#5: Sunset Yourself
Anyone who had a blog in 2013 (and the many more who just read a lot of blogs) remembers the shutdown of Google Reader, the most striking recent instance of a beloved product getting the axe despite no suitable alternative existing. Avid Twitter users, take note: I die this death every day in anticipation of a similar sunsetting of that platform, a terrible business but a wonderful commons, the end of which would send its users similarly scrambling to—well, where would we go after Twitter? Where did Google Reader's users go?
When Google Reader vanished, a big wild ecosystem of personal blogs and websites disintegrated and feebly, partially reassembled itself inside walled gardens controlled by singular corporate entities (Facebook more often than Google, ironically). The blogs themselves didn't go anywhere. They still existed, and some had sufficient traction to maintain their own communities or transform themselves into destination sites; the rest were left alone to peacefully shrink in place, like towns on the Erie Canal. A better metaphor, actually, is the US airline industry in the past decade, during which air service has concentrated in fewer large cities at the economic expense of smaller ones, a network realignment in which nodes that benefit more than they contribute find themselves disconnected.
There's a saying about contemporary technology that you and I are too often the product rather than the user. Sometimes I forget what this means, or suspect it's too dramatic, but then I remember the end of Google Reader, in which the hapless people who actually wanted it were shuffled into other channels like dollars in a marketing budget, thus helping to fulfill a goal that was Google's, not theirs. The internet and Google-sized platforms (The Stacks, as Bruce Sterling calls them) have colonized plenty more territory since 2013, too often dismantling the infrastructure that came before and showing a more blatant propensity to prod their users into service of their strategic vision. It's one thing when Google sunsets Reader, another when a company that's less Not Evil sunsets your health care, your car, or your identity.
Reads:
Nicholas Carr on the subjectivity and fictionality of digital maps
The towns around Japan's Fukushima plant are overrun by radioactive boars
Why Southern Californians say "the" before freeway numbers (I didn't know there was a reason)
Until next time,
Drew