https://www.bookforum.com/print/3202/i-meme-business-62381Joanna Walsh "wants us to remember how truly creative, and human, the internet once was," in the golden age of user-generated content:I Can Has Cheezburger... was an amateur project, an outlet for tech professionals who wanted an easier way to exchange cute cat pics after a hard day at work. In Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, Walsh documents how unpaid creative labor is the basis for almost everything that's good online. The WWW platforms that emerged in the 2000s as "Web 2.0," including Facebook, YouTube, etc. allowed anyone to experiment in a space that had been reserved for coders, making the internet interactive even for the inexpert and virtually unlimited in potential audience. The explosion in amateur creativity that followed took many forms, from memes to tweeted one-liners to diaristic blogs to durational digital performances to sloppy Photoshops to the formal and informal taxonomic structures — wikis, neologisms, digitally native dialects...[U]ser-generated content was also, at bottom, a business model sold to us under the guise of artistic empowerment. Even referring to an anonymous amateur as a "user," Walsh argues, cedes ground: these platforms are populated by producers, but their owners see us as, "helpless addicts." For some, online amateurism translated to professional success, or a reputation as a top commenter.. But for most, these days, participation in the online attention economy feels like a tax. The few remaining professionals in the arts and letters have felt pressured to supplement their full-time jobs with social media self-promotion, subscription newsletters, podcasts, and short-form video.The online spaces where amateur content creators once "created and steered online culture" have been hollowed out and replaced by slop, but what really hurts is that the slop is being produced by bots trained on precisely that amateur content.
>>519338323So before the third world gained Internet access and before (((corporations))) consolidated major websites.
20 years ago, everyone had an inkling of hope that one day they may become a big internet star, celebrity, giving an incentive to create, generate content, upload your heart's contentnow everyone knows it's too hopeless so internet got dead and we've got content farms & big business taking care of it allthat's the true reason no one ever mentions
>>519338323is Hannah Stein really jewish? I hope not shes so hot
