Dear readers and customers,
we are doing it.
It may be a slow process and may take a long time. But users are actually bringing the Internet back.
It’s a mighty good feeling!
You know before FAANG we didn’t have a centralised web. It was the Internet’s architecture itself which was built around a highly decentralised approach. What seemed completely chaotic at first was a killer feature for the freedom of information we had in the 90s and early 2000s. Only a tiny bit of it still exists today. Of course it may look outdated (like IRC) but it’s still there. Our new hope mainly lies in the fediverse now. And similar movements driven by individuals for other fields too.
Revolutions don’t happen without cataclysms.
Google wouldn’t have invented a search engine when information on the web would have been findable. Apple wouldn’t have invented the iPhone if mobile phones wouldn’t have been crappy technology. And Netflix wouldn’t have been able to strive when the movie industry wouldn’t have found leverages to take down (mostly illegal) streaming. In the beginning, we could have happily applauded for those big corporations to find solutions to problems existing. What wasn’t so cool though, was the fact that the exact same corporations started building monopolies around their inventions. This led to the state the web is in today: a pityful, centralised, sophisticated designed and gated anti-community of dopamine inducing bubble blobs. Each blob existing with its own millions if not billions of users. Trapped in there like drug addicts not knowing that all they consume is algorithmically provided by a machine they are incapable to understand even a fraction of its inner simple logical working. This is exactly what the Internet didn’t want to be. And it’s the virtual extension of the exact same old world governed by the exact same outdated mechanisms of the 1960s or even before. A mentality not suitable for the future to come. A world not suitable for us to be capable of living in today.
Cataclysms happen all the time.
They are a part of life, part of the universe itself. Sometimes without any mentioning in the big wide media world. The opposite was true when Twitter was converted to X by an eccentric billionaire. Maybe that was the last big cataclysm we were witnessing when thinking about when exactly people took back the Internet a bit more. There were more of course but let’s take this one as the last huge one for the next explosion for the fediverse in 2021/2022. Like the Internet itself, it may be difficult to describe what the fediverse is. Imagine the fediverse bringing social networks back to the people one step at the time. We are collectively smarter today than in 2008. So of course we found out what we like in social networks and what we don’t. People started building up on that.
More connect themselves to those decentralised social networks: the European Union. Blogging platforms like Ghost. The popular Twitter killer Mastodon is introducing third-party-apps for new innovative features. The list goes on as this is only the news flash from the last couple of weeks.
Bit by bit, it looks a bit like the 90s are back. It looks like people understand in the meantime and worship what it means to be part of a truly decentralised network. This is no geek movement anymore, even your neighbour could be an individual Mastodon hoster. And what started once with social networks will spread to other fields: streaming. Retail. Who knows maybe even online search and mobile networks. All it needs is the appropriate code to be released in the wild for anyone to use. And the passion and creativity for people all over the world to build upon it. After all, these are all democratic movements and seeing them winning is seeing democracy winning. A mighty good feeling indeed!
So long and let’s keep on the dreaming,
the aethyx staff
P.S.: for many years, we provide our own social network which is open to anyone here. Join us there in the fediverse and look around, we bet you will find something you like!
Dear readers and customers,
And nevertheless at the end of each day, we still have so many open tabs in our browsers, on mobile devices we already see an infinity sign – the browser lost control of the amount of open tabs.
But fret not!
Keep the tabs open!
There was never more information out there to process for humans and bots alike.
A link shared delayed is better than a link never shared!
Because sharing is caring.
All the best,
your aethyx staff
Dear readers and customers,
the pandemic and now an ongoing war in Europe since over a year combined with an excessive media consumption because of several lockdowns through this entire time made one thing clear: “everything falls apart”.
But is this really the case?
Can we say that peoples’ interests and what the media provides for its consumers became really worse?
Is this just a subjective opinion, varying from individual to individual, or is it scientifically traceable?
That’s exactly what we did in our now finished field study “Into The German Mind” from February 2022 to February 2023.
We wanted to know what really grinds the gears for Germans and makes it to the top on Google Trends.
Here are the results from one whole year of observation:
Somehow you need to provide proof if you think everything is going to sh*t.
Somehow bad media coverage should be traceable.
