Do you ever think about the internet? I mean, of course you do: practically everyone has been forced to spend a dispiriting amount of their lives on the internet over the last year in particular, and the great promise of its connective technology starts to feel drained of all joy when it is forced to replace, rather than complement, the “natural” social interactions most of us have always taken for granted. It feels often as if the internet has flooded our lives, overwhelming our daily routines and habits, even seeping into private or forgotten corners of our being we may once have considered immune.
So: what do you think about when you think about the internet? Perhaps because the technology which underpins it is largely invisible to the end user, the internet invites creative use of analogy, demands insightful metaphors to make it understandable. Some of these have become unutterable, even in the spirit of irony: "the information superhighway", "surfing the net" – these phrases have been drained of their resonance. And yet it feels to me like there is a lack now, a void where the clarifying image should be.
It is hard not to think of the internet as a place, though of course that makes no sense at all once you get literal about it. And if the internet is not a place, can it be said to have a time? It's long been recognised that the internet can warp our time in strange ways; time is easily lost there, expanded, minimised, made meaningless in one way or another. You can spend nearly all your time "there", leaving you with the sense that you have no time in real life. It is: distraction, boredom, work, leisure, entertainment, society, cartoon, crowded, lonely, cesspit, heaven. It is everything at once, the best and worst of us, all the time. (Is it any wonder that the instinct to flee is so strong?)
Time may be strange on the internet, but it is nonetheless passing. Which is to say, the internet is aging. I’ve probably been on the internet for almost 25 years now. It has changed a lot in that time. But like the rest of us, the internet holds its own past inside itself, never fully overwriting the earlier versions of itself. Those embarrassing aesthetic choices, naive passions, and misguided avenues of personal exploration are still present, ghostly now, within the networks. Flash is deprecated, MySpace is haunted, Facebook is almost old enough to vote. It is possible today to be nostalgic for an earlier internet, to look at where things have come to and say, take me back to a time before the questionably benevolent dictatorship of the algorithm.
In 2015 – several aeons ago in internet time – I started a website called Fallow Media. Its aim was to be kind of like a traditional punk zine; hand-made, happily niche, quietly resisting the dominant media forces of its time. At that time (gather round now, children) the big thing in internet media was scale: Buzzfeed and its many imitators were chasing scale, trying to get as many clicks on as many vacuous articles as possible. It required everyone involved to write fast, to have sparky headlines, to tweet incessantly, to pivot to video. It seemed to me then, as it does now, to be a shell-game – there were only so many eyes to go around, and eventually the advertisers would realise they weren’t worth very much anyway.
If it was just Buzzfeed working that hustle, it wouldn’t have mattered much. But the mentality had clearly seeped into everything from no-audience blogs to hard news coverage. Having the snappy take, and having it first, was the only way to achieve lift-off through the social platforms. The end result was a torrent of indistinguishable content, water-cannoned through the same funnels in search of the same overstuffed eyes.
A natural opposition arose: a wave of anti-internet sentiment, best expressed through the concept of the “digital detox”, “experiential marketing”, and the fetishisation of exclusive physical objects. Within this, there was rarely any attempt to understand the strengths and opportunities of the internet; instead, the strategy was one of well-heeled, holier-than-thou retreat into reassuringly expensive consumer goods. As it often is in politics, both “sides” seemed to be selling the same thing with different stickers on the front.
Fallow Media was intended as an experiment to discover if a different mode of publishing was possible on the internet. If the internet still could, as in olden days, be remade. Our interest was simply in art: literature, music, film; essays, stories, poems; strange work that was none of those things. A couple of unusual choices were made at the beginning of the journey: everything we published would have its own unique design, there would be no templates, there would be no sketchy user tracking, no advertising, and we would attempt to pay writers properly for their work. After five years and over 50 unique, one-off projects, I think we can say that the experiment has been worthwhile.
Fallow Media is now a team of four. We have subscribers from all over the world who support what we do. We have the backing of the Arts Council, which has allowed us to be ambitious and to pay writers and artists properly for their work. We have published our first book, Some Good Will Come, which might be seen as a retreat into consumer goods, but thankfully it’s neither expensive nor exclusive. And we still have some hunger to seek out new ways of doing things – to keep a little corner of the internet home-made and a little quixotic; a small way of saying, it can always be different.
Some Good Will Come is an anthology of selected work from the first five years of Fallow Media. It features work from Kevin Breathnach, Shane Culloty, Adrian Duncan, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Anne Hayden, David Hayden, Tim MacGabhann, Ian Maleney, Orla McGinnity, Rebecca O'Dwyer, Gareth Smyth, Cathy Sweeney, Suzanne Walsh. It is available for purchase now through the Fallow Media website and from selected bookshops.
