WE LIVE IN THE MEDIUM

We Live in the MEDIUM_

INTERNET DEEP THOUGHTS WITH KRISTIN COSTELLO

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"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."

Marshall McLuhanThe Medium is the Massage

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

The Early Days: 1992 - 95

One of my roommates was a tech millionaire in his 30s He owned our house and nine others in Palo Alto, named them after Grateful Dead songs and filled them with students. No one I knew was sure how he made his money, but he slept in a sleeping bag on a carpet studded with processing chips and transistors, so we figured it had something to do with computers.

Back when I was graduating from Stanford with a degree in American Studies, I was living in Palo Alto, and not sure what to do with myself. Someone I knew mentioned Larry Page and Sergey Brin were starting Google in their dorm room.

Once the landlord invited me to a Grateful Dead show. My friend and I spotted him all the way across the dark stadium, dancing in a full-body bear costume covered in blinking lights.

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

I often rode my bike down Sand Hill Road, past the first high tech venture capitalist firms. I sensed something significant was happening in these buidings. What were they building in there? Working in technology was looking interesting. It seemed mysterious and slightly sinister in a thrilling sort of way.

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

Decisions, Decisions.

After finishing up college, it seemed like time to start figuring things out.My first big decision was location.

Do I stay in the Bay Area? Or move to Seattle?

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

I fell in love.

As I began to learn how to create digital media, I fell in love with the medium. It's literally energy and pixels of light, a direct manifestation of an idea. The digital space is so responsive, forgiving and expansive. Making websites reminds me of Buddhist mandalas made of sand. So much energy and intention goes into them. Worlds are built around them. They exist for a moment in time, and are reabsorbed back into the void of possibility with the click of a button.

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

The Internet is Fun!

Back in 1997, when less than 1% of the world was online, working on the internet felt like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The combination of the medium's creative potential, the promise of building a collaborative and creative space for everyone, and the opportunity to strike it rich all at the same time seemed utopic.

Best of all, if I took a wrong turn along the way, I could just close the book and start again.

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

Merging onto the Internet

After I finished school, I started looking for my first internet job. A friend suggested I apply to work with her. She was one of the first employees at a small online bookstore. I also had an offer to work at a small animation company making online Flash games for Disney and Nickelodeon. Another decision to make: Should I apply to work with my friend? Or go with the offer I already had?

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

Around this same time, I bought my first domain name, www.orange.com, because it was my favorite color. I didn’t have any plans for it, and didn’t notice when my $15 renewal quietly lapsed. Back then, when the internet was new, nearly the whole dictionary was available.Twenty years later, the Gannett Company, a massive online news conglomerate worth $0.88 billion bought the domain name cars.com for $872 million in 2014.

Orange, the company that now inhabits my old web address, is one of the world’s largest telecommunications and digital service providers with a net worth of $44 billion.

Internet as Choose Your Own Adventure

At home, I was putting my nascent skills to better use building a rudimentary portfolio website for my husband Sean. Sean was studying computer music and used the website to apply for a position as a video game audio algorithm engineer in the Bay Area.

He got the job!

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

Gold Rush 2.0

Only 4% of the world’s population was online when we moved to San Francisco 150 years after the first gold rush. The City was once again in a speculative frenzy, this time over the dotcom boom. It was fueled by those venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road and an 800% increase in the stock market. Joining the stream of hopeful prospectors, we took out a $5000 loan from the bank. It instantly disappeared after we rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment with a broken stove in the foggy Outer Sunset, and we were lucky to lock it down. People were paying up to a year’s rent in cash, in advance. Sean started his job in Mountain View, a one-hour commute each way. He drove past billboards pleading with tech workers to watch for pedestrians as they raced to their pre-IPO jobs at Gadzoox and Flooz and Beenz.com.

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

ORGANIC, INC.

I quickly found a job with Organic Online, reported to be the first marketing and advertising agency focused solely on the internet. I was hired as a junior project manager for the Blockbuster website. I worked with a team on the part of the site dedicated to selling used VHS tapes. The agency was in a warehouse in the industrial part of town with four walkup floors of Aeron chairs, ping pong tables and knife wielding, roller-skating web developers. I was given stocks as part of my hiring package, and lots of encouragement to invite family and friends to invest in the upcoming IPO. It was all very exciting, and kind of overwhelming.