The same is true for the interest of the average media consumer: if there is no interest in serious or relevant topics, media outlets won’t provide this as they can’t sell ads here and make no money. It’s a no-brainer.
So let us categorise the results for you now for easier interpretation, starting with the most sought after and going down from there:
Entertainment: IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII III
Sports: IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIII
Politics: IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII
Life: IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII
Economy: IIIII IIIII II
Technology: IIIII I
Crime: IIIII
Health: IIII
Art: III
Science: II
Religion: II
And the winner is: Entertainment! One hundred and thirteen mentionings out of 329 overall in only one year! What people in Germany want and “need” the most, a country with to date 83 million inhabitants, is not health, not science, not even sports, they want entertainment! So Kurt Cobain in “Smells like teen spirit” (1991) was totally right: “Here we are now, entertain us!” And it seems nothing changed in 32 long years. Heavy. If you can’t provide news and links and junk and whatnot about this topic, don’t try to open or maintain a media outlet in Germany: you will go bankrupt with it.
Second place, not really surprising over here: sports. Football and tennis are incredibly popular, so these are the most hot topics people were looking on the internet here. Followed by some US “sports” like football or wrestling.
Third place: politics. A little bit surprising if you ask us. Not so surprising if you know a bit about German history. It’s really the only ray of hope in the Top 3 here, as this is not only done by the people in a democracy and the discussion about “democracy crisis” is ongoing since over a decade now. But it shows people in Germany still like the “meta” in their life and in the world, want to take influence in a way and change the everyday life to the positive. Because really this is the only chance we have as individuals to do so in a democracy and it’s also a good prospect for the collective. Present and future.
Honorable mention: life at #4. If you need social aid, these are the topics you are looking for. Same is true for your pet or if you need compensation for your heating. Or you would like to know which holiday is at the moment, etc. Some of this is irrelevant, no discussion about that. But some is also important for your everyday life which shows us Germany is not full of zombies as the winner of the categorisation which took the top spot would suggest. Nevertheless: don’t think you can make money with it, as entertainment, sports and even politics will take the crown for relevancy. Think about that for a moment if that’s really how you want to proceed in your life. In Germany, Europe; wherever you might be at the moment reading this.
Everything else is neglectable: Economy. Technology. Crime. Even health, a topic which we thought would be important during pandemic times – totally not true, the facts say otherwise. Oh, and don’t ever think making content about science, religion or art! Of course you can do, nobody is stopping you from doing it. But paying your rent with it? Nah. Im-poss-ible. Nobody will look for it, nobody will pay for ads here. Do yourself a favour and look for other hobbies, like becoming an influencer (entertainment!) or becoming a tennis star (sports!) for example. No, please don’t. This was a joke, OK. Maybe a bad one but a joke, j-o-k-e.
So, yes, which took the top spot over a whole year might suggest exactly that: all is going to shit. If all people really care about is entertainment, life has no meaning anymore. Like Kurt Cobain fabulously told us in one of his most memorisable songs. May he rest in peace, as he also failed miserably to change something to the better and finally, sadly, killed himself. The only hope we have here is that trends vary, on Google Trends and elsewhere. And they vary in even shorter timespans as ever before. What held relevancy in the past for over a decade or more, then for a decade, only applies today for a timespan of just a few years. So when we come back in, let’s say 10 years, doing the same study, we might have another ranking. With, who knows, maybe science taking the top spot. Or art. Of course the possibility of that is minor to happen but it’s not completely ruled out as the future, our future, is still unwritten.
Facts are facts. What you did in the past defines your present. What you do in the present defines your future. Be your own future! That’s another reason why we are here, AETHYX MEDIAE, your friendly and helpful indie online publishing house.
Let us help you in changing things for the better! Start your own blog! Write your own eBook! You want to work collectivly on your own projects, rent some of our cloud space! Want your own app – of course, we got you covered! Hire us now and be part of a future where we tackle the concepts of relevancy, all by ourselves.
We hope you enjoyed our excursus today, it took a lot of work and discipline from us. But it was also a lot of fun.
Take care and best wishes,
your aethyx staff
Dear readers & customers,
for us at AETHYX MEDIAE it’s time to celebrate this month:
as of August the 8th 2018, we counted the 1,000,000th visitor at our oldest project, cipha.net!
