"What happened to the internet? It used to be fun. Look at me in 2012. But lately, it's gotten a little weird...."

"When you inspect these paintings — and even feel them, through tactile replicas of four paintings with four different kinds of dotting — you may be surprised..."

"... by their nubbiness, and how thickly the pigment has been lashed through a punched aluminum screen. The dots are raised. They grow and shrink, chafe or splinter. The sun may be setting on humanity, but look up close: Every dot, and every pixel, means nothing without you and me."

Writes Jason Farago, in "Connecting the Dots Between Roy Lichtenstein and Today The Whitney’s retrospective is full of jokes, but it captures our image overload with surprising tenderness. Our critic calls it 'the most momentous exhibition of the season'" (NYT).

That "sun may be setting" line has resonance because: "A remake of [Lichtenstein's] 1967 'Super Sunset Billboard' stands in front of the Whitney’s western picture window, so if you come at day’s end you can see two sunsets in one."

Speaking of breaking images up into tiny components and the effect on humanity:

"So, what I notice when you talk with people is you seem like a tough guy, but you're really sensitive."

"You're an incredible listener, obviously. You learn all these things and you're putting together—this is my impression—a kind of map of the world, a map of knowledge through all these different people's eyes. My question for you is: how do you see culture shifting? Because I think you're really sensitive to it, and you're kind of like one of these signal fish—you notice what's happening in the environment and you're going to guide the school of fish accordingly. Do you think the culture is shifting toward better use of these exceptional — or natural — capacities that we already have, or do you think we're shifting away from it and we're going to run away in fear?"

Says Julia Mossbridge, a cognitive neuroscientist, beginning her interview with Joe Rogan by asking him a question.

Rogan gives a good answer:

"They cut off the internet. No blogs. No channels.... We don't want it. We don't want it. You won't find us on line."

"We don't sit. We don't sit on your internet. We don't want it. We don't want it. Don't sit. Don't sit there. I declare a whole year of everything turned upside down."

Russia's main TV channel is airing songs about how great life is without the internet. Getting even closer to North Korea. pic.twitter.com/KS2Hur0ioc

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) March 20, 2026

"rage bait" — "online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive."

It's the Oxford University Press "Word of the Year" (the NYT reports).

The runners up were "biohack" and "aura farming."

I've never used (or quoted) the phrase "rage bait" or "aura farming."

I did quote "biohack" once. The context was the use of an IV to fend off a hangover. I commented: "Drinking is funny until it's not. Does this IV bag extend the funny phase or expedite the tragic? The need to say things like 'self-care,' 'virtuous aftercare,' and 'biohack' sounds desperate, but that can be part of the funny, especially for the drunkards."

"Worldwide search traffic has fallen by 15 percent in the past year.... Now that AI-generated summaries are being integrated into search results..."

"... anyone looking for information has less reason to click through to the websites where that information originates. For media publishers whose business models rely on referral traffic to bring them advertising revenue, this shift feels nothing short of catastrophic. There’s no getting around the decline in traffic. Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report showing not only that people who see an AI-generated summary on Google search are significantly less likely to click on external links than users who don’t, but that people almost never click on the links included in the AI summary. (They do so just 1 percent of the time.).... One strategy is trying to demand compensation from AI companies for crawling their content. Media companies are also investing in their own channels that deliver content directly to readers. They are launching new subscriptions, newsletters, events, membership programs, and even platforms and apps. Wired’s Katie Drummond wrote recently that the... trick... is to 'connect our humans to all of you humans.'...."

From "Traffic Apocalypse/Google’s AI Overviews are killing click-throughs to news sites" (Columbia Journalism Review).

"Six hundred and forty-two people are watching when Emily tugs off her sleep mask to begin day No. 1,137 of broadcasting every hour of her life."

