Facebook Tamed the Feral Internet—and That’s Too Bad

She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico.

The ISPs tried with all the powers of middlebrow marketing to make something user-friendly that wasnt friendly at alla half-orc painted up to look like a Disney character. Still, AOL and CompuServe deserve credit: The first wave of the digital middle class poured in through the Mall of Americastyle UX, and AOLs and CompuServes illusion of order gentrified things.

Shortly after, as it spread to all colleges and then outside dot-edu, some Ohio University kids set up an account for me.

After all, Facebook addressed itself to something that wasnt a problem: the occasional incoherence of the Web 1.0 villages. In Japan, according to sociologist Con Isshow, the internet was always seen as rich, thick soil for the youngits generative chaos vitally necessary for the development of jungly imaginations.Teenagers and twentysomethings could flee the stultifying stratification of Japanese society in favor of roleplaying where they could experiment with identities: heroic, gender-bending, scholarly, angry, romantic.

But since getting off Facebookwith its imperative to keep your private life data-minable and your public life a branding exerciseIve fared better.