It’s amazing in regarding the fact that we installed this counter back in 2006, when we ported the project from Greymatter to WordPress. Unfortunately, because this was an indie underground project, we never had the mood, time or resources to count visitors from 2001 on, when the project went live, to the aforementioned date.
What’s interesting too is: the number mentioned and the counter which you can still see live in action on the website on the lower right corner, these are really visitors, not page views. In this day and age both KPIs (key performance indicators) are confused very often. What a pity, the web is 27 years old now…
In page views, we are nearing the five million mark: right now it’s showing us 4,915,471.
We still want to thank anyone who still visits this intergalactic anthology antiquity!
As you may have read on our Where? page, we shut down the blog and released all of its content in eBooks, in 2017 also in books on demand via Amazon.
To be honest and that’s what impresses us even more here: cipha.net isn’t our first project to reach the infamous one million visitors mark.
The first project which achieved this milestone for us was zockerseele.com, our video game blog. It happened on April the 11th, 2011.
The counter here was implemented right from the start in 2005, shortly after we aquired the URL and published the system along with its first entry. So what we see here as counter data in the first sidebar is really what’s rolling in since the project was born.
zockerseele.com will also be our first project to reach the 2,000,000 visitors milestone. Right now we’re at 1,955,981. And due to financial and time problems we almost update nothing there anymore. In page views, zockerseele.com is even more impressing: 17,655,816. Never in our dreams would we have imagined to do a “no budget web project” with such figures…
We don’t know when but the party will be joined by gizmeo.eu, our gadget blog, as the counter there is somewhere in the 250,000s. As you may have read between the lines above this may take ages.
But hey, that’s how indie projects work! <3
Today we’re going to celebrate a little: if you like join us in Lisbon, most of the time you’ll find us roaming the streets around Bairro Alto or Costa da Caparica. We’re even sometimes visiting the small beaches in Cascais when we’re drunk, haha! Well, due to the fact that we have to get there by train this doesn’t happen very often. Of course we can’t guarantee that we’re still alive when you see or meet us but we’re living the indie dream and touching is explicitly allowed! <3 Just be prepared for a incalculable reaction. 😉
AETHYX MEDIAE.
We’re:
The Million Makers.
Nice to meet you!
Time to book us: info@aethyx.eu.
Sincerely,
get drunk already,
the aethyx staff
If you want to know the entrepreneurial view of the Internet, visit Portugal: https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701871092441088.
Usually we don’t link to stuff on Twitter, because they are working on dismantling the web as we know it too. But the majority accepted this fake news medium already and we as experts(!) can’t do nothing about it.
Welcome to reality.
There’s serious stuff going on right now.
Imagine an Internet of lanes, where the ones get the fastest lane who pay the most. That would be the death of net neutrality, a concept which the Obama administration tried to support but right now seems to fail miserably.
A lot of corporations tried to kill the Internet before: Comcast. Verizon. AT&T. To name only a few. And the NSA stuff about Edward Snowden didn’t mean that things would get any better, to say the least.
We live in a world of sick societies. Most of the people you meet, you work with, you like and appreciate, don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on in reality. In real time. Anywhere. They just don’t give a shit, all they care about is C.R.E.A.M. We live in a cold, misinformed, polarising world, where those are punished who try to educate, evaluate, really want to entertain.
Prefixes are inverted in this world, what appears “good” is bad, what they call “bad” is often good. Good for you as an individual, good for your future, good for your morals. If you want to dive deeper, just check the biography of one of the most important geniuses of our time: Aaron Swartz. For those who never heard this name: he was the one realising the semantic web for the ordinary users, who killed himself because he tried to publicise closed-source scientific records. Welcome to your real world. Do you feel comfortable in this world? Do you have the slightest clue what’s really going on?
Let’s remember Thanksgiving 2017 as the time in history of mankind when the Internet died.
2016 they took us the pride to live in electing a racist, misogynic, dumb-as-fuck, feckless, apolitical, aryan, retarded US president.
It won’t get better from here. That’s something we should have realised by now. Next step is: support goes to the FCC.
We never wanted nor approved this. We weren’t asked.
“Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here’s American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!” – Bill Hicks
Update I, 11/27/17:
In the meantime, more than a million Emails repealing net neutrality were simply: fake email spam.