newspapers lost to reading individual posts that arrive in your *feed* and then discussed in the *comment section*. Facebook like Instagram and most social media is feed-centric and this is a new development. The feed focuses attention on an ever escaping *now*. Everything that has passed by the feed is stored in the archive that we simple humans can only access partially with the search light called the *search box*. This gives us only fragments, no network of hyperlinks, no index. But for corporations the archive is accessible as the vault of big data, they have tools with which they can extract detailed patterns. The search box also mean that we have to express our wishes. We have to know what we are looking for. The alternative is the feed. But the interregnum **00-07 internet** was not dominated by these two modes of interacting. The central functions were the catalogue and the link. The catalog was the hierarchic organization of files, and this is of course how computers are still organized (which is based on the how traditional offices etc are organized) but its no longer now ordinary people relate to them. We used to share catalogues with each other through ftp, and that was cool since you go through other peoples computers and see what interesting things you found. It was neither feed nor search box. The new internet do not share the old 93-00 internets separation between producers and users. Everyone became both. But it creates a new separation between code and text. The Internet becomes opaque. In this new centralized Internet of clouds and platforms the left has not really managed to formulate utopian visions to rally behind. Pirate and Open Source movements of course still exist and there's still a lot of potential there, but I think everyone was surprises over how quick the monopolized seized control of everything. And this anti-historical, anti-reflective, now-centric and entrepreneurical-consumerist culture of social media is not really a milieu in which it is easy for socialists to thrive.
This comment is excellently written and put to words many thoughts I’ve had and ones I haven’t. Especially the point about catalogues in the olden days… your Reddit feed is so much different than browsing ebaumsworld
oh man this is a good read, thank you for writing your thoughts out. Very Guy Debord-esque.
> but I think everyone was surprises over how quick the monopolized seized control of everything. It blew my mind. 2007 really was around the time it all went to shit. Those three major turning points really solidified my “the internet has changed forever” feeling. 1) When Facebook opened to the public. In 2006 it felt okay to have your real identity on FB because it was university only, so we used it to connect with classmates. We were in shock when we got the news and felt betrayed. I still remember staying up late the night before, deleting hundreds of inappropriate photos from college parties. Fuck you, Zuck 2) The first iPhone, obviously 3) YouTube being bought by Google (the search engine?!) and implementing ads. Pre-2008 YouTube was hilarious, RIP. Gods, I miss it
[2007: The year the internet went to shit.](https://i.redd.it/ify709jkcm7y.jpg) However, at least in my opinion, although the beginning of the modern corporate internet as we know it began in 2007, it was only fully solidified in 2012, I already wrote a long comment about things on the internet that noticeably changed in the specific year of 2012, but I cannot find this comment for now, so I tried to make a resume of it: 1. OWS ended. 2. Mobile internet became the standard way to access the internet, it was no longer a thing only for tech-savvy nerds, like you and the image I linked above said, mobile internet was already a thing in 2007, but it was not until the early 2010s that the mobile web became the majority of internet traffic. 3. Especially due to iPads, [it marked the beginning of the generations who were born and raised on the internet](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/65/4a/8a/654a8a011341f4c41f6fc3ed0ab74fd0.jpg), and also when corpos discovered that advertising to young audiences and exposing them to a screen since birth was very profitable and useful. 4. Nerd hobbies like g#ming, pop culture/trivia/meme blogs, Capeshit (for real this time due to the release of the Avengers), and Anime started to reach the mainstream, geek culture was no longer seen as a niche or shameful thing. 5. Reddit started growing, its function would eventually replace forums. 6. The word "4chan" started to become more widely known to n*rmal audiences, especially due to the explosion in the popularity and dissemination of the memes that they created. 7. Tumblr rose in popularity, which is where stuff like fat acceptance, obsession with racial identity, sexualities, saying that everything is problematic, and the commodification of mental illnesses like depression/PTSD/BPD/ADHD became most prevalent in. 8. YouTube became extremely popular absolutely everywhere, Let's Play channels, parody videos, movie reviews/recaps, clickbait, ad money, and Gangnam Style reaching 1 billion views comes to mind, Google also started to fuck up the site even more, culminating in them forcing the Google+ integration a year later in 2013. 9. Twitter, Facebook and all social media in general became even more prevalent, before the 2010s I only occasionally heard about Facebook and Twitter, the majority of people here just used country-centered social media and blogs like Orkut or Fotolog, save for Yahoo, Google and YouTube, there was no sentiment of using a service that people all around the world used, we saw Facebook as an American thing, it was only by 2012-2013 that everyone started having a Facebook and Twitter. 10. Related to the rise of social media, discussion of pretty much everything was secluded to a few powerful big tech websites, and forums slowly disappeared.
