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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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As previously mentioned, the "Behind the Bastards" podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I'm just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It's like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.
This is something I've noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There's a nostalgia for the "old" internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I've always thought that's dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.
This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.
I have a lot of time for nostalgia about older versions of the web, but it really ticks me off when people who actively participated in making the web worse start to indulge in nostalgia about the web. Doesn't Yarvin get a lot of money from Peter Thiel?
There were women and people of colour on the old web, and feminists and radical anti-racists too - they were just outnumbered and outgunned. One of the earliest projects listed on the cyberfeminism index are VNS Matrix, who were "corrupting the discourse" way back in 1991.
To be perfectly fair i was a very callow youth at the time and probably bounced off stuff like that had I come in contact with it.
I'm thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.
I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it's the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.
The funniest thing I got was ads for Maybelline in a podcast about WW2. Know your audience!
The YouTube version doesn't have the ads
Because they think you live in a real country, not the USA.
I wonder for how many people this is a reactionary impulse, wanting back to the 'old internet' they didn't actually participate in. At least in modern days the flamewar posts are quite limited in length, in the old days they could reach novel sizes. Anyway sure we should go back to the old internet, where suddenly your whole university had no internet because there was a dos attack on the network to force a netsplit on an a random irc channel.