Ghost town

According to the WHOIS records, I first registered hiddencity.net on October 28, 1999. I can’t recall with certainty what I thought I would do with it, beyond a basic personal publishing shtick, combining all my various sites under one umbrella. I remember quite vividly, though, sitting in my home office on a Saturday, poring over arcane references in a quest for inspiration. Eventually I settled on a city theme, as even in those early days it was clear that the strength of the web was in its community and diversity. I wanted Hidden City to be a part of that, an archetypal urban center with streets and alleys running at angles no cobblestones or asphalt could manage.

But of course, the web was much smaller then, and my dreams were much larger.

Today, eight years later, the web has changed. It is far less of a creative frontier, with social codes determined by the pioneers and early settlers, a kind of virtual Deadwood. The citizens of the web are no longer primarily writers and artists, musicians and essayists, hackers and visionaries — the “netizens” are just ordinary people consuming ordinary popular culture; the omnivorous corporations run the show, reducing us to mere demographic metrics, targeted consumers, or occasionally “content creators” churning out snippets to fill the spaces between advertisements. The by-words are no longer community of individuals, but conformity to the masses. A new social networking site even uses the term “herd” to describe its users. I cannot begin to describe how much despair that brings me.

I had planned to write more on this topic — the pointlessness of site design when all content is consumed through RSS; the public relations and marketing companies devouring Twitter feeds to spot trends in feminine hygiene attitudes; the erosion of creativity in the face of Stepford-esque gated community sites (“Click here to be just like everyone else!”) — but I can’t see the point. This is no longer Deadwood; welcome to Fernwood. We’re all the same here, and I guess that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Perhaps I’m just frustrated. At this writing I’m running a fever of nearly 102°, and I had my doctor call me up and tell me tests indicate I have had a minor stroke, but “it’s nothing to worry about,” and now doesn’t want to return my calls. And it’s hard for me to see the upside of the commodification of the promise the Internet once held. Once it was a level playing field with ideas judged on their merits; now you get the playing field your corporate masters want you to have.

But again, just as I said last year, I’m not going away — I just paid for five more years registration on the domain. The streets of the Hidden City may be empty and littered with burnt-out cars; the storefronts advertise products long unavailable; and City Hall’s paint has faded to gray and the flower beds gone to weed. But there are lights in the high windows, and strange crackling sounds burst forth from time to time, along with the sound of hammers, leading the neighbors to wonder — with a hat-tip to Mister Waits — what he’s building in there.

Thanks for reading these long years. I hope you stick around.

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