# the appeal of retro garming tried searching for it online almost all of the articles shown by duckduckgo were ai generated slop and thus utterly worthless the pages shown had articles and links totally unrelated to the name and theme of the site all of which only *appeared* to be about retro garming the internet wasn't hardly ever not headed straight into the toilet / up its own capitalist arts but the rate of its systematic ascent into terminal decline - the same way ignorant techbros of whiteness constantly 'fail upwards' - seems astounding consider the following podcast: the grand inquisitors (dead internet theory) by kill the computer another example of bafflingly selective impossibly naive utterly ahistorical (read: white) memory regarding 'teh good old internets daze' when apparently it was all wild raw rough-hewn all-too 'human'(tm) content. you really saying the old internet was honest and real and the current net nothing but a 2d plastic simulacrum? (isn't such a bad take itself the plastic simulacrum of the very web?) here it is in mono ogg format ![[KTCdeadinternet.ogg]] >max: bianca o'blivion? > bianca: yes? > max: i'm max renn. i run civic tv. i did a panel show with professor o'blivion.. the rena king show. > bianca: oh yes. you said some very superficial things. 'violets sex imagination catharsis.' > max: my exact words. > ~ videodrome 1983 david cronenberg something else selectively naive and wildly ahistorical is the manifesto "individualism in the dead-internet age: an anti-big tech asset flip shovelware r̶a̶n̶t̶ manifesto" by nathalie lawhead: [[individualism in the dead-internet age by alien melon.pdf]] how exactly is a (still currently missing) 'golden egalitarian net age' of crappy zines bad website design and slow dialup speeds a remotely accurate portrayal of how-things-used-to-be-utopian online? talk about 'i never got any on me so those covered in digital muck are a mystery to my worldview'; talk about a much needed people's history of the internet - seems the only thing currently lost online is the capacity for actually critical thought link to interview with lawhead in garme developer magazine: [how individualism in the dead internet age challenges technocapitalism and 'the things we lost along the way](https://www.garmedeveloper.com/design/how-individualism-in-the-dead-internet-age-challenges-technocapitalism-and-the-things-we-lost-along-the-way-) 2/ what even is a sgj serious garmes journalist ideologically speaking jason schreier often comes accross like an industry plant a convenient pressure release valve installed only to give the general impression of caring for workers - precisely in order that the horrible garmes industry itself continues unchanged insert trailer for nightcrawler - anti-ironically itself a bad examination of media ethics a creepy rubbernecker a slimy ghoul who hangs around accidents with a notepad a voyeuristic kibitzer providing unwanted commentary at the multi-billion vidyagarm industry garme - never to actually change things for the better - help destroy capitalist misrelations per se or even merely unionize against its worst excesses - but only to ensure that the one rubbing ir hands feverishly in the background (as long standard industry labor atrocities play out) gets all the reporting credit for being a sgj never once noting that work and labor themselves are the atrocity it's almost as it such churnalists secretly enjoy the steady diet of horrifying harassment stories which constantly leak from the stinking unwashed back end of the industry because they know at the end of the day they'll get a decent dollar rate reporting on it the merest notion of actually doing something about it - that the industry is inherently rotten from the pixellated ground up because its built on wage slave labor - is never mentioned and is for sgj's the steaming pile of elephant dung in the center of the room whose overwhelming stench cannot possibly be mentioned less the whole spectacular house of virtual cards tumble back into the void // republic of bob