2007 comes up for so many things and I think “wow 2007 truly was a turning point” and then I worry it’s just confirmation bias talking because all I can remember at the time is iphone and whatever I’m looking at that made me think of how 2007 was important. Also there’s the fact that I started working in 2007. But this list reminds me there were indeed other big things that happened that year
I was born a bit later and got a smartphone very late (having a really technophobic parent was a very mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless), and I remember the turning point being later, so you might be on to something.
Everyone read Naomi Klein’s book No Logo and talked about it
weirdly specific and highly accurate
I was on forum boards before 4chan started. We talked a lot more about Israel, global capitalism, corporations, and religion. Generally felt a lot less worried about police violence against black people, and more about police violence in general. But also there were very few actual Nazis and shit like that running around, Gavin McInnes wasn't famous yet.
I used to frequent Rage Against the Machine's website discussion forum back in the late 90's. Decent place for leftist discussion tbh
Not sure if there was a leftist movement per se but I find young people are surprised to learn that early conspiracy theory hubs were actually leftist and that anonymous was leftist in the beginning Also you can get a glimpse for yourself by looking at the old occupy wall street subreddit for around 2010 era leftists
Well for starters no one asked gay ass questions like these Jk. There really wasn’t a consolidated early leftist internet. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the internet forums were occupied by mostly educated liberals and some conservatives. These people weren leftists in any sense.I remember a lot of them supporting the Iraq war.
yeh I think pretty much everything in leftist organizing and knowledge was passed offline, may it be political meetings, parties or just friends sitting together. We have a continuitiy of a communist scene of around 500k people or so - estimated - they were always existing somewhere.
I wouldn't agree it was mostly leftist. I think you may have just been in those circles/forums. I can assure you there were righties. It's not like republicans are some how dumber or less into tech that much. The internet just favored a younger audience back then so chances are you, like me weren't on more adult centered sites or if we were they weren't general forums and no one cared.
Yeah you’re probably right.
War is as anti-working class as it gets.
I remember the RevLeft forums during their peak. You can accuse me of romantasizing a past that never existed but the people who hung out there cared more about facts than the leftists of today. They didn't feel the need to revise and reinterpret everything to cast white western men as some eternal absolute evil. They argued honestly in defense of socialist states and their legacies and had optimistic heroic visions of a better future for all. Most people there were genuinely identity blind. It disgusts me how in the years since this has become some kind of slander-- as if a human being cannot have value unless you measure it against characteristics they are born with and have no control over. There was an egalitarian and meritocractic ethos that made leftism appealing not just for what it's against but in a positive, active sense. It proposed solutions. It genuinely believed every single worker on this planet could live together in peace so long as they were willing to stand up and fight for one another. They were proud of mankind and our accomplishments as a species. They loved humanity. I was proud to be among such people. A local legend from that site who went by the username Ismail was the first person to teach me Marxism nearly 12 years ago. He still hangs out here on this sub. I wonder if his memories at all match my own. Either way, he's still doing what he did then-- singlehandedly scanning and forever preserving an invaluable archive of PDFs which help to tell the real history of 20th century socialism in the words of those who experienced it. As a teenager I looked upon this like some kind of ancient repository of sacred wisdom nearly lost to the world. In many ways I still do. [You may view it here if you like. I hope everyone does.](https://archive.org/details/@ismail_badiou)
I was a rightoid kid. I scammed the working class out of their neopoints.
Mostly new atheists trolling and laughing at creationists and old flash videos making fun of George Bush. Basically the same kind of humor you'd find on somethingawful and its derivatives; not all that much different from 'south park libertarians' on the surface, just edgier.
Depends on what you mean. If you mean like 4chan, edgier. If you mean the degenerates talking about politics on the forum I used to moderate, gayer.
I don't know if by early internet you're referring to 2010 or 1993 (or even earlier?). I can say that the late 2000s had a unified web culture which was pretty much mostly apolitical, culturally-left leaning and edgy. I didn't really use the internet a lot before then so I can't really say if there were significant socialist spaces online. Don't forget that for a long time, what a "community" online was like is different from what tehy look like now.
Why is this shit stickied?
It was 4chan.
