deathmtn

A dismaying thing is how much of current gaming culture is locked behind Discords, and/or is revealed to the world only through Youtube videos.

These two phenomena are the result of the Myth of the Benevolent Corporation, which was largely started by early Google and their “Do No Evil” policy, which sustained the early web for a good while but itself did huge damage to online culture, and yet promises to do much much more, when they decided that profits mattered more.

…

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, there are vast swaths of online culture that are already lost permanently: the Compuserve forums of the era immediately preceding the rise of the web. Compuserve was once the biggest online presence. And AOL, which grew to eclipse it in size, likewise holds (still? I don’t know, it’s on AOL!) a vast amount of early internet culture.

I’m no longer seeking explanations for inscrutable emotions, wondering: ‘Why am I feeling this way?’ I’m now exploring somewhere new, asking: ‘What is this space and how does it work?’

Liam Gillick remarks to his fellow conceptual artists John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, and the curator Beatrix Ruf:

People either functionalise the work, instrumentalise it, or use it as a metaphorical structure. The truth is that the work is none of these things alone. The object is neither just functional nor is it exactly a metaphor of the idea of a place for something to happen. It has potential, it is in a constant state of ‘becoming’.