Authentic Voices in the Internet age: January 29, 2017 Snippets

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Social Capital

6 min readJan 30, 2017

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Earlier this week the creators of Homestar Runner, Matt and Mike Chapman, gave an interview on io9 telling the story of how their strange online animated series came to be:

An oral history of Homestar Runner, the Internet’s favorite cartoon | Luke Winkie with Matt & Mike Chapman, io9

If you didn’t experience it in its weird early-2000s internet glory, Homestar Runner was an early Flash video web site that became popular for seemingly no reason other than that it made absolutely no sense and was very funny. Originally just a group of silly characters the creators made up for their own amusement, the flash video site become popular through word of mouth and helped define a very particular kind of “Internet humor” that thrives to this day. There was something truly charming and authentic about those crudely animated cartoon characters that is hard to describe, but immediately recognizable. That authenticity, in hindsight, would become one of the truly rare and valuable qualities of the Internet age: hard to fake, and easy to appreciate. You know it when you see it. And it’s important for us to pay attention to it, because when we look back at the early internet before it became so full of sound and fury, there were many little keys and hints showing a window to how our future world would work, disguised as jokes like Homestar Runner.

Meanwhile, on cable TV, another crudely-animated show on Comedy Central was turning into an unexpected but dominant franchise: South Park. The humor was different, and the subject material beneath the surface-level jokes was a lot more sophisticated. But the authenticity factor was the same: South Park could cut through a noisy, blah-filled TV environment like a knife through butter, establishing a brand that remains one of the most genuine and prescient voices in media. In a piece last year, Kaleb Horton articulates why South Park was so ahead of its time compared to everybody else, and how its rise to late night TV dominance foreshadowed what was about to happen with media and the Internet:

“What makes the show an institution, in spite of its persistent danger of being so topical that it becomes ephemeral, is the internet. Parker and Stone inadvertently future-proofed the show against the decline of cable. South Park was perfectly suited to internet consumption in a way no other 90s shows were. They had the early internet’s dispassionately antisocial aesthetic locked down before the internet took over. The jokes and pace were loud and fast — it said what it wanted to say as crudely and conversationally as possible. The show’s rudimentary animation style meant you couldn’t ruin its intricacies with digital compression, mainly because there weren’t any intricacies to ruin. This was an enormous priming force toward the mainstreaming of internet distribution.”

South Park was a show for the internet before the internet was a thing | Kaleb Horton, Vice

That final idea — “The show’s rudimentary animation style meant you couldn’t ruin its intricacies with digital compression, mainly because there weren’t any intricacies to ruin” — actually speaks to a lot more than dial-up Internet bandwidth. Both Home Star Runner and South Park mastered the art of storytelling in a way that was peculiarly un-warpable; natively suited to the crowded, noisy, unreliable channel of the web. Today, as we face an epidemic of outrage, fake news and social media saturation online, it is clear just how valuable and rare these authentic and un-warpable voices have become. Home Star Runner is back, and it feels like it never left. South Park remains a smash hit, as astute and culturally relevant as ever. Why? Because they can pierce through the noisy channel of the Internet with so little effort. This matters.

When friction is abolished and everyone has a megaphone, it’s really as though no one does. This is becoming a very real and very serious problem, with implications not just for the spread of information but also for our civil discourse in the internet age. Real policy, real outcomes, and real consequences all hinge on the flow of information, of opinion and of emotion. This past week, we’ve seen the renewed need for clear, urgent and widespread coordinated dialogue like few times we’ve needed before. But without a clear, un-warpable way to express a message with any sense of urgency, we are at the mercy of the noise and chaos that overwhelms by default. If we’re going to learn how to effectively communicate, tell stories and express our ideas in an age of amplification, we really should pay attention to these threads of authenticity. They might teach us something.

Energy and climate:

Base the social cost of carbon on the science | Nature Editorial

Steve Holliday, National Grid CEO: “the idea of large power stations for baseload is outdated” | Karel Beckman, Energy Post

New climate index shows extreme weather is now 3 times more frequent | Don Jergler, Insurance Journal

Global scenarios of urban density and its impacts on building energy use through 2050 | Guneralp et al., Proceedings of the National’ Adacemy of Sciences of the USA

Notable voices:

These times are not business as usual. Wishing you the best in a troubled world | George Soros, Business Insider

Jack Ma: America has wasted its wealth | Stephanie Thomson, World Economic Forum

Shaking up the status quo:

D-Wave’s $15 million quantum computer runs a staggering 2,000 qubits | Agam Shah, PC World

John Arnold made a fortune at Enron. Now he’s declared war on bad science | Sam Apple, Wired

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley wants to disrupt American soccer and improve the USMNT, one club at a time | Leander Schaerlaeckens, Yahoo