#8: Why the Internet is fun, actually

Or why it never was.

Just as I was getting ready to skin this smoke wagon,

Garbage Day

published an excellent reader on the state of the worsening internet. And it mentions the article I’m writing about today! This post will inevitably be viewed in that context.

Today’s post responds to the claim that the Flash internet was unproblematically better than today’s internet, and specifically the claim that it was “more fun.” It is not a denial of the larger trash fire. All is not well. But let’s not lose something important in the mending.

Supernormal’s stated mission is to examine overlooked and underappreciated art. (Yeah, I know Dracula isn’t underappreciated, just go with it.) But the subtext for my starting this newsletter, and what I ultimately hope to get out of it, is something different. I’m interested in fun. As in, I want to achieve some academic understanding of what fun actually means.

Let me stand at my lectern for a minute: we do things just for fun, or we make fun of them, or we claim it’s all fun and games, or we say someone is no fun at all. A common thread runs through each of these expressions, which is that fun is something frivolous and outside the scope of sobered attention.

And yet, having fun is absolutely core to our experience of art.

So it rankles me when I see an article like this one that ran in The New Yorker, written by Kyle Chayka, “Why the Internet isn’t Fun Anymore.” The headline itself is lab-engineered to upset my sensibilities as an aesthete and born sewer rat of the web. It hasn’t upended thought or anything — though it made the rounds — but it echoes a kind of panic I’ve seen percolating through internet commentary post-AI and post-X, and that’s something I want to address.

Online spaces have never been completely frivolous. Dominating influences have always pushed some users to the margins. And yet, independent artists still thrive, provided you know where to look.

Wanna guess what the first Flash game was about? Pico’s School, Newgrounds

What exactly is the fun” Chayka eulogizes? He writes:

“Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser.”

Most halcyon impressions of the early internet cite the decentralization of it all, the islands of user-generated art adrift on seas of green-black Matrix glyphs. Chayka argues that corporate monoliths like Instagram and TikTok — and Facebook, the originator of the social web itself — have homogenized our individual experiences of the internet to maximize ephemera like “engagement” and “retention.”

I agree with that, by the way! He also cites X’s neverending trainwreck as the source of a lot of online malaise. And he’s weirdly fixated on Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce discourse as an example of that. But, you know, we can at least agree that the public unspooling of big social networks should encourage us to reexamine how we interact with those networks.

Here’s where we disagree: I don’t think the solution, if there is a solution, exists in our memories about an older, better internet. I think we won something important in the Zuckerbargain. To explain why, let me explain two things we know about fun.

First, you can characterize fun as total absorption. It engages our whole attention, reining in the parts of us that would typically worry about higher level concerns.

I think this is some of what Chayka reminisces. Raph Koster, the lead designer on Ultima Online, writes that we interpret routine information in “chunks.” If you’ve done the dishes a hundred times, then it gets sorted as one chunk: “doing the dishes.” However, new experiences need to be broken up and analyzed piece by piece. Now I’m squeezing the dish soap. Now I’m scrubbing the plates. Now I’m fitting things into the dishwasher.

By encountering new information — or making the familiar strange — we get the absorption of discovery and rediscovery. The early internet, with its wild frontiers and untapped novelty, encouraged constant discovery.

But a lot of experiences wholly absorb us, and they’re not fun at all. For just one example: the social internet! Social media companies know which dark patterns detain our attention, and especially the attention of young people, way past the point of discomfort. Architects of fun weaponize whole-brain attention to disrupt our critical faculties.

This is the second thing we know about fun: it depends on what philosopher Jonathan Gingerich calls “spontaneous freedom.”

We are spontaneously free when our course of action is unscripted, uncontrolled, completely of our own making. Jigsaw’s victims in the Saw movies need to win or die, and because of that his games are no fun at all. On the other hand, Leigh Cowart writes in Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose that the totality of the pain response can be fun, provided it’s engaged in freely and consensually. And this applies to everyone from marathon runners to spicy food enthusiasts, not just sadomasochists.

When Kyle Chayka laments that the internet is no longer fun, what exactly is he lamenting? That it’s no longer absorbing? Not really. Plenty of users (like me and Chayka) scroll disintegrating feeds rather than cut our losses.

So his issue is that we’re being taken advantage of by corporations, that our experience is controlled and thus not spontaneously free. And that’s 99% of a take I can get behind. But what did we gain in the trade? Why did we put our online experiences in the hands of lizardfolk?

Or: Who had fun online before the social internet? We’re left with this image of a simpler time, a rosy time, in which you switched on your DSL modem and played Flash games about forest animals. Chayka’s nostalgia shutters the complicated, exclusionary reality of the Flash era. Slurs flew freely. It was not a safe or free place for many people.

In the absence of moderation, oppressive cultural influences prevail. An actively moderated internet could support Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement. It supported a place like Tumblr in its golden age, where young people could find refuge and develop language about themselves. Don’t forget that the guy who bought Twitter did so because he felt threatened by the site’s aggressive moderation of hate speech. These things don’t happen when we’re just playing in the mud. We traded an unmoderated internet for a moderated one.

Tumblr via spartanburger.tumblr.com

Granted, we also got QAnon. We traded a silenced world, a cricket world, for a world of unimaginable volume.

Which is why I also balk at the idea that artists on the internet have stopped creating and become passive observers. Meanwhile, as Ted Gioia writes, “alt culture” on platforms like YouTube, Bandcamp, even Substack is growing exponentially. You just won’t see it if you remain on platforms hostile to artists. Would you believe that if you stay on the train as it wrecks, all you’ll see is the damn trainwreck?

Communities once happy in the tesseracted cafeteria of Twitter slid into private Discords, or onto sites like Tumblr, or literally anywhere other than those platforms which punished them for creating. The great arc of the internet has moved from the universal to the niche. Flash died so that countless more specialized platforms could live.

I’m not here to claim this internet is strictly better or that internet is strictly better. I’m not anti-alarmist, here to suggest everything’s fine. I liked Twitter. But let’s not pretend that all of this is just an internet problem. Should we think anything of the fact that avenues of open, vibrant conversation online are disintegrating at the same rate as avenues of open, vibrant conversation in the real world? Should we expect a followup, “Why Libraries aren’t Fun Anymore?”

Whatever course we take to fixing what Some Guy broke, it needs to incorporate what we learned in the last decade. We need adults in the room — just maybe not ones motivated by profit and nothing else.

Anyone would get tired of an internet that gives carte blanche to the tallest toddler with the biggest wad of cash, after a while.

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Thanks for reading!

I sorta scrapped the essay I was writing about pre-move, maybe that’ll see light one day. This one I turned around in three days. It’s sort of a return to my blogging days — I’m picking up the pace now that I have ~~**an office**~~ and can put more work into spiffing up this joint.

Which, you may notice there’s no “what I had fun with” or whatever I call that section. Expect it Friday!

DR