Digifesto

Today I got an email I never thought I’d get: a message from the creators of TheListserve saying they were closing down the service after over 6 years.

TheListserve was a fantastic idea: it was a mailing list that allowed one person, randomly selected from the subscribers each day, to email everyone else.

It was an experiment in creating a different kind of conversational space on-line. And it worked great! Tens of thousands of subscribers, really interesting content–a space unlike most others in social media. You really did get a daily email with what some random person thought was the most interesting thing they had to say.

I was inspired enough by TheListserve to write a Twitter bot based on similar principles, TheTweetserve. Maybe the Twitter bot was also inspired by Habermas. It was not nearly as successful or interesting as TheListserve, for reasons that you could deduce if you thought about it.

Six years ago, “The Internet” was a very different imaginary. There was this idea that a lightweight intervention could capture some of the magic of serendipity that scale and connection had to offer, and that this was going to be really, really big.

It was, I guess, but then the charm wore off.

What’s happened now, I think, is that we’ve been so exposed to connection and scale that novelty has worn off. We now find ourselves exposed on-line mainly to the imposing weight of statistical aggregates and regressions to the mean. After years of messages to TheListserve, it started, somehow, to seem formulaic. You would get honest, encouraging advice, or a self-promotion. It became, after thousands of emails, a genre in itself.

I wonder if people who are younger and less jaded than I am are still finding and creating cool corners of the Internet. What I hear about more and more now are the ugly parts; they make the news. The Internet used to be full of creative chaos. Now it is so heavily instrumented and commercialized I get the sense that the next generation will see it much like I saw radio or television when I was growing up: as a medium dominated by companies, large and small. Something you had to work hard to break into as a professional choice or otherwise not at all.