9 ms·

The Death of the Cyberflâneur

87 points by ernestosoo 10y ago

jack_rabbit 10y ago
The article is totally wrong. The internet is now more than ever a good place for this kind of thing. > Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. Doesn't the whole click-bait "industry" specifically because people are surfing? What's more, even on social media, things like "Weird Facebook" come into existence. Huge groups form with no clear purpose other than seemingly to be exactly the kind of internet "arcades" that the article is describing.
- busterarm 10y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. I think the whole idea of a flâneur or "surfing" the web is that you choose where you go. There's an illusion of control. The whole click-bait industry depends on you browsing within walled gardens (facebook, reddit) and being on the conveyor belt of places your attention has to go. A flâneur or surfer can just go somewhere else. There's only so much physical real estate you can own. There isn't exactly another facebook or reddit to go to...and if there is, BuzzFeed is all over that shit too. Basically, the internet has driven the minimum cost of advertising/branding down to bit-transmission prices. Anybody basically can afford to throw shit everywhere and see what sticks. It's messy out there...
  - jack_rabbit 10y ago
    Yeah, I understand your argument. I think it's not a bad one.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    What about things like reddit, especially - as mentioned before, things like Weird Facebook? Sure, it's curated, but so were the arcades of the original flaneurs. And you can always follow links. (I do think that webrings were really well suited for this, though, and that's something reddit, etc. can't quite replicate.)
networked 10y ago
As a companion article to this one, read "The Net Is a Waste of Time" written by William Gibson in 1996 (http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/14/magazine/the-net-is-a-waste-of-time.html http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/14/magazine/the-net-is-a-wast...). It celebrates what Gibson thinks is the moment of peak "cyberflânerie".
kazinator 10y ago
> While not deliberately concealing his identity, the flâneur preferred to stroll incognito. ... > However, anyone entertaining such dreams of the Internet as a refuge for the bohemian, the hedonistic and the idiosyncratic probably didn’t know the reasons behind the disappearance of the original flâneur. If the flâneur is operating incognito ... how the hell can you be sure he is actually gone? Maybe he just upped his flâneurism game and dropped off your flâneuradar. People do still just surf the web instead of trying to only get stuff done---that's how we get interesting submissions on HN and why we are here to rummage through them. Twenty years ago I might have surfed the web for fun, but picked up the phone to get stuff done; now I can just use the Internet for most of that latter thing too.
- ernestosoo 10y ago
  You are missing the main point, man. I am sure you never experience the internet in the 1990's or early 2000's. You must live in a very parochial place! You don't know anything about arts, films, music. This website is one example. I like this website because there is something that is "HIS". He owns his individuality. http://www.novaexpresscafe.com/main.html http://www.novaexpresscafe.com/main.html It is not just about information. It is about aesthetics! The fun of flaneuring! Surfing the internet for spontaneity!
  - kazinator 10y ago
    > I am sure you never experience the internet in the 1990's That sort of guessing tends not to pan out very well around here. I used Mosaic under XWindow in 1993.
    - ernestosoo 10y ago
      That is pretty cool. Do you have any websites that make you feel nostalgic for the past? Any interesting websites in 1990's and early 2000's as well?
      - kazinator 10y ago
nosuchthing 10y ago
Take a break from surfing, and start diving. See how far the rabbit hole goes.... http://i.imgur.com/BLJl7f0g.jpg http://i.imgur.com/BLJl7f0g.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pdJsQDh.png http://i.imgur.com/pdJsQDh.png http://i.imgur.com/UaWoV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/UaWoV.jpg
- ernestosoo 10y ago
  This is so funny! You must know the internet!!! Do you know any of these? Obscure Music Blogspots, IRC chats, usenet, ASCII art, Slsk, DC++, penpals in Finland, Botwana, Iceland, and Uruguay, grainy and idiosyncratic university-websites, Tunak Tunak Tun, Albino Black Sheep, Zombo.com
GabeN 10y ago
I enjoy trawling through old Google Groups, some of them contain BBS messages dating back to the '80s
ernestosoo 10y ago
The Facebook technically kills the whole internet. (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/facebook-is-eating-the-internet/391766/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/facebo...). It tries to copy other startups, so people can stay on its platform and watch more "ads". Instead of surfing idiosyncratic webpages, flaneur now surfs facebook. It is like going to Paris and one only sees McDonald and Starbucks. