Internet marketers have infested the internet for so long that they’re part of the ecosystem. They’re like your brother who keeps trying to cadge rent money and sell you loosies. You don’t exactly like him, but the idea of him gone…

We’re now entering a world where all that shit is just no longer viable. Aaron Wall says it here. The internet is changing, consolidating, and getting harder and harder for little guys. Once, you could register a new domain, spend zero money, and actually rank on Google for stuff. These days, you can sink five figures into a website and attract a number of organic searches closely bounded around “zero”. Search Engine Optimisation was always a bit mysterious. Nobody knew the algorithm by which Google ranked Site A above Site B – but at least we had some decent guesses. Now? It’s fucking impossible.

The three benefits of the internet (from a marketer’s perspective) were: 1) speed, 2) little overhead, 3) potentially viral transmission of messages. All those things come with strings attached. The “speed” aspect means that conditions change too rapidly to be predicted. Having long term plans is impossible, and any success is transient and can vanish overnight. A tailwind that can take you around the world can also sink your ship.

Remember EZineArticles and eHow? It’s been a while since you’ve heard of those sites, hasn’t it? Back when they were ranking on Google, online marketers would write hundreds of spammy articles for those sites, and use the traffic to drive subscribers to their personal lists. Then Google rolled out Panda in 2011, summarily delisted the article farms, and countless online marketers had their income streams obliterated overnight. I still remember the long night of sorrows on the Warrior Forums. One guy actually ended up destitute and selling his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure collection to survive. No kidding.

2) The internet has less overhead, but that means nobody has much of a motive to make things favourable for you or your company. Paying customers get respect. Tire-kickers get shown the door. Anyone who’s ever lost a social media account understands this. Hell, back in the day you could click a copyright claim button on a Youtube video, the video would get taken down with no questions asked, and it would be up to the VIDEO MAKER to prove their innocence! Maybe it’s still that way, for all I know. Unless you’re the guy writing the checks, you’re a shnook.

Is virality on the internet still a thing? This is a much misunderstood term. Virality implies a classic “R > 1” model where content is passed ad-hoc from user to user, gaining strength as it spreads. This does NOT describe the majority of “viral content” on the internet. The main way content gets spread is by famous people sharing it with their followers (there was a study on this, I think). Your best case scenario isn’t “my content will spread like an unstoppable virus!” Think “Ricky Gervais will share my stuff with his 12 million twitter followers!” Yeah, it’s not virality so much as finding someone with a megaphone to shout about your stuff…just like the traditional media the internet was supposed to replace. New boss! Same as the old boss!

Internet marketing itself is a hat with no rabbit. They promote themselves as freewheeling entrepeneurs, brave mavericks thumbing their nose at the nine to five workaday world. In reality, they’re more like hackers. They lucked their way into a glitch in the Matrix, and have earned a pitiful, transient source of income that might vanish at any time…and that time is now. SEO was a glitch. Glitches get fixed. And if there are a few cockroaches hiding inside them, too bad.

Obviously, IMers have to look like paragons of wealth and success to their followers (“fake it till you make it!”), so I doubt you’ll see many of them admit that their cash flow has disappeared. And it’s safe to say that 90% of “make money on the internet” guides should be retitled “stuff that kinda worked back in 2007”.

The Matrix, unlike Keanu Reeves, hasn’t aged well. It wants to be both timeless and futuristic, but that’s impossible, and now it comes off as steampunk: a comical chiaroscuro of old and new. Hackers who share files using compact discs. People who “jack in” using public phone booths. It’s as if a 1997 college kid and a post-singularity wireheader got into a head-on collision and their possessions got mixed together as they were strewn over the highway.

For a while, people joked that we actually do live in the Matrix, and the dwindling numbers of phone booths means Machine City is finally catching on to our means of escape. Imagine it were so. Imagine being a redpilled human inside the Matrix, and knowing that your only escape rests in your masters leaving the door open. No glorious Colditzian escapes. If you want out of the Matrix, you must rely on the most ignoble method of victory imaginable: the enemy making a mistake.

Welcome to internet marketing, where there are fewer phone booths by the day.

When the internet appeared, so did new opportunities to make money. This was not a goose that laid golden eggs. You need products to sell, or services to sell, and most people have neither. “Get rich quick” will never exist on the internet, and for most people, neither will “get rich slow.” Very few people are capable of functioning as entrepeneurs, online or off, even a matter Even if you have a marketable skill, . Someone selling novelty keychains on eBay might make money, but he’s never going to scale that into “fuck you” money.

