Two things: one, CB stands for Citizen’s Band. That’s really beautiful in a way. And second, if a bunch of your favorite subreddits go down, Ham Radio is not an effective substitute.
Obviously, when your volunteer workforce routs and turns against you, this is a time for effective leadership. Reddit’s CEO says that this, too shall pass – “this, too” meaning what essentially amounts to a content strike on the platform. Not all the subs agree; a few have opened back up, but there are many who intend to continue indefinitely. One of my favorite nibblins in a leaked letter from Mr. Reddit was his suggestion that they “absolutely must ship what we said we would.” He was referring to the erection of a toll gate on their API, which is why everyone is mad – it was a platform, and they’d like to make it service. I just love the turn of phrase. What they’re “shipping” in this case is a kind of “nega-product,” an unmaking of the existing schema. They’re “launching” an “abortion.” Sometimes I wish I’d never read 1984.
There was a cognitive submunition in this event I found particularly interesting: that people doing Google searches are often just searching Reddit with it, because Google is of fractional utility these days, and Reddit has the operational human minds to pose questions and make sense of the world. Reddit being largely down exposed Google’s concussed utility in a tremendous and striking way.
I was trying to talk to Gabriel about it, and he mostly tolerated me: we’re looking at the end of an era. Maybe eras of various kinds are always ending; Taylor Swift has had several. But last fall we started to hear about companies needing to “get serious about revenue,” and I was like… you need to “get” serious about it? What the fuck debauched state were you living in before? Of course, I know the answer, which is that the zero interest rate money stopped happening. And outfits like Twitter and Reddit that attained primacy on a much better, more useful Internet than we have now are fundamentally unlike what they were, constraining the access that enabled them to have the very reach they do. The Internet has been carved into corporate fiefdoms, fiefdoms most people now see as some kind of natural order. It wasn’t like this.
And, yes: I am fun at parties.
(CW)TB out.
