Post-internetism
A shift in the fabric of culture. Please reach out with any thoughts, critiques, or further reading on Twitter.
The liquidity of our modernity has birthed the playground of culture: the internet. As conceptualised by Zygmunt Bauman, modernity is liquid because of the ‘permanence of change’ seeking ‘an infinity of improvement’. The enabler of our impermanence is software. Allowing us to transcend all of our physical limitations, software enables us to write and rewrite, send and resend, do and redo at no extra cost.
The internet is a polycentric society. It is a modular world for every user, where we are all working off the same database, but discover different centres and then generate different journeys. From luddites to the Extremely Online, we have connected billions of people who have and will never meet, democratised information for anyone with a connection, and created countless online-only industries that have flourished into multibillion dollar businesses.
Culture is created in corners of the internet, with niche internet microcelebrities becoming the pulse of our digital lives. Our consumption has converged into these hyperpersonalised pockets, brought to life through the fragmentation of communities and the advertisements that manufacture our desires. We have become what we consume.
Without the internet to connect us to our in-groups, we would be left wandering aimlessly with a disconnected sense of self where our sense of culture would be too distant from most people we will ever encounter. This is a symptom of internet people, who no longer scroll and scroll just to consume media, rather they scroll to come alive. Personalised distribution has made us antisocial beyond belief. These subcultures are what have amalgamated into our post-internet world.
“Post-Internet does not imply a time “after” the Internet but rather a time “about” the Internet” — Artsy
The idea of post-internet is maybe most akin to post-modern, which was a commentary on modernism that became a movement in itself. We mock, compliment, and iterate on internet culture all the time, and that is a culture: post-internetism.
The pre-internet era was limited by physical distribution, where we had to deliver newspapers to households or stream radio and television to a whole family at once. Now, a media business only needs a website or social media page to exist, and then a couple thousand superfans to become sustainably profitable. We are beginning to see specialisation trump generalisation, with the rise of microinfluencers and the verticalisation of every market. The post-internet era is further catalysed by the ease of creation (enter generative AI), ease of monetisation (enter crypto), and ease of distribution (enter social media).
Media no longer correlates to anything real or tangible. It’s beyond digital-first, it’s digital-only. The internet began by digitising the real world, shrinking the entire world into our screens. The post-internet enlarges the world to as big as one can attempt to fathom. There are no limits online, we create infinities. The physical limitations of our world are a mere nuisance to be bypassed.
Every craze in technology fuels this future vision. We are becoming more and more online, so that ideas, happenings, and relationships happen online before they happen (if they ever end up happening) in the real world. Human interaction is scrunched up into the mediums of texts, tweets, and taglines. By the time a message reaches another receiver, the message is a product of the internet, not an unadulterated thought from someone made of the same matter. Maybe soon, when we come to accept postinternetism is here to stay, it will become the consensus that our physical world is no longer the real world.
Reading List