The internet’s promise of niche escape collapsed into a mass culture of short-form content

Evidence

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund famously lamented, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Yet those 140 characters—and the rise of short-form content—became powerful vectors for a new kind of culture: fleeting entertainment, get-rich-quick schemes, and venomous propaganda. By 2010, digital advocate Douglas Rushkoff noted that Boing Boing, once a defining voice of internet culture, had instead become its “counterculture.” A decade later, it was even more marginal than that. Nearly everyone had flocked to the internet on the promise of circumventing the particular norms they disliked—now including the ones we once considered essential to a functional society. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 522

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘omnivore monoculture’ thesis — what was supposed to be the great escape from cultural conformity became its own totalizing culture. — connects to: The internet’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34; The internet’s many-to-many ideal collapsed into a many-to-one structure — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 175; Early internet use felt like entering a separate fantasy world under a made-up name — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 984 (+2 more)
• SEED: The Thiel line supports the counter-case the reader wants: the era’s signature might be exactly the 140-character short-form omnivory he dismisses.