How the web was lost

oh god.

By whatever authority I have as an erstwhile webcomic author, I would bracket the period from 2000–2007 as the golden age of the online comic strip.¹ Not that we are or have ever been in danger of running out of well-written and visually captivating pictorial narratives to read in our browser windows, nor have webcomics declined in quality. To the contrary, today's strips display more technical proficiency and polish than the ones I followed in the early aughts. But the medium's glory days are nevertheless behind it.

I won't embarrass myself by trying to polish whatever infinitesimal legacy is left to my contribution, but I do take pride in having participated in what could fairly (if immodestly) be called a subcultural movement.² The webcomics scene, with its DIY ethos, camaraderous social networks, and the ingenuous passion of amatuerdom as its élan vital, was for kids like me what the ska punk scene was to my more gregarious friends.³ 

Jackie Lesnick, Girly (2003–2010)

At the beginning, nobody began cobbling together comic strips and slapping them up on the internet as part of a plan to pay off their student loans. Money and fame weren't the goal. Many of the early scene's biggest names—including ones who remain active to this day and have blueticked Twitter accounts—started out making and sharing their comic strips purely for amusement. For the first year or so of its run, Zach Weiner's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal was a series of scanned pencil drawings he produced in class in lieu of taking notes.⁴ The first pages of Brian Clevinger's 8-Bit Theater certainly don't read like the work of someone who approached his web presence as though it were an audition for a Marvel Comics gig. David Rees assembled the first Get Your War On strips as a means of sorting through and screaming out his thoughts on 9/11 and the Bush Administration's ghastly, shambolic crusade against "terror." Even when the strip was appearing in Rolling Stone, Rees leased no space to advertisers on his website, maintained an irregular update schedule, and permanently retired the comic the day Bush vacated the White House.

David Rees, Get Your War On (2001–2009)

By modern standards, even the luminaries of early-aughts webcomics shone rather modestly. In 2006, Penny Arcade (which owed its status as the big kahuna of online comics to having been around since dial-up modems) was receiving two million views per day—which is roughly twenty percent of the daily traffic to PewDiePie's YouTube channel. Far fewer people were aware of Fred Gallagher's Megatokyo circa 2000–2005 than have seen KC Green's epochal "this is fine" strip in the last five years. Moderately popular comics like Nothing Nice to Say and Chugworth Academy had trade paperbacks for sale at Barnes and Noble, but their creators never reached the level of visibility enjoyed by even the B-listers of today's "influencer" caste.

Dave Cheung, Chugworth Academy link image (capture archived 2004)⁵

It must be emphasized that before the mid-aughts, there was no established method for converting page views into revenue. The artists and writers who realized they could quit their day jobs by selling ad space and T-shirts, finding publishers for printed collections, and soliciting donations (sometimes offering "cheesecake" pinups as donor gifts, skeevily prefiguring OnlyFans), were, by the seats of their pants, helping to compose the rules for monetizing free digital content. In doing so, they were professionalizing what had begun as an amateur endeavor, and what ensued was a quiet gold rush. Hierarchies crystallized. Enterprising observers founded webcomics listings that offered exposure in exchange for money or traffic. Others wrote blog posts instructing artists in how to get noticed, insisting upon frenetic update schedules and targeted content, outlining networking strategies, and recommending cross-promotion with one's other business ventures.

2008(?) blog post capture, archived 2011 

The evolution of the webcomic through the aughts may be correlated with the fate of the blog, whose development and coming of age were in many ways analogous to its own. People involved in the webcomics scene who read Silicon Valley archskeptic Nick Carr's 2008 eulogy to the blogosphere may have found parts of his postmortem dismally familiar:

That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

The buzz has left blogging...and moved, at least for the time being, to Facebook and Twitter.

I was a latecomer to blogging, launching Rough Type in the spring of 2005. But even then, the feel of blogging was completely different than it is today. The top blogs were still largely written by individuals. They were quirky and informal. Such blogs still exist (and long may they thrive!), but...they’ve been pushed to the periphery.

The trends of careerism, overcrowding, competition, and immitigable stratification doomed the old blogosphere to elanguescence and sapped the webcomics scene of much of its early energy. However, the changes wrought upon each by the renovation of The Information Superhighway into Web 2.0 were not identical. The webcomic artist never found herself trying to keep pace and fight for attention with the visual-narrative equivalent of Gawker or The Huffington Post; but by the same token, search-engine optimized content mills had little interest in putting her on the payroll. The blogger, to the best of my knowledge, was never inveigled into paying a monthly fee to a scammy "Top Blogs" index to put his banner or link button into rotation the way the frustrated and unnoticed webcomic artist was, nor was he as likely to have been tempted to produce erotic content for attention and commissions.⁶ In any case, by 2010 it was abundantly clear that the wave on which amateur comickers and chroniclers had rode in at the start of the decade had crashed and receded.