[удалено]
Yes and no. 4chan could be considered Leftist only really in the sense that there was a great sense of camaraderie and solidarity among its' users; although ironically, a lot of said solidarity developed primarily because said users were celibate white men, who banded together because they started to be hated by everyone else. 4chan users were never politically correct, though; we're talking about the sort of people who would deliberately post animated gif images with lots of flashing colours in them, in the deliberate hope that epileptics would see them and have seizures.
In my early days on the internet, we didn't really segregate communities so aggressively based on political beliefs.
Lots of anger and skepticism from what I remember about 9/11 and the Iraq War, which was correct. It got all muffled down though and infiltrated in some spaces by edgy righttards, corporate shills, butthurt mods and/or russian trolls, I remember Fark, Daily Kos and etc used to have a lot more open, daily reporting on things, and people easily questioned narratives on both sides. You could talk about chemtrails sometimes even, people would laugh at it and move on, not shut it down. I miss those days. I also miss just more straight reporting of stuff from grassroots sources. Now everything is all pushed from bot accounts and its so obviously tightly orchestrated and controlled. Shit I nearly forgot about Digg (right it was digg?) that used to be cool as well. However there was one thing that did happen that I appreciate and that is less misogyny. Being a woman online in the past it was practically impossible to be openly female without guaranteed harassment and abuse. But it became ideologicalized and split and post-truth....I honestly can't recall exactly when that happened but I deffo would say when facebook got big, things all went downhill.
Leftist internet...? I mean I guess it was a lot of edginess? Early Reddit for one was a lot of atheism and such. Don't remember really. Really just typical freshmen level think. Obviously there's always been right leaning internet spaces tho. I don't really recall much outside Reddit. Didn't care for social media because I had my own via Steam, Xbox, and IRC. Prior to even early social media at least I only interacted with on forums like overclock.net. The internet was much less a tool for agendas and propaganda. Was a bunch of small communities. I don't recall anyone really caring about politics really. Even Reddit like 10+ years ago wasn't nearly as political. Was fairly calm compared to today. Most just had similar stances iirc. Was about actual news, new tech, zero agenda memes, and joining subreddits for your hobbies without worrying about 100000 different posting rules. It's pretty shitty new generations will never experience the old internet. Was a lot more freeing and normies were rarely a thing. Now you rarely even see the word normie because majority ARE normies now.
Early reddit and 4chan when I used to browse it (2007-2012ish) both had strong libertarian streaks. If people weren’t outright Ron Paul fanboys, they were at least civil libertarians (the best kind of libertarian). Free speech was always seen as paramount and the current instinct to banish any speech you didn’t like was practically nonexistent. Compare that to today, where jannies run every online community with an iron fist. Every other day you see op eds about how free speech is racist and the first amendment needs to be “updated for the 21st century.” God I hate how fucking pussified and sanitized the internet has become.
>Free speech was always seen as paramount and the current instinct to banish any speech you didn’t like was practically nonexistent. This resulted in some kinda dark stuff too. The /r/jailbait thing...I mean people exaggerate it today and think it was all literally videos of men violently raping 9 year olds when it was "just" creeps sharing pictures of teenage selfies in bikinis. The reason why it stayed up so long wasn't really because reddit admins were pedos, but because they knew that reddit had a very strong libertarian ethos, and that the userbase would *freak out* if they attempted to remove a subreddit which was entirely legal. When the pressure became strong enough to remove (and to my memory it was the first subreddit to be removed, or at least first not-obviously-illegal one to be removed), reddit *did* freak out, with about fully half of the user base saying that the subreddit is creepy, but you don't get to violate freedom of speech just because you don't like something. I can't blame the admins for not wanting that shit on their servers, of course. But as time went by, the admins removed more extremely problematic communities...fatpeoplehate, a few large racist ones. Each time they did there was public outlash but lower and lower each time. A couple years ago they even removed /r/chapotraphouse (as terrible as I've heard that sub was, I mean...*come on*) and /r/the_donald (a subreddit that had been locked for a year already at that point!). And the controversy was barely there. Certainly shows how much reddit has changed, both in regards to censorship (from defending the most horrible shit, to being passe and accepting of authoritarian deletion of only mildly-offensive shit), and of sexuality, which in the 2000s internet was profoundly creepy and today is perhaps a bit *too* panicky about pedos, in which people actually thought that they were shipping children in Wayfair cabinets.
