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The always engrossing Things Magazine refers us to a quite excellent essay composed by the consummate Kate Wagner (previously) on the manner in which the old grifter nostalgia is cannibalising and repackaging the old, aspirational internet and selling it back to us at a premium.
For the sake of sleekness and convenience, we’ve relinquished a lot of our agency for something that was not inevitable yet a natural consequence of the capitalist model made virtual perfect and instantaneous by ghettoization and other forms of corralling. The interregnal period between the transition from the scientific, professional internet to the interwebs of throttling and objectification is characterised as the age of Vaporware, Vaporwave—referring to items that are prototyped and test-marketed but never released—references Karl Marx’ (the thinker being the original arbiter of the free exchange of ideas—advocating that when “society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”) other pronouncement “All that is solid melts into air.”