The Internet Has Changed
0:03 Have you noticed something online is different these days? Something in the air has shifted. Being online now means something else. It's not clear if it's because there's more money involved or maybe people are more attached to what they're doing, but something is just different overall.
10, 20 years ago, the average person online was presumed to be an overweight neck beard living in their parents' basement. But despite this, we know people now who are using the internet to their great advantage precisely because of how well they look. There's been a change in which the way the average person who we expect to be online is: it's no longer an overweight man, but more or less somebody who looks really quite good.
If you were online in the early days, you could bail out at any moment because your username was in no way linked with who you took yourself to be. It was an artificial, arbitrary creation against which you could hide. Even in the early days of YouTube, people would mark this arbitrariness by putting periods or x's in front of and behind their usernames—XX Shadow Lord xx, for instance. Today, people's usernames on just about any website are their
1:06 real names. Any famous internet celebrity or influencer is somebody whose name you can likely find, and their address, and all of their other personal information. This doesn't just go for the individual celebrity, though. If you want to apply for a job now, chances are you're going to have your real name in your email and your LinkedIn associated with things like your Social Security number, your work history, your bank history—all of this is now mediated ated in a public way online.
10 or 20 years ago, if you were online, you were more or less participating in very niche online spaces. You relished in that anonymity because that's exactly why you were there. Nowadays, though, we're participating in discourse, and there is now online "the discourse"—the discourse about gender, the discourse about this movie, the movie discourse, or the TV show discourse. There was no discourse in the way we talk of the discourse now. On an AV Forum, on WW w. avgeeks in 2003, the TV show discourse could be taken up by CNN or reposted by Donald Trump. That wasn't going
2:07 to happen in 2003, whereas 10, 20 years ago, if you posted online by itself, nobody would really give a [ __ ]. Nowadays, you can be just about anyone and somebody could pay attention to you.
All of this we might call the institutionalization of the internet. The institution is that which in society sets up the rules of the game. When there are rules in place, we are playing nice with each other and doing things with each other that we all accept as desirable. Before institutionalization, anything we do with each other is something like a Wild West. The notion of the wild here is crucial: there are no rules in the wild, it's a free-for-all. And to this day, people will describe the early days of the internet on just these terms. People could create pretty much anything they wanted. This was oftentimes to disastrous effect. There were underground websites and underground videos that were shared overnight. We can all remember days in which email chains sent out containing a video that was entirely untraceable. Nowadays, these things still happen, but we know more or less where the videos come from, where they're sourced, and who produced them.
3:10 This change has afforded to us a digital public sphere. Like the French salons that preceded it in the real-world public sphere, this is a source for people to talk about how they live in the world, grounded upon the historical identities they have formed with the people around them. In the digital public sphere, those identities are removed and made more complex because they must travel through worries about anonymity. We don't really know who we're talking to, we don't know why we're talking to them, and yet, because of that, everything we say can travel all the faster. A meme made in China using American images will then be used in America and compared to an American meme made using Chinese images.
This the philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habber M calls instrumental reason. When we're engaging in instrumental reason, although we're doing something social, we're still doing something but private. We're not really taking the role of other people with whom we're discussing. Certainly, we have to do this if we're going to ever talk with anyone—I have to at least understand what you might think of what I might say—but there's
4:10 still something private about it, so far as we are still doing something that's uniquely confined to our specific purposes for being there, wherever it is we are, and talking about whatever it is we're talking about. This is very different from how somebody would engage on Twitter or YouTube right now. If I'm on YouTube right now, I'm not talking to you for any particular purpose. My purpose is rather general, very universal. Ideally, anyone who speaks the English language could look at this video. Ideally, anyone who speaks the English language could retweet anything from anyone. Participation is not going on randomly or willy-nilly, but rather in a manner in which the person who is going into it can also come out of it with a sense of order.
Institutionalization of the internet therefore means the formation of an order of expectancy about what it is to be online at all. Where there no notion of order, nobody would ever intervene in order to make money. The general trend towards professionalization is it's self-rooted in a much bigger phenomenon that's going on online right now. The integration between the anonymity that the internet affords and the interpersonal relationships that we take for granted is something that we are living
5:14 through right this second. This means that although we always still want to capture that anonymity, at any moment when we produce something online, we know we can't always, and we're going to have to be moments in which our personal identities come to bear on the things we put online. In the case of professionalization, this is a capitalistic personal identity. Somebody like Mr. Beast or Logan Paul can enter into relations of money and capital and make networks with other people so as to produce something online that at any one moment, for any viewer, they cannot know the full personal identity of.
