I had grand plans of posting something about Godzilla today, but that will have to wait for these delightful rats. These tiny furry folx learned to associate pushing a little button with getting a sugar treat. As time progressed, though, they ended up just pushing the button for fun.
The results are about as delightful as you’d expect.
The project was led by French photographer Augustin Lignier, whose work explores the technography and performativity of photography. I came across the work due to the mighty Kottke, who quotes a New York Times piece where Lignier considers that the rats’ continued button-mashing as a neat analog for our addiction to social media.
As platforms morph, shrink, converge, collapse all over the internet, one begins to wonder what the web of the imminent future might look like. While I did mention grassroots movements and community-run services like Neocities in my last post, the network effects that platforms like Substack, X, hell, even WordPress right here, can offer, are often more tempting than a cutesy throwback. That is to say nothing of the ease with which said platforms integrate with other services to maximise attention on their users.
Substack and X are feeling the squeeze of the real world to greater and lesser degrees; the former as a safe space for Nazis, the latter as a haven for AI-generated deepfakes. But where one platform collapses, another will happily take its place, unless we all decide to opt out together.
The internet of the future will be several interweaved different platforms, modes, nodes, devices, personalities, and communities. In a way it has always been so, but with its sheer ubiquity, the way it layers over and enfolds so many aspects of existence, thinking ‘the internet’ (or even ‘the Internet’, as autocorrect seemed to cling to forever) as a monolith is now a waste of time.
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