In February 2000, two months after I was hired, Organic went public.

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

I eventually crawled onto a small incubator-funded startup raft in Oakland as a product manager for a visionary developer. He created a proto-smartphone back when flip phones were cutting edge. It had many of the same capabilities and user interface features we use in phones today. Over the next six months, I watched his 27-year-old CEO burn through the budget, the tech incubator run into trouble with the mafia, and the proto-smartphone die a quiet death 7 years before the first iPhone came out. And, then, I was adrift again, lost in a sea of confusion and disappointment. Did I make a wrong turn somewhere? What was happening? How did this all go so wrong?

Us

Meanwhile, Sean’s company was acquired by a huge digital chip manufacturer, again with a huge cash out for the founders. He went from working in a quirky Mexican restaurant repurposed as a start up office to a 90-minute commute into vast rooms full of empty Severance-style cubicles and lunch in a cafeteria overlooking huge tanks of hydroflouric acid.

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

Do we stay in San Francsico and keep trying? Or do we head back home to Seattle and start over?

Things didn't seem to be working out. It looked like time to go. We joined the U-Haul exodus leaving the Bay Area and headed back to Seattle, just in time for 9/11. As we got our bearings, we realized Seattle had become a ghost-of-its-former-self town. It was as if a plague of locusts had descended on the city, eating everything alive. Our favorite pizza place and movie theater had been replaced by vacant offices filled with unused PCs and more of those damn Aeron chairs. Sullen grunge musicians had been replaced by arrogrant tech bros. It was like a horror movie. Seattle was interchangable for San Francisco. In a few short years, the world had changed and we had escaped nothing. It took me a while to recognize we were two of the locusts in the swarm too.

After 9/11, the job market froze. I found a temp job at the Nordstrom call center, placing orders from a catalogue for people who didn’t know how to use the internet. Sean was offered an unusual opportunity to continue working for his company remotely, long before Zoom was an idea. He set up an office in our house, strained to hear his colleagues over muffled daily conference calls, and flew back down to HQ every three weeks.

I went back to school and got a certificate in graphic design. We moved to Portland and I landed a great job for Nike as a multimedia producer. Eventually, we had kids and I stayed home with them while Sean continued to work remotely. When the 2008 recession hit, we learned Sean's department was going to be dissolved, and there weren’t many jobs for audio algorithm engineers. After years out of the tech space, I needed to quickly get up to speed and support the family for a while.

To warm myself back up, I created Going Green Family, an online curriculum and community space for people interested in exploring ways to reduce personal consumption and pollution. Traction for the site was growing. A KING 5 TV producer reached out and they filmed a GGF meeting at my house. I was exploring ways to create a curated store for vetted products with carbon-offset delivery, but I had to find a paying gig so I leveraged it all for my job interviews.

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After interviewing for project manager jobs, and taking any temp job I could get, I slipped into a full time position right before the 2008 recession froze the market. I was hired as a senior project manager and quickly promoted to program manger. My team and I were dedicated to Microsoft, and worked 80+ hours a week at a Mad Men-style marketing agency with three Jagermeister taps and a full bar. I was not into it. The thrill was gone. Facebook was only a few years old then, and the agency was trying to figure out how to make money with this shiny new social media thing. Social media managers, all young early adopters, began joining our teams to help us figure out how to make money off of it. The agency was also leading the way on learning how to track, measure and monetize the behavior of the users on websites. 23% of the world’s 6.7 billion people were online.

The Choose Your Own Adventure Internet

While I was grinding away at the agency, Sean took care of the kids, and started building a DSP code library on the dining room table. Over the next three years, he evolved his code base into a set of audio plugins and began sharing them on message boards. I made a logo and another website, and we offically launched our online company, Valhalla DSP, in 2010 selling audio plugins to musicians and producers around the world. We would never have been able to do any of this without the internet. We believe in the creative and collaborative promise of digital technology.