As services and desirable outcomes tend to come in view, there thereby also emerges regulation. This is not a same kind of regulation as what we were used to when it comes to, say, the regulation of the press or the regulation of TV and movies. Whereas there, anything you do depended upon an interpersonal, present, generalized other—somebody who could see you, understand you, and talk to you based upon a shared history that you two had formed together, a character that they could see in you—in the digital public sphere, the generalized peer does
6:18 not form that history in the same way. Nobody really knows who you are, and so what it is to be participating in the discourse is not to be participating as an authentic character, a person whose history is known, but merely as an image, a profile whose history is formed through the very formation of the profile. The politicization of the internet and the politicization of the social games we play on, in, and through it therefore must be something new.
Elon Musk, for instance, champions Twitter as a public sphere for free speech, but when people support Kamla Harris, he can ban them. So it's public speech, but just not like that. This is a contradiction and attention, a difficulty and a problem involved in this so-called public sphere. We can't then say that this is a public sphere exactly like that which we are used to out in the real world when we talk in the town square or publish something in The New York Times. When Elon Musk therefore thinks about what it is to have free speech on Twitter, he's thinking about whether or not we can guard this kind of free
7:19 speech—the kind in which anonymity is part and parcel of being online—as a kind of free speech that we in this society desire. There's no turning back to an early part of society in which that anonymity was not integrated into who we are. It is currently here to stay, and whether or not we like it, the only question then is how we treat it and whether whatever we do about it is the kind of thing that we still presume has desirable consequences.
The regulation of online speech as a political question is therefore comparable to that of the public sphere in a regulatory way. So far as we enshrine freedom of speech and freedom of the press, it makes a kind of obvious and intu sense to also regulate freedom of speech online. This is, on one obvious and superficial level, just the same kind of thing: people talking to each other like they always have. We agreed in the past that people should be able to do that freely, and we agree now that people should also be able to do that freely. But what is that issue is whether or not the integration of anonymity into personality
8:22 warrants the same kind of regulation or lack thereof. We know that novel kinds of group and collected action through anonymity are possible at an unprecedented way and rate. To secure society and to secure individual personhoods despite that anonymity, then just thereby, the kind of regulation we would need to take must also be different.
What we're doing right now online is nothing like what we used to be. You could go online, you could post whatever you wanted, and everything you thought at the end of the day would be fine, so you could just log off and be done with it. Not anymore. You go online now, and the things you post will linger. Whatever these changes mean, it's hard to say, but until we acknowledge that they're happening, and until we realize that there are something that we need to take seriously as concerns regulation and the politicization of what it even is to be on this damn thing to begin with, we're helpless. There's nothing we can do if we keep pretending everything just stays the same. Things have changed. We need to start acting like it. Even as I hold this microphone, am I enacting one of these changes, compressing your image of me into something more
9:27 solid and relatable? As Tom Nicholas has argued, holding a microphone not only enhances the perception of amateur authenticity, but also serves as a tool to personalize and humanize the creator, potentially fostering a deeper connection with the audience. Creators didn't have to do this 10 years ago—everyone knew they were amateurs. Now, in the age of professionalization, that amateurishness must be represented.
Creators now have options if they want to produce original works without selling their souls. Nebula is another one of them. Nebula allows Nicholas to pursue a podcast venture without the precarity still associated with the changing internet landscape. Nebula is a streaming service founded by Nicholas, myself, and several other creators, offering thoughtful, high-quality content. By working with other creators to share resources, ideas, and opportunities, Nebula has quickly become one of the fastest growing independent video platforms online. We've grown by elevating each other, pushing each other to create content that was previously unthinkable for you all, the audience. This insistence on quality has produced handcrafted original content that
10:31 wouldn't be possible elsewhere. That includes my friend Phil from Volksgeist investigation of the darker side of music production with his original documentary series Danger Music, and Jesse Earl's Twilight zones Nebula-produced movie Identities, which explores how the internet might be further changing how we relate to each other. These and other Nebula originals are pushing the boundaries of what we can make online without falling into the exploitative structures of traditional media and new media attempting to imitate traditional media.
I have long-term plans to produce a series of documentaries articulating the greatest ideas of mankind, a series that would not be immediately popular with the YouTube algorithm, but with Nebula, that's not a problem. Nebula allows myself and other creators a space to experiment with high-quality, high-intensity graphics and research so that you, the audience, get bigger, bolder, and more thoughtful content. So if you want to become part of a platform that's at the forefront of entertainment innov, enabling us to craft content we never thought possible, accessing exclusive originals like Danger Music and Identities, as
11:37 well as exclusive videos from many other creators like Tom Nicholas, Philosophy Tun, Contra Points, FD Signifier, JG Mulla, Lley Alexander, and so many others, you should join Nebula today. Right now, you can actually check out Tom Nicholas's podcast and Jesse Earl's Identities with a 40% off yearly subscription—that is, of course, by using my link at /m Mr Amazing. Again, that's... [Music] [Music] a [Music]
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