Much of what made the early-aughts internet's culture and landscape so interesting were those elements that had rolled over from the modular nineties, when most commercial websites were basically pamphlets and catalogues in hypertext, content aggregators were practically nonexistent, and the upvote button was still a twinkle in some software engineer's eye. If you were to open your browser window in 1997 and search for "x files" on WebCrawler or Yahoo, most of the results would be homebrewed personal pages. After clicking on a link and browsing an enthusiast's plot summaries and mythology theories, you might arrived at a links section and click around to see what other topics and people your host fancies. You might find an X-Files webring panel at the page's footer and go on to find out how the next webmaster in the chain brings his or her own sensibilities to bear on the same material. Often fanpages like these were subsections of somebody's personal website; after reading about Mulder and Scully, you might follow a link back to the homepage and learn more about your host.

Ranma 1/2 fanpage capture, archived 1998. (Incidentally, the webmistress
was also the artist of the first webcomic I ever read.)

While personal websites of the 1990s deserve their ex post facto reputation for crude design, we miss the essence of what made the "wild west" internet so much fun to explore if we denigrate enthusiastic dabblers on the basis of their amateur status. Here were scores, hundreds, thousands of people who went about constructing their web presences not as résumés, networking instruments, or business investments, but like sandcastles, cheerily piling them up and inviting people to come over and look at what they'd made. True, many of them had only a passing knowledge of HTML and could have benefited from a short course in color and composition theory; and as an aggregate they committed far more effort to celebrating mass-cultural trivialities than anyone should have been comfortable with.⁷ But these hypertext collages, made under no compulsion and freely offered to the world, don't represent a "primitive phase" of online content generation so much as a brief flowering of folk art. A kind of bastard folk art, yes, but an active strain of culture nonetheless. There were no winners or losers here: the hits counter at the bottom of our webmaster's X-Files page might have registered less traffic than the one on the more polished and comprehensive site preceding his on the webring, but what did that matter? It was all in fun. Nothing was actually at stake.

By the end of the aughts, this attitude was considerably more difficult to maintain.

The centripetal tendencies of the commercialized internet, and the discovery that views could be alchemized into revenue through targeted advertising and data collection, created very clear winners and losers. The upper-echelon webcomic artists paying off their mortgages through sales of ad space and merchandise, and the entrepreneurs who founded profitable media companies that factory-farmed bloglike content were not losers by any metric, but in the big picture, they were runners-up. The big winners were the emerging social media giants: the platforms that devised the revolutionary business model of recruiting users as an army of unpaid laborers continuously manufacturing content while simultaneously consuming that content, free of charge, along with the paid-for advertisements embedded within.

The major platforms' clearing of the neighborhood was effectuated from the mid-aughts through the mid-twenty-tens. At first, the artist or writer would take to Facebook, Twitter, and/or possibly Tumblr to promote their work and link to their offsite personal pages. Over time, they discovered that the platforms (and their massive, built-in audiences) favored content that wasn't hosted offsite. The webcomic creator who'd fought like hell to amass a sufficiently large and reliable audience to earn an income through website ads found those revenues shrinking as his fans shared his latest strips on Twitter and Facebook without actually linking to his page. The Wordpress blogger began to notice that her tweet rants were seeing more activity than the links to her longform pieces. By and by, the personal comics page, illustration gallery, or blog became pointless (except as a stiff, perfunctory "portfolio") unless its owner was already established and recognized.⁸ It's more expedient for the creator to host her material exclusively on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc., and include a Patreon link in her bio blurb.

The most immediately apparent consequence of the mass migration onto the giant platforms was the user's sacrifice of control. The homepages of the nineties and early aughts looked janky, but they had flavor. They included nothing that their designers, amateurs though they might have been, didn't make the deliberate choice to put there, and to arrange and order however they pleased. A common complaint of Facebook's early detractors was that the new platform, unlike the earlier user-friendly substitutes to the personal site (MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, etc.) didn't allow users to modify their profiles' appearance or layout. This has since become so standardized across social media (Tumblr being an exception) that it's beside the point now.

What should be a matter of greater concern are the parameters that the social media giants impose upon the content a user might wish to share. We're all familiar with Twitter's character limit and its incentivization of histrionic, paranoid gibberish. Fandom, née Wikia—the personal fansite’s corporate, crowdsourced replacement—welcomes (unpaid) contributions, but requires that its articles conform to the organization and house style established by Wikipedia. More subtly, Instagram and Facebook truncate post text with a "see more" tab after a certain number of line breaks, effectively disincentivizing posts that run over that length. In the same manner, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter discourage the posting (and thereby the creation) of images that deviate from the platform’s preferred aspect ratio. (So much for Scott McCloud's extolling the promise of the "infinite canvas.") On Facebook and Twitter, a comic strip that must be clicked on and expanded to be viewed in full is liable to getting scrolled past. While Facebook and Twitter allow users to share links, they grant that permission grudgingly. The preview displays on those platforms cut off headlines and the excerpted text, and give the user has little control over the thumbnail image. Getting the link to your blog, comics page, Twitch channel, etc. to look good enough to compel someone to put the brakes on the scroll takes a bit of doing, and this is by design: a platform that earns most of its revenue from targeted advertisements has an interest in dissuading its users from navigating away from its digital fief.