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-o...) In addition, nowadays, people do not create webpage for fun. They want to commercialize their online presence. Everything, including oneself, is a brand now (http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/50-tips-to-brand-yourself-online/ http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/50-tips-to-brand-yoursel...). This leads to the totalitarianism of minimalism (https://www.sitepoint.com/less-minimalist-websites-still-rule/ https://www.sitepoint.com/less-minimalist-websites-still-rul...) where they want to people to "see" their webpages "efficiently". People are wearing a mask in and out. There is no authenticity and honesty. The internet was the place for playfulness and wonder. DeviantArts, Rate Your Music, Geocities were really fun. Now, the internet is full of BS. Startups are full of BS ("This is a site that spits out whole websites of fake bullshit web companies. Hit "get started" to refresh. http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=243648772317 http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=243648772317). Reddit is a rare phenomenon because it was founded by Aaron Schwartz and he never got any credit. And I am pretty sure Aaron Schwartz would never go to “Hackathon”, “Entrepreneurial leadership at Stanford”. They are full of BS. No one has a deep passion for truly improving people’s lives. Everything is for efficiency. Palo Alto becomes a dead place now. There is only one bookstore in Palo Alto area and no students ever visit. Stanford students do not love to learn at all. They are “excellent sheep”. The dark net is okay and it becomes boring after a while.
- AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
  To be fair to the "hackathon," it was a concept started by the devs at OpenBSD.[0] Not exactly a bunch of poseurs, that group. [0] https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html
philippoi 10y ago
The point Morozov didn't make explicit that would have helped his argument: the internet is turning into a perfect Panopticon, a total environment of confinement for control and subjectification as highlighted by Foucault. I first read that for architectural theory in college, and now it only seems to get increasingly vital to understanding everyday culture and identity. When the idea of the web as a terrain for the flâneur to be the main focus, the rival and dominating idea of the web as a terrain of control via total surveillance clarifies which direction the mainstream skews. Sure there are outliers, but emphasizing that to dismiss the wave in the direction of the Digital Panopticon is to miss Morozov's point.
GuiA 10y ago
Link to the article mentioned in the opening: http://www.ceramicstoday.com/articles/050498.htm http://www.ceramicstoday.com/articles/050498.htm
alva 10y ago
The joys of the world wild west are still out there for curious surfers. Admittedly it does require a lot more effort, especially for a younger generation who may not remember what the early web is like and how you would traverse it. I still get a thrill finding 'hidden' communities on the internet.
- bbctol 10y ago
  I've started collecting my weirdest links, though I'm not sure what to do with them yet. Hundreds of watercolors featuring Nazi war criminal Reynard Heidrich transforming into a female bird, a studio producing sexy anthropomorphized American warships that's started shifting towards Trump propaganda, a network of alt-right teenage girls' tumblrs, mostly based out of Nebraska, subreddits for conspiracy theorists focusing entirely on an unremarkable seeming dude who is apparently at the center of the new world order... the internet's weirder than it's ever been.
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    Please post them on a pastebin. The alt-right tumblr and conspiracy reddit sound amazing
    - hood_syntax 10y ago
      Yeah, who is this seemingly normal guy? I want to know!
      - emluque 10y ago
        I second this. That's really intriguing! I'm imagining that there is some random dude out there that somehow became the focus of some nutty conspiranoids and I can't stop laughing.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      I'm familiar with /r/conspiracy. There's being open minded. And there's having your brain spilling out all over the pavement. As with many circuses and freakshows, a very small exposure goes a long way. The stunning lack of critical thinking ability, and/or self-parodying circlejerk nature, get old quickly. Trying to decide which of those two it is might occupy you for a while.
panglott 10y ago
I thought this is what they did on Geocities. But don't people still do that on Tumblr?
- rocky1138 10y ago
  Yes and no. Tumblr is a lot more curated. The hashtag and featured list makes aimlessly strolling obsolete.
  - frandroid 10y ago
    The hashtags are what streets were to the flâneur. You know which direction you're going but you don't know what you'll find on there...
  - niftich 10y ago
    Depends on your circles. Tumblr, like Twitter, is really defined by who you follow. If you follow 'professional', curated blogs where the author is promoting their own content, they will care about SEO and discoverability and they will tag their own posts with topical hashtags. But most personal blogs don't care about that, they tag their posts with custom, made-up categories or use the tag field as additional meta-commentary. There's a much-reblogged Tumblr post chain [1] that talks about this; ironically the only way I was able to find the post again is because one of the commenters tagged it with topical tags. So Tumblr is an amalgam of discoverable posts, long chains, and many posts that are completely untagged. If the blog's author has disabled the built-in integration Tumblr has with making search engines aware of posts, a lot of this content can only be found by going directly to the source through a friend-of-a-friend. [1] (shortened due to NSFW words in url, in deference to those at work) http://bit.ly/2cuwzE0 http://bit.ly/2cuwzE0
gumby 10y ago
But isn't that what FB browsing is? Internet "surfing"? Getting stuck in a Wikipedia rabbit hole?
- Juz16 10y ago
  There's no anonymity there, and everything is rationed and fed to you by their algorithm for a reason.
v64 10y ago
You can get a similar experience browsing directories of Tor hidden services (I'm sure there are other darknet equivalents). There's a little bit of everything in those lists, including the illicit, inexplicable, and of course, illegal.
vonnik 10y ago
Cyberconnecting cyber-readers with the cybernews: https://twitter.com/CyberEveryword https://twitter.com/CyberEveryword