But you know what does scale? Infoproducts. Get rich quick. It wasn’t the gold miners who made the money during the Yukon gold rush, it was suppliers, the people who made the shovels, the pickaxes, the dynamite. There was only so much gold in the ground, far less than the number of poor schmucks looking for gold. Likewise, it’s been well known for years that the easiest way to get rich from a self-help book is to write one.

Corporate America’s informercial culture soon invaded the internet, flooding the internet with sales pages for shoddy ebooks promising secrets to fantastic wealth and success. A man called Frank Irwin Kern was one of the early ones: his Instant Internet Empires product cost $47.77, and he promised that buyers could make more than $115,000 a year. How? Well, that’s the trick. You were actually buying the right to re-sell the Instant Internet Empires product. To achieve the promised $115,000 year, you’d have to sell the product to 2,400 people. The third generation of the scheme would need to sell the product to 13,829,760,000 people to each make $115,000. This isn’t a pyramid scheme. It’s a four-dimensional hypertetrahedron.

This stuff has been infesting the internet for years, and it’s as much a part of online mythos as the tone of a dialling modem. It’s the fuel of every sales letter (“Are you SURE you want to close this page and miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime?”), the accelerant of every spam email, the catalyst of every Craigslist Herbalife “job opportunity”. Kern was smacked down with an FTC judgement. He had disciples eager to replace him.

And it’s all a glitch in the Matrix. No more phone booths.

More soon.

[adapted from a blog comment]

“This comment section is the high-achieving son of Silver Blaze. It’s not as long, but it’s attracting equally crazy people. Hopefully we’ll get some more Nazis showing up, there’s been disappointingly few this time around.

The argument I keep hearing is that we can fix humanity’s problem du jour…by breeding our way out of it.

Essentially, that the Arab world could get back on track by banning cousin marriage, or importing European/Chinese women. That we could make Western women have children again by axing the welfare state (or whatever the argument is. Coherency is a good thing, guys. Clarity of thought, too). I see this idea everywhere on this blog. “Breeding got us into this mess, and breeding will get us out!”

But selection is very slow.

A eugenic solution would take decades or hundreds of years (if it works). Evolution is faster than Gould believed, but it’s absolutely NOT a solution to any short term geopolitical or demographic issue. You might as well propose a solution to the PNG/Indonesia border dispute that relies on continental drift. I don’t plan on living that long. Do you?

Furthermore, where are the examples of planned, controlled eugenics actually working? What cultures in human history have consciously said “hey, we’re selecting ourselves for something bad, let’s turn this around and select for something good…” and succeeded?

Yes, we’ve accidentally selected ourselves for various things. But every attempt I’ve seen to “put chlorine in the gene pool” (as a friend says) has turned into a horrifying clownfuck of a disaster. Egypt’s dynasties wed brother to sister to preserve the royal bloodline – they got King Tut. The Habsburgs let recessive alleles pile up until they looked like Halloween masks. In 1934, Germany’s schizophrenia rate was 2.0 per 1000. The Nazis came to power and sterilized and/or killed nearly every schizophrenic in the country. Forty years later, Germany’s schizophrenia rate was re-tested. 1.5. D’oh!.

I’m able to take a lesson: we are not good at doing this.

A third fly in the ointment: do we really have much time left? I’m not some hardcore lesswrongfag who thinks the Singularity’s five minutes away, but the 10,000 year explosion never stopped happening, and soon accelerating technology (CRSPR/Cas, etc) might make the process of breeding obsolete. There’s no reason to rely on traditional methods for creating smart people. Greg has some ideas here. Or perhaps you want to get on Stephen Hsu’s crazy train. What’s the point of shuffling around recombinant DNA in the hopes lucking into a few IQ points when we could isolate all the variants involved in higher IQ, and then stack the deck? Are we really sure this won’t happen in the next hundred years or so (a paltry 3-4 generations away?)

We spend lots of time kicking around nurturists. Ironically, this might be an area where they have us by the balls. If you want to fix any kind of short term disaster hanging over our heads, it HAS to be through environmental measures. Selection just doesn’t work fast enough.

What if no environmental measures are possible? What if we’re just screwed?

Well, has anyone seen Star Trek: TNG, specifically “The Lower Decks”? Worf challenges Sito Jaxa to pass an ancient Klingon test. He blindfolds her, and they spar. She gropes in the dark, while he pummels her defenseless body. It’s hopeless. How can you fight a person you can’t see?

Eventually, Sito gets frustrated, pulls off the blindfold, and refuses to fight any more. Worf tells her she’s passed the test.”