The most noxious of these platforms' locked-in features are the points system and the public scoreboard. Visual artists and writers are the least of their victims: they've acted as the vectors for some of the last decade's most discussed tech-related pathologies—Facebook and FOMO, Instagram and the nettling intimations of the inadequacy of one's appearance/lifestyle, the mass-hypnotic atavism of Twitter, and so on. Having their performance graded and constantly seeing everyone else's rankings displayed within sight of their own can make social media overwhelming and humiliating, even for people who just want to share photos and thoughts with their circles of acquaintance. It's not much better if you're "good" at it: prolific and popular Twitter users claim the platform makes them anxious, and it isn't simply from absorbing the invective brain rot of which the platform's "discourse" largely consists. They report the anxiety that precedes the submission of content and the disappointment that sometimes follows. Oh god is this a good idea what if it doesn't perform well what if nobody cares? And: Oh god it's been ten minutes and no likes what did I do what did I do wrong? I recently had coffee with a woman whose roommate, she tells me, is an "influencer-level" Instagram user, and apparently has a fitful, anxious relationship with the app.

Twitter exchange (2020)

The comic illustrator who wants to share her work with more people than just her coworkers and Tinder dates has little choice but to subject herself and her practice to the malignant Skinner box of social media. She has before her at all times a numerical readout of how precisely many people gave a damn about her last contribution, how many people give a damn about her in general, and how her valuation compares to that of her former SVA classmates, her high school friends who went into different fields, and other comic artists, aspirants and professionals alike. She knows that her cumulative record factors into the way other users prejudge her, and is aware that her popularity determines whether her work will show up in people's algorithmically-sorted feeds or be automatically recommended to other users. Speaking from experience, it can be miserable and debasing. It's easy to feel like the kid who drops a card into all his classmates' Valentines Day boxes and receives none himself. What the hell am I doing wrong what does it take?

Several of the amateur illustrators I follow on Twitter exhibit a cyclic pattern: over a period of two weeks to a month, they'll post one or two drawings a day—which is fairly prolific for someone with a full-time job. Some will get a few likes, and maybe a retweet or two. Then one night they'll tweet something like "I'm in a bad headspace I need some time away" and disappear for a while. When they return a week or two later, they’re in better spirits, but they usually take some time to get back into the groove. They'll post some drawings and watch the Notifications icon light up a few times. Their tweets suggest they're satisfied with their recent pieces; they ramp up their output over the next couple of weeks. Then they crack, announce they're depressed and apologize to everyone, and vanish again.

Perhaps my memory is unreliable, but I don't recall this happening so frequently or so conspicuously on any of the old webcomics message boards and IRC channels I used to visit.

When an artist chooses social media to be the vehicle of their work, there's a good chance that the self-reinforcement of the creative process will lose its relevance as a behavioral variable as the conditioned reinforcer of the Notifications icon acquires control. This is precisely what Instagram and Twitter are designed to do, and it’s the key to the variable-ratio reinforcement schedule on which their business models are founded. A small, irregular trickle of conditioned reinforcers (likes, shares, replies, new followers, etc.) is not only adequate to keep a habit locked in for a long time, it does so more effectively than a fixed-ratio reward schedule.⁹ Undoubtedly you've read elsewhere that this is the same behavioral hack that makes a gambler unable to tear herself away from a slot machine. It makes its epiphenomenal ingression as the goading supposition that maybe this time will be different.

The comparison of Instagramming to slot jockeying is an apposite one, given the implication of a potential jackpot. Social media, like a Vegas casino, dangles the remote possibility of a life-changing, liberating payoff in front of visitors' faces. You could go viral. You could become "internet famous." You never know. The comic artist familiar with Kate Beaton and Allie Brosh knows that shares and retweets gave them careers. The writer trying to sell her first manuscript shortly becomes aware that literary agents are just as interested in the size of her social media following as they are in her novel's plot. The Instagrammer and YouTuber both know from the onset that surpassing a certain followers count is the first step toward leveraging their influence to generate income. And it's hard to blame people for wanting to play the game: by all accounts, becoming a human content mill is exhausting, but so is ringing people up at Target, steaming lattes at Starbucks, bussing tables at TGI Friday's, getting yelled at by angry customers at a call center, and scuttling around an Amazon warehouse. Even if running oneself ragged working on illustration commissions and following through on promises to Patreon donors ultimately doesn't generate much more income than a wage job, at least it would mean getting a little fucking recognition from someone.

