Well, the Internet mostly feels bad these days.
We were given this vast, holy realm of self-discovery and joy and philosophy and community; a thousand thousand acres of digital landscape, on which to grow our forests and grasslands of imagination, plant our gardens of learning, explore the caves of our making. We were given the chance to know anything about anything, to be our own Prometheus, to make wishes and to grant them.
But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.
Instead of turning freely in the HTTP meadows we grow for each other, we go to work: we break our backs at the foundry of algorithmic content as this earnest, naïve, human endeavoring to connect our lives with others is corrupted. Our powerful drive to learn about ourselves, each other, and our world, is broken into scant remnants — hollow, clutching phantasms of Content Creation, speed-cut vertical video, listicle thought-leadership, ragebait and the thread emoji.
It used to feel way better to Go Online, and some of us will remember.
We used to be able to learn about our hobbies and interests from hundreds of experts on a wealth of websites whose only shared motivation was their passion. Some of those venerable old educational blogs, forums, and wikis still stand, though most have been bulldozed.
Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next.
¶
We used to make lasting friendships with folks all over the world on shared interest and good humor.
But now those social networks, once hand-built and hand-tended, vibrant and organic, are unceremoniously swallowed by social media networks, pens built for trapping us and our little piggy attentions, turning us all into clout-chasers & content-creators, and removing us from what meaningful intimacy & community felt like.
¶
Even coding for the web used to be different: One could Learn To Code™ to express oneself creatively, imbue one’s online presence with passion and meaning, and for some of us, build a real career.
These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value. We don’t think about the art of our craft and the discipline of its application, we think about throughput and scale.
To be very clear: I’m not trying to Good Old Days the internet. None of this is meant to make you feel nostalgic — the Internet used to be slow and less populated and less diverse, and its access was limited to those of a certain class. The Web For All is a marked improvement, widespread global internet access is a marked improvement, and what I’m asking you to consider is what it used to feel like to use these tools, and what we’ve lost in the Big Tech, Web 2.0 and web3 devouring of the ’Net.