"They watch as she draws on eyeliner and opens an energy drink for breakfast. They watch as she slumps behind a desk littered with rainbow confetti, balancing her phone on the jumbo bottle of Advil she uses for persistent migraines. They watch as she shuffles into the bathroom, the only corner of her apartment not on camera.... When Emily started streaming in 2016, her world felt impossibly small. She worked night shifts as a cashier on Long Island and spent her off hours at her boyfriend’s place, watching him play video games. At 19, she chose to save money by staying close to home and enrolling at the local community college, watching as all her friends moved away. One afternoon, her boyfriend told her to try Twitch, saying, as she recalled: 'Your life sucks, you work at CVS, you have no friends. … This could be helpful.'..."

From "Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’ A lonely young woman in Texas has streamed every second of her life for three years and counting. Is this life, or a performance of one?" (WaPo)(free-access link, because there's a lot of material here, and I couldn't begin to quote everything interesting/horrible).

If it all feels very deja-vu, perhaps you are remembering JenniCam, which went on for 7 years and went off 22 years ago. Jenni — Jennifer Ringley — got on the David Letterman show: "He predicted that Ringley’s style of entertainment would 'replace television, because this is really all people want.... They’re lonely, desperate, miserable human beings... they want to see life somewhere else taking place.'"

"Children as young as 12 are being arrested on suspicion of extremism offences, Britain’s most senior counterterrorism police officer has said."

"Matt Jukes, assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, said there was a 'conveyor belt leading children towards extremism' being driven by tech companies 'making vast amounts of money' from them.... [G]overnment figures revealed that the largest group of people referred to the government’s counterextremism programme Prevent were children aged 11 to 15, who made up 2,729 referrals — 40 per cent...."

The London Times reports.

"[O]blivion is restorative: we come apart in order to come back together. (Sleep is a case in point; without a nightly suspension of our rational faculties, we go nuts.)"

"Another is the notion that oblivion is integral to the possibility of personal evolution. 'The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning,' Foucault writes. To do so, however, you must believe that the future can be different from the past—a belief that becomes harder to sustain when one is besieged by information, as the obsessive documentation of life makes it 'more fixed, more factual, with less ambiguity and life-giving potentiality.' Oblivion, by setting aside a space for forgetting, offers a refuge from this 'excess of memory,' and thus a standpoint from which to imagine alternative futures. Oblivion is also essential for human dignity. Because we cannot be fully known, we cannot be fully instrumentalized. Immanuel Kant urged us to treat others as ends in themselves, not merely as means.... [O]ur obscurities are precisely what endow us with a sense of value that exceeds our usefulness.... The modernist city promised anonymity, reinvention. The Internet is devoid of such pleasures. It is more like a village: a place where your identity is fixed...."

Writes Ben Tarnoff, in "What Is Privacy For? We often want to keep some information to ourselves. But information itself may be the problem" (The New Yorker).

The article is mostly about the book "The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life," by Lowry Pressly (commission earned).

ADDED: Here, I made you an "Oblivion" playlist:

"I don’t think the obvious thing needs to be stated out loud, which is that when Russia blocks YouTube, they’ll justify it with precisely this decision of the United States."

Said the Russian opposition blogger, Aleksandr Gorbunov, quoted in "What a TikTok Ban Would Mean for the U.S. Defense of an Open Internet/Global digital rights advocates are watching to see if Congress acts, worried that other countries could follow suit with app bans of their own" (NYT).

By targeting TikTok... the United States may undermine its decades-long efforts to promote an open and free internet governed by international organizations, not individual countries, digital rights advocates said. The web in recent years has fragmented as authoritarian governments in China and Russia increasingly encroach on their citizens’ internet access.... 

"They coerced her into carving their screen names deep into her thigh, drinking from a toilet bowl and beheading a pet hamster..."

"... all as they watched in a video chatroom on the social media platform Discord. The pressure escalated until she faced one final demand: to kill herself on camera. 'You just don’t realize how quickly it can happen,' said the mother, who intervened before her daughter could act on the final demand.... Unlike many 'sextortion' schemes that seek money or increasingly graphic images, these perpetrators are chasing notoriety in a community that glorifies cruelty...."

From "On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm/Vulnerable teens are blackmailed into degrading and violent acts by abusers who then boast about it" (WaPo).