Instagram post, June 2020. (The user is still updating.)

The background of the present narrative, from GeoCities to TikTok, has been a world in which conditions for working people have been getting worse for decades. Wages have stagnated. The workday has grown longer. The threat of automation and the ongoing cycle of economic bipolarity (not to mention the unresolved COVID-19 crisis) leave many of us uncertain whether our jobs will still exist five years from now. The hollowing out of the middle class and the trend of downward economic mobility has produced a generation of art-school and humanities graduates stocking supermarket shelves and signing up to be Uber and DoorDash drivers. Probably the competition and desperation for social media success through reptile-brained microblogging, memes masquerading as comic strips, prurient illustrations/selfies, etc. wouldn't be so fierce today if people didn't hate their goddamned day jobs so goddamned much—and their stations in life might not be the source of so much ressentiment if their wages increased with productivity, if the length of the workday or workweek were shorter, or if employers (and the public) were more inclined to treat working people with respect.

The social complex that has made wage labor increasingly precarious and degrading since the mid-twentieth century is also responsible for the conditions that drove a cohort of withdrawn creatives online to find friends and express themselves. As nostalgic as we might be for the old internet, much of its contents were an indirect product of late-capitalist social atomization. The reason one makes an OkCupid profile today is because of the difficulty of meeting potential partners now that offline social networks (churches, civic organizations, bowling leagues, etc.) are at a low ebb;  the reason one shared her Tenchi Muyo! fanart on LiveJournal in 1999 was because her classmates or coworkers (and who else was/is there, really?) weren't interested. Or perhaps because her friends and neighbors mattered less to her than the idea of an "audience" inculcated by the culture industry and isolation. In any case, fewer people would have gone to the internet to express themselves if immediate social reinforcers operated more abundantly and effectively than electronically mediated rewards.

The early internet—webcomics, blogs, personal homepages, and all—was an uncoordinated group effort to escape from the disconnection, competitive pressures, and hierarchy of the turn-of-the-century capitalist state by cultivating a breathing space in a newly formed interstice of its architecture. It has been difficult for me to come to terms with the realization that much of what the early "netizens" did ultimately amounted to preparatory work for their corporate colonizers. To have been involved in the webcomics scene when it was still exciting and relatively egalitarian was a joy, but the signification of the ".com" domain extension should have warned us that the well was already poisoned.

classics never die.

Many of us old enough to remember the world before wi-fi, when the web was a desktop retreat from the aggravations of school and work, the vicissitudes of social life, and the Serious narratives of the day are still apt to remark our astonishment at how much the internet has become like the "real" world. Over the last few years, I've had occasion to wonder if an inflection point has been passed, and real life is starting to become less like the internet. I mean that the web has become so overheated, so populous, so relevant that offline pursuits and groups have become a source of respite. Before COVID-19, some of the times I found myself coming back to this idea were at poetry readings, weekly open-mic nights, and small zine fests around town. How good it was to see people just sharing their stuff and casually yakking it up with other hobbyists. And how few clout-chasers and ambitious self-promoters there were! There were people who'd come out hoping to sell books and stickers, sure, and it's doubtful that nobody there was interested in networking—but by now the careerists know they'd be better served staying at home and trying to increase their follower/subscriber counts.

It might seem paradoxical, but I'm coming to believe that the greatest hope anyone has of recreating a space like the early-aughts internet for artists and writers is taking their work offline and building local, IRL groups of support and collaboration. The corporate playground iteration of the web has become the place where joy goes to die, but that destination needn't be inevitable.

1. 2000–2007: the lifespan of David Anez's Bob and George. A coincidence, I'm sure.

2. Whatever legacy it has, I mean, aside from increasing the total number of sprite comics on the internet by one. The ignominy is as indelible as a pixel-art tattoo.

3. People like me: a bloc of introverted adolescents who spent far too much time surfing the internet and playing video games, and who suffered from varying degrees of anomie.

4. Weiner removed these early strips from the comic's archives well over a decade ago.

5. The inclusion of this image should not be read as an endorsement of Chugworth Academy. The strip sticks in my memory because it (and its high ranking on webcomic popularity lists) got on my damn nerves.

6. There are illustrators who'd be drawing and sharing pics of futa furries regardless of remuneration, but I'm not talking about them.

7. Yeah, yeah. I know what I've done. I'm not well.

8. Probably a blog like this one, anachronistic and untrafficked, is as pointless as a bed of moss growing unnoticed on a damp rock in the middle of the woods. But I'm a big fan of moss.

9. See BF Skinner's Science and Human Behavior, chapter 6.