87 points by ernestosoo 10y ago

The article is totally wrong. The internet is now more than ever a good place for this kind of thing. > Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. Doesn't the whole click-bait "industry" specifically because people are surfing? What's more, even on social media, things like "Weird Facebook" come into existence. Huge groups form with no clear purpose other than seemingly to be exactly the kind of internet "arcades" that the article is describing.

busterarm 10y ago
I'm not sure I agree. I think the whole idea of a flâneur or "surfing" the web is that you choose where you go. There's an illusion of control. The whole click-bait industry depends on you browsing within walled gardens (facebook, reddit) and being on the conveyor belt of places your attention has to go. A flâneur or surfer can just go somewhere else. There's only so much physical real estate you can own. There isn't exactly another facebook or reddit to go to...and if there is, BuzzFeed is all over that shit too. Basically, the internet has driven the minimum cost of advertising/branding down to bit-transmission prices. Anybody basically can afford to throw shit everywhere and see what sticks. It's messy out there...
- jack_rabbit 10y ago
  Yeah, I understand your argument. I think it's not a bad one.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  What about things like reddit, especially - as mentioned before, things like Weird Facebook? Sure, it's curated, but so were the arcades of the original flaneurs. And you can always follow links. (I do think that webrings were really well suited for this, though, and that's something reddit, etc. can't quite replicate.)

networked 10y ago

As a companion article to this one, read "The Net Is a Waste of Time" written by William Gibson in 1996 (http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/14/magazine/the-net-is-a-waste-of-time.html http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/14/magazine/the-net-is-a-wast...). It celebrates what Gibson thinks is the moment of peak "cyberflânerie".