"In the early days of online life, there were 'flame wars,' performatively absurd and vitriolic debates among the people who posted messages on various bulletin boards."

"These endless arguments prompted efforts to better moderate discussion. The resulting desire, on the part of posters, to depose the moderators, or 'mods,' has been a constant of the Internet’s existence ever since—on Usenet groups, on Reddit, and on every form of social media. Who are the mods? The big ones are establishment institutions that aim to govern and to regulate, to maintain credentials and decorum. The mainstream press, obviously, which includes me and my employer, is a mod, and we are the target of endless ire, often rightly. The academy—particularly its most élite schools, the Harvards and the Yales—is another mod. But the mods have been weakening for some time.... The mods do have supporters: 'normie' liberals and conservatives who still put a degree of faith in the expert and media classes and who want, more than anything, to restore some bright line of truth so that society can continue to function...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Arguing Ourselves to Death/To a degree that we have yet to fully grasp, what rules our age is the ideology of the Internet" (The New Yorker).

The article title "Arguing Ourselves to Death" is a play on the book title, "Amusing Ourselves to Death." The book, by Neil Postman, came out in 1985, and mostly took aim at television.  

The article's subtitle reference to "the ideology of the Internet" is also inspired by "Amusing Ourselves to Death." There's this quote from the book:

"Quora once encapsulated a central premise of the internet, that connecting people with questions and people with answers across the globe would create..."

"... an exchange of information unlike anything before it; that rather than seeking answers from a friend or in a library, you could put your query to … everyone. Today, the website spams my inbox with questions such as 'Has your husband ever shared you with another woman?' Fourteen years into its run, Quora now provides an answer to one fundamental question: How has the internet evolved? From idealism to opportunism, from knowledge-seeking to attention-grabbing, from asking questions to shouting answers."

Writes Jacob Stern, in "If There Are No Stupid Questions, Then How Do You Explain Quora? The tragedy of Q&A sites is the story of the internet" (The Atlantic).

"That earlier generation of blogs once performed the task of aggregating news and stories from across the Internet."

"For a while, it seemed as though social-media feeds could fulfill that same function. Now it’s clear that the tech companies have little interest in directing users to material outside of their feeds. According to Axios, the top news and media sites have seen 'organic referrals' from social media drop by more than half over the past three years. As of last week, X no longer displays the headlines for articles that users link to. The decline in referral traffic disrupts media business models, further degrading the quality of original content online. The proliferation of cheap, instant A.I.-generated content promises to make the problem worse...."

Writes Kyle Chayka, in "Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore/The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over" (The New Yorker).

Time for a blog revival. Some of us have never left.

"I am very self-conscious about the way that I look, in part because I am a woman who happens to be conscious."

"Since birth, every piece of media I have encountered has socialized me to hate all of my body parts.... I thought that I was ugly for a very long time and then, suddenly, I found myself on wikiFeet [a photo-sharing foot-fetish site dedicated to celebrities’ feet], against my will, in the form of a photo of me from college, on a Lake Michigan beach.... [A]mong five voters, one voted 'beautiful,' one voted 'nice,' two voted 'okay,' and one hater voted 'ugly.' I am not sure the wikiFeet community realizes that, by reducing women to just their foot scores, they are dehumanizing us.... I am more than ten toes and eerily flat arches. I also have a beautiful heart beneath two medium-sized breasts.... Please go to wikifeet.com, create a user account on this collaborative, celebrity-foot database, and vote for me like my self-confidence depends on it..... I care what people think about me. But the best lesson I ever internalized is that no one will love me, or my feet, like I love myself (and my feet).... Loving myself is a tough task, and requires constantly reminding myself that I deserve patience and generosity and warmth...."

Writes Ziwe, in "Best Foot Forward/How to feel about an 'okay' rating of your feet by strangers on the Internet" (The New Yorker).

"[O]nline life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it."

"They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power. When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised.... But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless. Musk’s obsession with X as a brand... reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none. It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet. I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been. Foul nerddom is part of what invented, popularized, and profited from the internet’s commercial rise. Twitter did its part to hide all that, with its unoffending avian verbs, its adorable birds, even its charming fail whale...."