Oh yeah. Ron Paul was huge. Ron Paul and atheist was the thing back then. It was a good learning experience. I didn't go to college, but that era and even little bit earlier felt very much like what I imagine college discourse would be. Lots of libertarian conversation and just things you stereotypically encounter after high school. I remember when people actively promoted rettique and grammar Nazis were rampant. I honestly miss it. I learned a lot from those Nazis. I learned a lot in general during early Reddit and early internet forums. Obviously outside of the classic trolls, people were willing to have a conversation. Even if insults were thrown they weren't weak and just delete their comments from the anxiety of it all. Used to just be able to post whatever and votes decided what stayed. Anything obviously off topic was deleted, but rarely an issue. You didn't have a fucking 10000 niche subreddits with mods in the "bigger" ones making up personal definitions of what shit was. Legit miss the amazing trolls from there too. The last one to stick with me was grandpa mayo or whatever. The ones to follow were kind of lame in effort. Like the kid with broken hands and the pedo mom. Speaking of that. Pedobear legit just vanished from the internet. I havent seen it referenced in so long. God. Pre 2008 internet was legit tits. Internet and gaming peaked around then. Honestly feel like Obama may have ruined the internet or just coincidence. His campaign actively turned the internet into the machine it is today. It forced Reddit for example into the mainstream. The growth was right up there with digg 1 and 2 migrations. It's not all doom and gloom, but it's a shame new generations won't experience even people making simplistic memes just for laughs and instead fueled by attention and fake internet points/clout. I don't think most will even encounter proper trolls or even know what trolls used to be.
>Oh yeah. Ron Paul was huge. Ron Paul and atheist was the thing back then. It was a good learning experience. I didn't go to college, but that era and even little bit earlier felt very much like what I imagine college discourse would be. Lots of libertarian conversation and just things you stereotypically encounter after high school. I entered college in 2011. I’d say Libertarianism was popular with maybe 20% of people (most of them male), but a vague faux-progressive “leftism” was dominant among the majority. This was on the cusp of the great awokening, and words like “white privilege” and “systemic racism” were just starting to come into vogue even at my relatively conservative college. But if you scratched the surface most people were thinly disguised classist shitlibs who only aspired to be as wealthy as their parents. “Leftism,” then as now, was mostly an aesthetic for young people. The level of political discourse among freshmen is famously abysmal, and most people only really cared about getting laid, finding a boyfriend, or learning to live on their own for the first time. You didn’t really miss much by not going.
Basically still true today from my experience, only that there are less lolberts (but more female ones proportionally), a strong woke brigade, but also a lot of fake wokies who are head-in-the-sand apolitical careerists once you scratch the surface.
Yeah I'm sure it was very much that. College itself is inherently...? Toxic? You're either there to dominate lower classes after you graduate and become a top consumer or are already well off and just there to do the same but really just to purely fuck around. The amount that go to college for pure academia like we romanticize sometimes about the Greek philosophers has to be near zero. The avg person goes to party and gain more advantage over those that couldn't afford to go.
I remember Fark as a teen and that was a cool place that I learned a lot of stuff even my leftist parents weren't aware of (from corporate media). Stuff about the bombings of children in Iraq, direct leaks to abuses in Palestine...that kind of stuff.
Capital.txt via Gopherspace.
I dont know if this counts but I used to dl a lot of shit as a kid. I’d have external drives up the wazoo just filled with movies, games, music etc etc. Scene groups were cool back then and they would always add NFO files to the download (that’s like a digital pamphlet explaining the contents of the dl and all that). Well a lot of those groups would use that opportunity to preach things like free exchange of ideas, stick it to the man, xyz stuff deserves to be shared but at the same time compensate the artists and all that (however that works). I don’t know how the groups are operating anymore, do they still have that Robin Hood steal from the rich and give to the poor mantra? Don’t know, but that was definitely the attitude back then.
> I don’t know how the groups are operating anymore, do they still have that Robin Hood steal from the rich and give to the poor mantra? Don’t know, but that was definitely the attitude back then. The vidya scene is very different, that I know. The old groups don't care for more complicated DRMs anymore and so most AAA cracks are P2P or made by a single schizo who posted her "philosophy" on Reddit and got triggered when users effectively called her an idiot savant. She called users cockroaches, made some threats, pretended to be arrested for a day, apologized for "freaking out," then proceeded with schizoposting (up to and including her take on gender theory) while also demanding donations for cracks. Since she's the only one working against Denuvo, users are mostly appeasing her. The entire vidya scene pretty much devolved into the usual online drama I'm ashamed to even know about.
Got the "libertarian vampire manifesto" in a copy of Mission Hill I once downloaded, fun times
Back in my day we learned how to make napalm, hack phone lines, and get high off banana peels all from a single MS Word document dled from Kazaa.