Content Neverending
Content Neverending
What do you know about how Flickr started?
In 2002 a Canadian game studio called Ludicorp launched a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game called Game Neverending. This was an open world exploration game that you could play forever with no opportunity to win. Instead you’d collaborate with strangers to gather resources and build things together; you could endlessly manipulate objects, create new spaces, and enjoy shared creative experiences in cyberspace, without the horrific burden of success metrics.
Game Neverending was shut down in 2004 because it failed to make any money. It was an online social space built on user-generated content, with an extremely novel interface — people don’t (or at least didn’t back then) play MMOs for this reason; they do it to unapologetically dom each other. Game Neverending never had a chance in 2004. But, within the game was a file sharing system that players could use to share media with each other; after the game ‘failed’ the studio took the file sharing system and turned it into Flickr.
Flickr isn’t that different from an MMO if you think about it. You play a character (it’s you!) and shape the world around you by sharing photos that describe that world (the photos are mainly grainy images of your demented cat). This made a lot more sense; this was an experience that could be commodified. The studio sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005.
The founders of Ludicorp became very rich. They took their riches and tried to build another game, which again failed, and then they launched Slack — apparently this was an internal chat tool for the studio that they realised might ‘kill email’. Somehow email did not die, and somehow, we all use Slack and email. Anyway, Slack IPOed in 2019 and was acquired by Salesforce in 2020 and now the people behind it are even richer than they were before.
You might think that there is a lesson here, and the lesson is to keep building things and pivot to whatever makes you a billionaire. If this is what you think, you are wrong. That is not a lesson, that’s just how things have always been done. The founder of Ludicorp, Flickr, and then Slack was born Dharma Butterfield, and grew up in a commune in rural Canada because his Dad had fled the US so that he didn’t have to fight in the Vietnam war. Even he, the flower child living off-grid, worked that one out. Also that feels like such a weird childhood for a tech billionaire lol.
This story is actually a reminder that even the free and open internet is not immune from the perils of commodification, which obviously by this point should not come as any surprise either. The weird MMO to enterprise software trajectory is extremely emblematic of the last twenty years of the internet: you have something janky and weird right at the beginning, and then everything crystallises into SaaS and subscription models. Digital services mean that user data can be collected at scale; lots of data means lots of money; etc.
The Grand High Inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee looks upon today’s internet and is profoundly upset. He does not enjoy the way platforms commodify user experiences. None of this fits with whatever his vision for the web was decades ago. Over the last few years he’s been proposing a ‘new internet’ standard called Solid. I’ve written about this a bunch of times now… in fact I just found this old graphic I made, I guess during the NFT craze, which very clearly (not really) outlines the difference between Web3, and ‘Web 3.0’ which is Tim’s version of the New Internet.
This graphic is misleading because it looks like I’m dismissing both things as trivial and unserious. Really, it’s not even worth critiquing Web3 and it’s swirling mass of enigmatic features — do what I did and treat Web3 like your internalised homophobia: thank it for its service and then kindly ask it to leave.
However we absolutely should be critiquing Solid, because on the surface it all seems very reasonable: the data you create when you interact with various apps and services stays in your own personal pod. Instagram, Amazon, Spotify, etc., do not store any of your data on their servers. You keep it all in your pod, and you can change who gets to access it, and move it from service to service (e.g. your Spotify taste profile can be ported to Apple Music).
In actuality Solid is just an imaginative reworking of the idea that users go on the internet to consume products: that Spotify’s aggressive recommendation system is something we actually want, rather than something that just kind of happened to us, because its creators know that we are too exhausted from the daily grind of late capitalism to decide for ourselves what to listen to. The whole ‘keep control of your data’ prospect represents a highly individualised — and actually quite cynical — vision for the web; as if we’re on it just to interact with companies.
The data pods assume two things:
that the way to get to a ‘better internet’ is to make things more comfy for corporate entities (allow smaller platforms to compete with bigger ones!) rather than making things more comfy for the actual users
that there is any political or corporate will behind this lol — companies have to either want to allow users to store data on pods rather than on their servers, or they have to be forced by lawmakers.
These ideas are melded to the ground of the internet that made the founder of Flickr and Slack very rich; it’s the internet that is built on products rather than whacky ways of interacting with each other. The conception of Solid stems from a growing mistrust in institutions. That mistrust is still very present, but in manifests in other ways, such as the rising popularity of individual writers/creators over legacy media corporations. Those who subscribe to newsletters like this (thank you!) want to get perspectives from individual people that they trust, rather than feed exclusively from a troff of information provided by a crumbling online publication.
But, this does create a new problem: the individual creator is burdened with the pressure to produce content at the same quality and cadence as a media organisation — I’ve certainly felt that pressure before myself and it’s very hard to shake. Platforms like Patreon and Substack (lol) only exacerbate this problem. So now, we’re seeing new monetisation solutions pop up, such as sub.club which allows individuals to monetise their federated social media feeds. If you post anywhere in the fediverse (like on Mastodon or Threads and I guess even Bluesky) you can shove some of your content into a subscription model via a page like this.
I mean I call sub.club a ‘new’ solution but really all it does is productise individuals, which is really what I thought we wanted to avoid. I’m lucky that I can earn enough money and have enough time to write for my own pleasure on the side; and we all know that monetising what you take pleasure in sucks all the fun out of it.
Now that it’s 2024 and we’re all very tired, we might finally be ready for Game Neverending. In fact, we deserve to play a game that doesn’t make any money after spending all these years having our bank accounts wrung dry by subscriptions. Please plonk us into an eternal bliss of bizarre, glitchy, interactive worlds. I don’t want to paywall my Bluesky posts please just let me play a game forever with no success metrics I’m begging you.
I want to thank my friend Mark for giving me the idea for this post — he messaged me about Solid after reading another one of my posts about our collective Rapid Onset Reality Detachment. As always feel free to email me or message on Substack if you have any thoughts to share and then maybe those thoughts will turn into a coherent post and then maybe your name will appear at the end, which is fun.