Writes Ian Bogost in "The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter Rebrand/The platform’s new logo seems a little juvenile. So does the internet" (The Atlantic).

Where does this intense disgust come from? Is Ian Bogost the sort of man who felt naturally privileged to run the world before those horrible nerds broke out of their cage? Or is he being funny and he's one of the nerds? Wikipedia: 

"Freedom of expression is not absolute in nature but is nonetheless a highly important right that cannot be lawfully restricted without the requirements of legal certainty and proportionality being met."

Said Judge Anthony Chan, quoted in "Judge Rejects Hong Kong’s Bid to Ban Pro-Democracy Song From Internet/The authorities sought a court injunction that could have pressured Google and other tech firms to remove 'Glory to Hong Kong'" (NYT).

Judge Chan also said that it would have been wrong to grant the injunction because existing criminal laws already gave the authorities the power to prosecute people for spreading the song, and that this ban would have been difficult to enforce, and unnecessary. Numerous people in Hong Kong have been arrested or charged for playing the song in public under an expansive national security law that Beijing imposed on the territory in 2020.... 

The “Glory to Hong Kong” case had risked “muddling” the city’s reputation as a place where the internet is open, he said. In China, the authorities block content and websites they don’t like, a system called the Great Firewall....

In this "Era of That's Not Funny," is the problem too little humor... or too much?

I've been running my "Era of That's Not Funny" tag for quite a few years. I don't like the suppression of free speech, and putting some topics off-limits for humor is a subcategory of that suppression. But that doesn't mean everyone should have free rein to make any sort of joke about anything to anybody on any occasion. There are infinite considerations of taste, decency, and funniness. There are differences between what can be said by a professional comedian late at night in a club and what can be said by a stepmother at a child's funeral. How much loose talk do we really want? There's also the free speech that comes in the form of telling jokesters that's not funny. Or — because maybe it is funny, really funny — You're an asshole. 

Anyway, the issue of the day is all those jokes about the implosion of the Titan submersible. I'm reading a WaPo editorial by Molly Roberts titled — unhumorously — "What internet jokes about the submersible disaster say about society."

"In hindsight, the twenty-tens saw the emergence, growth, dominance, and incipient decay of the largest social networks...."

"[W]e can’t rely on large digital platforms that are motivated by profit above all.... Those huge, public networks are growing riskier, messier, and less enticing by the day.... The next decade of the Internet is likely to yield more cloistered digital spaces that seek to correct the ills of Big Social Media. The looming 'post-platform' era, as it is already being called, will consist of smaller online communities connecting through group texts, Reddit forums, Discord servers, and e-mail newsletters.... [V]irality may no longer be the goal. But it may at least offer a less exploitative mode of existing online. In a way, it will resemble an earlier version of the Internet, operating on a tried-and-true principle: friends are more trustworthy than strangers."

Writes Kyle Chayka, in "BuzzFeed, Blue Check Marks, and the End of an Internet Era/Just a decade ago, Twitter and BuzzFeed were the popular poles of online life. Now their struggles are emblematic of where social media went wrong" (The New Yorker).

Here at Althouse, it doesn't just "resemble an earlier version of the Internet." It is that earlier version. And it has been for 7,039 days straight. You don't have to go back. You're already here. 

"Kiwi Farms harvests anguish. It thrives on pain and revels in death. Users of the innocuously named forum prey on the vulnerable and marginalized..."

"... with persistent and twisted harassment campaigns. Despite its penchant for destroying lives, Kiwi Farms has been mostly overlooked by the media for much of the site’s existence. That is partly because of who it attacks, but also because reporters are wary of becoming targets themselves. The users call their victims 'lolcows' because their pain can be milked for laughs. The group made its purpose clear on its Twitter page before it was taken down: 'Gossip and exploitation of mentally handicapped for amusement purposes.'..."

From "The Website That Wants You to Kill Yourself—and Won’t Die/How the trolls on Kiwi Farms hounded people to commit suicide and created the online culture we have today" (Mother Jones).