kazinator 10y ago

> While not deliberately concealing his identity, the flâneur preferred to stroll incognito. ... > However, anyone entertaining such dreams of the Internet as a refuge for the bohemian, the hedonistic and the idiosyncratic probably didn’t know the reasons behind the disappearance of the original flâneur. If the flâneur is operating incognito ... how the hell can you be sure he is actually gone? Maybe he just upped his flâneurism game and dropped off your flâneuradar. People do still just surf the web instead of trying to only get stuff done---that's how we get interesting submissions on HN and why we are here to rummage through them. Twenty years ago I might have surfed the web for fun, but picked up the phone to get stuff done; now I can just use the Internet for most of that latter thing too.

ernestosoo 10y ago
You are missing the main point, man. I am sure you never experience the internet in the 1990's or early 2000's. You must live in a very parochial place! You don't know anything about arts, films, music. This website is one example. I like this website because there is something that is "HIS". He owns his individuality. http://www.novaexpresscafe.com/main.html http://www.novaexpresscafe.com/main.html It is not just about information. It is about aesthetics! The fun of flaneuring! Surfing the internet for spontaneity!
- kazinator 10y ago
  > I am sure you never experience the internet in the 1990's That sort of guessing tends not to pan out very well around here. I used Mosaic under XWindow in 1993.
  - ernestosoo 10y ago
    That is pretty cool. Do you have any websites that make you feel nostalgic for the past? Any interesting websites in 1990's and early 2000's as well?
    - kazinator 10y ago

nosuchthing 10y ago

Take a break from surfing, and start diving. See how far the rabbit hole goes.... http://i.imgur.com/BLJl7f0g.jpg http://i.imgur.com/BLJl7f0g.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pdJsQDh.png http://i.imgur.com/pdJsQDh.png http://i.imgur.com/UaWoV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/UaWoV.jpg

ernestosoo 10y ago
This is so funny! You must know the internet!!! Do you know any of these? Obscure Music Blogspots, IRC chats, usenet, ASCII art, Slsk, DC++, penpals in Finland, Botwana, Iceland, and Uruguay, grainy and idiosyncratic university-websites, Tunak Tunak Tun, Albino Black Sheep, Zombo.com

GabeN 10y ago

I enjoy trawling through old Google Groups, some of them contain BBS messages dating back to the '80s

ernestosoo 10y ago

The Facebook technically kills the whole internet. (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/facebook-is-eating-the-internet/391766/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/facebo...). It tries to copy other startups, so people can stay on its platform and watch more "ads". Instead of surfing idiosyncratic webpages, flaneur now surfs facebook. It is like going to Paris and one only sees McDonald and Starbucks. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-o...) In addition, nowadays, people do not create webpage for fun. They want to commercialize their online presence. Everything, including oneself, is a brand now (http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/50-tips-to-brand-yourself-online/ http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/50-tips-to-brand-yoursel...). This leads to the totalitarianism of minimalism (https://www.sitepoint.com/less-minimalist-websites-still-rule/ https://www.sitepoint.com/less-minimalist-websites-still-rul...) where they want to people to "see" their webpages "efficiently". People are wearing a mask in and out. There is no authenticity and honesty. The internet was the place for playfulness and wonder. DeviantArts, Rate Your Music, Geocities were really fun. Now, the internet is full of BS. Startups are full of BS ("This is a site that spits out whole websites of fake bullshit web companies. Hit "get started" to refresh. http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=243648772317 http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=243648772317). Reddit is a rare phenomenon because it was founded by Aaron Schwartz and he never got any credit. And I am pretty sure Aaron Schwartz would never go to “Hackathon”, “Entrepreneurial leadership at Stanford”. They are full of BS. No one has a deep passion for truly improving people’s lives. Everything is for efficiency. Palo Alto becomes a dead place now. There is only one bookstore in Palo Alto area and no students ever visit. Stanford students do not love to learn at all. They are “excellent sheep”. The dark net is okay and it becomes boring after a while.

AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
To be fair to the "hackathon," it was a concept started by the devs at OpenBSD.[0] Not exactly a bunch of poseurs, that group. [0] https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html

philippoi 10y ago

The point Morozov didn't make explicit that would have helped his argument: the internet is turning into a perfect Panopticon, a total environment of confinement for control and subjectification as highlighted by Foucault. I first read that for architectural theory in college, and now it only seems to get increasingly vital to understanding everyday culture and identity. When the idea of the web as a terrain for the flâneur to be the main focus, the rival and dominating idea of the web as a terrain of control via total surveillance clarifies which direction the mainstream skews. Sure there are outliers, but emphasizing that to dismiss the wave in the direction of the Digital Panopticon is to miss Morozov's point.

GuiA 10y ago

Link to the article mentioned in the opening: http://www.ceramicstoday.com/articles/050498.htm http://www.ceramicstoday.com/articles/050498.htm

alva 10y ago

The joys of the world wild west are still out there for curious surfers. Admittedly it does require a lot more effort, especially for a younger generation who may not remember what the early web is like and how you would traverse it. I still get a thrill finding 'hidden' communities on the internet.

bbctol 10y ago
I've started collecting my weirdest links, though I'm not sure what to do with them yet. Hundreds of watercolors featuring Nazi war criminal Reynard Heidrich transforming into a female bird, a studio producing sexy anthropomorphized American warships that's started shifting towards Trump propaganda, a network of alt-right teenage girls' tumblrs, mostly based out of Nebraska, subreddits for conspiracy theorists focusing entirely on an unremarkable seeming dude who is apparently at the center of the new world order... the internet's weirder than it's ever been.
- yolesaber 10y ago
  Please post them on a pastebin. The alt-right tumblr and conspiracy reddit sound amazing
  - hood_syntax 10y ago
    Yeah, who is this seemingly normal guy? I want to know!
    - emluque 10y ago
      I second this. That's really intriguing! I'm imagining that there is some random dude out there that somehow became the focus of some nutty conspiranoids and I can't stop laughing.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    I'm familiar with /r/conspiracy. There's being open minded. And there's having your brain spilling out all over the pavement. As with many circuses and freakshows, a very small exposure goes a long way. The stunning lack of critical thinking ability, and/or self-parodying circlejerk nature, get old quickly. Trying to decide which of those two it is might occupy you for a while.

panglott 10y ago

I thought this is what they did on Geocities. But don't people still do that on Tumblr?

rocky1138 10y ago
Yes and no. Tumblr is a lot more curated. The hashtag and featured list makes aimlessly strolling obsolete.
- frandroid 10y ago
  The hashtags are what streets were to the flâneur. You know which direction you're going but you don't know what you'll find on there...
- niftich 10y ago
  Depends on your circles. Tumblr, like Twitter, is really defined by who you follow. If you follow 'professional', curated blogs where the author is promoting their own content, they will care about SEO and discoverability and they will tag their own posts with topical hashtags. But most personal blogs don't care about that, they tag their posts with custom, made-up categories or use the tag field as additional meta-commentary. There's a much-reblogged Tumblr post chain [1] that talks about this; ironically the only way I was able to find the post again is because one of the commenters tagged it with topical tags. So Tumblr is an amalgam of discoverable posts, long chains, and many posts that are completely untagged. If the blog's author has disabled the built-in integration Tumblr has with making search engines aware of posts, a lot of this content can only be found by going directly to the source through a friend-of-a-friend. [1] (shortened due to NSFW words in url, in deference to those at work) http://bit.ly/2cuwzE0 http://bit.ly/2cuwzE0

gumby 10y ago

But isn't that what FB browsing is? Internet "surfing"? Getting stuck in a Wikipedia rabbit hole?

Juz16 10y ago
There's no anonymity there, and everything is rationed and fed to you by their algorithm for a reason.

v64 10y ago

You can get a similar experience browsing directories of Tor hidden services (I'm sure there are other darknet equivalents). There's a little bit of everything in those lists, including the illicit, inexplicable, and of course, illegal.

vonnik 10y ago

Cyberconnecting cyber-readers with the cybernews: https://twitter.com/CyberEveryword https://twitter.com/CyberEveryword