The Internet: A Series Of Little Boxes On The Hillside

This week’s edition of Virginia Heffernan’s “The Medium” is a meditation on what she calls “the death of the open Web” thanks to the rise of The App, the walled garden where content is approved (and profit-shared in) by Apple. An interesting point! But it’s based on a fairly flawed premise: “In the migration of dissenters from the ‘open’ Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight,” Heffernan writes. Which, uh… not for nothing, but online culture has been all about settling in with demographically similar enclaves — the term “eternal September,” which dates all the way back to 1993, comes to mind. (And let’s not even get started on the amateur racial studies that are taking place on Twitter by people who are looking in from the way outside.) Perhaps she could have, instead of “white flight,” used the analogue of the gated community, as opposed to the poor old suburb where any driver looking to take a shortcut to the highway can just whiz around the sidestreets, stopping only to pee on some poor homeowner’s lawn when it’s absolutely necessary?