A Beautiful Web

People often assume I have “classy” cultural tastes. I don't, really. I have a decent enough palate for white wine, I suppose, and a fairly good breadth of reading, but that's about it. I'm not even well travelled — frankly, I dislike being more than a rough curry away from my own toilet.

Further evidence of my manque de raffinement: the films I've watched most are Baywatch and Starship Troopers; I'll read parking tickets before I ever open Dostoevsky again; and my view of fine dining is 'why are they serving me from the tasting menu?' It is TV, though, that might be my trashiest vice.

Total Wipeout, Takeshi's Castle, whatever's lurking at the back of BBC iPlayer — I'll watch it late into the night and regret nothing. About twice a decade, I'll even rewatch all four terrible seasons of a nineties sci-fi called Lexx, and all eight original seasons of Red Dwarf. And I enjoy every smegging minute of it.

All the same, I'm an internet snob. YouTube thumbnails make me want to puke, the videos behind most of them put my teeth on notice, for the life of me I can't understand what Twitch streaming does for an audience. And, while I'm at it, Mr. Beast's success makes me hope the nukes launch and some other creature gets to evolve into first place. I have no right to these opinions — they are rank hypocrisy.

Putting my snobbery aside for a moment, Mr. Beast is objectively as much a genius as any. Granted, his talents might not have worked in a different time — you can't see him faring well in Viking Age Scandinavia, for example. But neither would Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, or Isaac Newton (although a young Descartes might have loved it). A sad fact of fate is that we succeed or fail by our synergy with the time and place we find ourselves. Mr. Beast fits the internet in the current era — including, reportedly, capitalism's less edifying managerial practices.

Also fitting our epoch are: garish adverts with men shouting investment advice; "Nobody believed what happened next" clickbait; endless short videos of young women dancing to absolutely no music; product placements so obvious they'd embarrass the producers of Friends; a set of ridiculous facial exercises called "mewing" that physiologically can't have any effect; and some really weird stuff involving Sonic the Hedgehog and the Microsoft paperclip.

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But does any of it actually lower culture's proverbial bar? I mean, we were watching accidental groin injuries on candid camera TV shows before the web happened. And let's be honest, 'man lands balls first on a fence post' is as universally funny as 'goat headbutts man in the nuts', and the more of these clips the showrunners queued, the funnier they all became. Perhaps the bar has always been a tad lower than we'd like to admit?

Or maybe there's a generational issue behind my online pomposity?

Depending on your definition, I'm either a young Gen X or an old Millennial. (Personally, I think the definition should be whether you saw your first online naked person through dial-up or broadband, but nobody agrees with me). The point is that people my age are the only ones who can look through the disapproving, spectacled eyes of middle-age and see an internet we had as children.

And everything is worse when you compare it to childhood. The English summers I knew as a kid, for instance, were always sunny, the winters always crisp and icy, the people always friendly. And although I know none of this is true, I'm not making it up — I really do remember things this way.

Psychologists might attribute this to the 'fading effect bias' — negative memories fade faster than positive ones, so after a few decades, everything seems rose-tinted — but I think being a kid is simply amazing, and you remember it as such. Either way, the modern web has no hope of matching up to my subjective past.

Luckily, a fittingly cathartic kind of content is being made for the 35-50 age bracket. An online cottage industry has emerged of people recording themselves cleaning their houses. They give time-saving tips, advice on organizing kitchen cupboards, you regularly hear the satisfying crackle as a vacuum cleaner goes over the "good and dirty" bit of the carpet. It's all great stuff.

It's not going to raise the cultural bar, however. I don't think anything ever has. Or will.

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https://www.benjclarke.me/p/a-beautiful-web

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