The Internet as Leviathan

67%

Today, almost 70% of the world has logged onto the internet. With this increased interaction, there is a a growing list of concerns about the negative consequences surrounding this technology, including: Fragmented Attention Mental Health Declines Toxic Social Media Manipulative Algorithms Misinformation Campaigns Rise in Hate Speech Echo Chambers Deep Fakes Revenge Porn Political Bots Surveillance War Dog Robots Cyborg People Sentient AI

Global % of Internet Users

43%

30%

6%

1%

2024

1995

2000

2010

2015

What happened to making the world a better place?

Elon Musk,$441.6 Billion

Jeff Bezos, $234.5 Billion

Mark Zuckerberg $206.5 Billion

Larry Page & Sergy Brin$155.6 Billion

My hot take: The internet has been hijacked by tech colonizers. They have claimed the shared digital space and figured out how to commodify engagment, attention, beliefs, needs, emotions, mental health, and time. Individual and societal consequences are secondary to accumulating vast empires of wealth and power. We are currently living in their version of the internet.

With all these challenges, the tech that used to feel creative and helpful to me has been feeling out of control. I struggle sometimes with slipping into alarmist black-and-white thinking about technology, a “back in my day” cognitive location. Sometimes I feel like a pawn in a chess game, powerless to make change. From this perspective, digital technology appears to me as a whale-like Leviathan force of incomprehensible size and power. The scale of it reduces me to the size of a grain of sand. I can’t step back far enough in my imagination to find the outer limits of it. It feels scary, sentient and sublime, an unstoppable force insisting on actualization through us.

Internet as Leviathan

I search on Google to see if other people are feeling the same way, and find a blog post about technoplegia, the fear of technology.The author, an engineer who has worked in IT for decades writes, “I am often scared of technology . . . [it is] something much bigger than me. With its nebulous, grayish, and transparent body extending up to the sky, I can only see it blurry. I cannot not measure its size or guess its limits, and I always feel what I feel in the face of something too big to understand. Technology is something that covers us all, causing me to feel doubt, fear, and respect.”

I search on Google to see if other people are feeling the same way, and find a blog post about technoplegia, the fear of technology. The author, an engineer who has worked in IT for decades writes, “I am often scared of technology . . . [it is] something much bigger than me. With its nebulous, grayish, and transparent body extending up to the sky, I can only see it blurry. I cannot not measure its size or guess its limits, and I always feel what I feel in the face of something too big to understand. Technology is something that covers us all, causing me to feel doubt, fear, and respect.”

When I was in college, someone I knew had a psychotic break and destroyed the computer lab with a baseball bat. I wonder if he was perceiving the threat of what has come to pass, way back then, and tried to stop it. I have no illusion there’s anything people can do to stop technology from advancing. Destroying computers isn’t going to change anything. But in my darker moments, I get it.

Truth is, people have been panicking about technology since the beginning of time.

Writing, 399 BCE, Socrates fears writing offers "the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

Telegraph, 1844 Morse's first telegraph message: "What hath God wrought?"

VHS, 1982 "...the VCR is to the... public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.

Radio, 1896 Inventor asks"have I added another menace?"

?????

Personal Computer, 1974 "Computers are like Old Testament gods – lots of rules and no mercy.”

Telephone, 1876"We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other."

Television, 1927 "If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons."

Printing Press, 1440"It can bring about serious evils."

N.W. Ayer, 1979Reach Out and Touch Someone TV campaign forlong distance calling.

When I get despondent about the destructive aspects of the current internet, I have to remind myself that human beings have been in a symbiotic relationship with technology since the first intentional fire in a cave. Maybe that’s where this whole thing started. Back in my agency days, creative directors talked about the power of storytelling to pull people back around the digital campfire. People still like stories and flickering light, and also seem to evolve more slowly than technology does. It seems to me that humans are always barely hanging on to the tail of technology. Maybe that’s just how it works. I'm realizing my old stories about the internet aren't working anymore. It seems like time to give myself a new framework, one that can hold the fuller complexity of a co-creative process.

