What Happened to the New Internet?

In crypto, an entire generation of alienated tech workers saw potential to have their cake (create a better, decentralized internet) and eat it too (get very wealthy).

The tech industry currently stands at a crossroads. At the twilight of social media, adtech, and crypto bull markets (bubbles?), tech workers and consumers are simultaneously exhausted by tech and starving for more. Shiny trends like Artificial Intelligence and Mixed Reality stand on the sidelines ready to transform latent frustrations into newfang... See more

. I did marketing there, which basically amounted to drafting tweets that promoted a hypothetical product in unflinchingly positive terms. I remember on several occasions being reprimanded for not using enough emojis in my tweets.

For me personally, it would have meant the preemptive realization that many of the ideas we theorized at Other Internet had little feasibility beyond the thinkpieces they were contained within, not because they were bad ideas, but because they never had the agency to be implemented.

Despite its gravitational pull, the story behind decentralization and the rise of crypto was just one island in the new internet archipelago.

Among other things, this meant leaning into a career and leaning into a career meant less time for the group chat.

There’s a strong argument to be made that the most compelling solutions in the short history of the New Internet have been those that are the most commonplace, slow, ambient, and avoidant of hype. Products that actually work and will continue to.

Young romantics working at the "intersection of art and technology" launched endless criticisms of big tech's overreach and in the process created the foundations for an entire scene of left-field internet aesthetics.

By shape shifting between utopian global computer and Ponzi dispenser, crypto both indoctrinated New Internet practitioners and implicated them amongst a crowd of day traders that they otherwise would have been repulsed by. In crypto's effect on the New Internet, we see the subtle ways that access to capital can simultaneously accelerate and mutate... See more