26th May 2019

Post with 104 notes

Your Granddad On The Internet

I’ve been thinking, as I always am, about the 90s and how we got here from there

And one thing I thought about was the figure we used to have of Your Granddad On The Internet - who would include you and all your brothers and sisters and parents on long e-mail FWD: chains about things that were transparently false on their face, frequently conservative-themed, frequently in ALL CAPS

Because apparently such a critical mass of people on the internet had that exact experience with their exact grandfather that it was a trope. Which brings up two points:

1) “People circulating viral conservative misinformation to their family and friends on the internet” is not a phenomenon of social media, it was there well before

2) Though these people were on the internet, ubiquitous on the internet even, they weren’t of the internet. Little or none of it was made for them and there was a hegemonic Internet Culture that recognized them as outside it.

So what was really going on? Well, let’s try to define the issue by subtraction.

It wasn’t just that he was a granddad - there were STEM professor wizards who’d been on USENET since the early ‘80s, or grey ponytail hippies from The WELL or whatever, and not only were they part of The True Internet, they were its founders.

It wasn’t just that he was out of it, on a tech or social level. Maybe your dad was wasting your inheritance chasing his brilliant day trading hunches, maybe your mom was going on Focus on the Family forums to complain about TV shows treating homosexuality as just another way to live. Probably they were both Eternal September AOLers who would ask you troubleshooting questions revealing an astounding ignorance of how computers work and somehow expect a useful answer that respected that absurd model.

But if they weren’t part of The True Internet they weren’t really rogues against it, at some level they got how you were supposed to interact with the internet - you found the site or community that corresponded to your interest and pursued it there. If anything their posts and e-mails too formally followed letter-writing structure, and they may have made dumb or tautological arguments in support of their points but they had the sense they were supposed to make arguments.

It wasn’t just that he was obnoxious - the notion of the “troll” dates to USENET at least, as someone who says things to get a rise out of people, or to bait them into wasting time rebutting something. To “own” them, basically. And annoying or not, this was accepted as part of what the Internet is, one of the signal features of its culture, really. But even when you weren’t sure if Your Granddad On The Internet actually believed something he sent you or just passed it on to signal what side he was on and how fiercely, he wasn’t trying to “own” you, he REALLY WAS on that side, he wanted you to associate him with that position, and ideally join him.

It was probably at least in part being retired and having spare time and no other social outlet, back in the day going online meant going to a specific piece of furniture in a specific room of your home when no one else was using the computer and spending maybe 3 minutes just getting online, it was something you blocked off time to do. The young generation could just come home from school to the cul-de-sac and get online for lack of anything else to do, the parents’ generation was too busy to have enough uninterrupted time to become Extremely Online?

The thing I’m really wondering about is class. What was the cost of being Online back then? Say a new computer and modem every 4 years at around $2400 (Grandpa sure wasn’t building his own, but then he didn’t have to keep upgrading video cards either), $40 for an ISP, ideally $10 for another phone line? That’s $100/month, or alternately $50/mo and the ability to make $2.5k purchases on demand. And the kind of senior citizen who, in 1998, lived separately from his children, could swing this, would think to swing this, has multiple agemate peers and children’s households who did swing this, was a particular group. “Middle-middle” class AT LEAST and probably higher, probably went to college back when only 10% of people did.

BUT that doesn’t make sense. My theory is that this used to be a more marginal behavior on the internet, but if it’s gotten more common since the late ‘90s I don’t think it’s because the Internet has grown more full of wealthy old patriarchs since.

So instead how about this theory: the internet in general was pretty wealth-marked in 1998 (far more than we realized, with our American mythology of universal white suburban middle-classness and “global village” Internet mythology) BUT, of people who were more wealthy in 1998, the most likely to NOT have internalized upper-class practices were the grandfathers from the “Silent” or “Greatest” generations before the postwar “mass middle class”. Our parents were beavery professionals who settled into the suburban cocoon, we knew we were destined for glory (or at least selective colleges) from birth, but THEY were socialized into some pool hall, street gang, farmhand, enlisted man kinda culture where boldness of assertion counted more than patient derivation from shared principles.

And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.

That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”

Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.

Tagged: web 1.0web 1.5