The Internet as ???

So, where to start? This looks like a good place: “Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.”

― Marshall McLuhan The Medium is the Massage

The Internet as ???

"Symbols gather round the thing to be explained, understood, interpreted. The act of becoming conscious consists in the concentric grouping of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and describing the unknown from many ways. Each symbol lays bare another essential side of the object to be grasped, points to another facet of meaning. Only the canon of these symbols congregating about the center in question, the coherent symbol group, can lead to an understanding of what the symbols point to and of what they are trying to express."

As a giant depth psychology nerd, one of my favorite things to do is look for patterns that have been lurking in the human subconscious since the beginning of time. I understand these universal patterns as archetypes, as myths, and symbols.

Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

I've been looking at this photo a lot while writing this essay. It feels like an answer to the question, "How do I relate to the Leviathan version of the internet?" From a symbolic perspective, this image leads me into a new relationship with digital technology.

Like this diver, when I log onto the internet, I am Choosing My Own Adventure. I can place myself into it with intention, and show up for what is emerging in planned and unplanned ways. Like the whales in this image, each instance of the internet - Web 1.0, 2,0 and now 3.0 - has a discrete identity, and will keep evolving into new forms. The internet and humans will keep observing, co-creating and influencing each other. All of this happens inside, and outside, of capitalism.

And just like the diver and the whale, both the internet and I also share a larger environment. We are held in relationship to each other with and within a vast transpersonal field.

This space is ancient and new, known and unknowable, teeming with diverse life and ever-evolving ecosystems. It belongs to everyone and no one. All of us are creating and being created by this field, constantly and together. It is the field of existence, perhaps Consciousness itself.

As Marshall McLuhan said, "We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us." What happens when we reclaim our capacity and right to co-create digital spaces? What becomes possible when we collaborate with our technology? Who - and what - do we want to become?

"We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the [internet] services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.It's a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die."- Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation

The team was unsure how to make money off the “world wide web”. They landed on selling dark blue underlined links to car companies and hard coding them into the station’s new website.

I left Silicon Valley for Seattle and got my first marketing job at KING 5, a local TV station.

The first time I heard the internet come up at work was in a sales department meeting.

We had a big party at the local bar that night and came into work the next day to discover the founding team had already cashed out. Organic’s overvaluation plummeted, my father-in-law lost his investment and my own stocks quickly became worthless too. I didn’t understand how the stock market actually worked, so I was confused. I didn’t understand that the Federal Reserve had increased interest rates in an effort to slow down the venture capitalists from borrowing money to invest in over-inflated dotcoms, and that panicking stock holders were dumping their holdings, so the Organic executives were rushing the IPO to cash out. Less than 7% of the world’s 6.1 billion people were online when the dotcom bubble officially burst the next month, creating wave after wave of layoffs and liquidiations across the industry. Over the next two years, all the gains made during the dotcom bubble were lost. People and Aeron chairs and pool tables started floating away in the flood waters, and those of us hanging on were always looking for a safer place to go.

N.W. Ayer, one of America's oldest advertising agencies, needed a creative approach to help AT&T soften its image in the face of growing concerns about AT&T's potential monopoly. So Ken D'Ambrosio helped develop the concept for a print and TV campaign that incorporated the now famous "Reach Out and Touch Someone" tag line. We can credit Marshall McLuhan for creating the tagline "Reach out and touch someone" for Ma Bell. This campaign was designed to soften AT&T's image and position the company as an indispensable element of everyday American life. - Darian Glover

Based on my friend’s reports, Amazon sounded kind of unstable, so I went with the Flash animation company instead. Flash is now defunct, and Amazon, well, you know. There were so many strange opportunities and near misses in the early days. Once, when I was looking for something to do at work, I decided to reorganize the files for a game in progress, not understanding I was breaking all the links. To great horror for all involved, my boss had to spend a full week rebuilding the game.

In retrospect, I’m surprised they didn’t fire me. I wonder if it’s because the technology was evolving so fast that learning painful lessons on the job was to be expected. Failing fast and failing up were terms I heard tossed around, and I found this approach both inspiring and relieving.