Me & The Internet

As my first entry, here's an obligatory musing on the Internet 

I hardly have anything original to say when it comes to my experiences, I think, but I do wish connection was compatible with a kinder experience, if that makes any sense. I wish I could cut my online activities to just this and a personal website and maybe a forum, but my own personal Pandora's box has been opened and I now know what it's like to connect with mass amounts of people and I can't convince myself to go back. 

Part of this is, of course, that the web has been privatized and has shifted away from more insulated and personalized spaces. There were fewer people on the Internet in the 90s and 00s, but this was the most connection known at the time, and everyone was doing it, so it was more than enough. There are of course pitfalls to romanticizing this era of the Internet, as this culture did breed echo chambers, cliques, and a certain rigidity when it comes to accepting new ideas. Still, it was exciting and unique. This could not last forever, I know. Bubbles are always going to end up popping. The carrot on a stick that is the endless chase for profit manifested in front of the frontrunners of the web much like it had for just about everything else. 

In chasing that, CEOs and the like have had us suffer. If they're chasing carrots, we're in the car with them as it veers off a cliff (I do wonder if there is a carrying capacity to all of this, so to speak- surely the servers will use too much water to continue eventually; the datasets will start eating their own tails in Dead Internet Theory come to life; something will cross the line?). Things very much are wired to take our attention and our money. If it's incredibly hard for me to turn away from places on the web that I know are bad for me, then it would be damn near impossible for the people helming the web to turn away from the next big thing no matter the price we pay in humanity. Slop really is the must succinct term for the absolute drivel clogging up the Internet these days. It's seemingly all either mindless, mass produced, or malicious. 

For all I've just disparaged the web as it is today, I've made good friends. I have learned things I wouldn't have otherwise and enjoy a level of political awareness I very much wouldn't have otherwise. In many cases, online spaces have given me the tools to both better know myself and grow into who I am today. When there's nowhere to turn to where you are, you are naturally going to look somewhere else. I went to the Internet. The one I went to does not have enough of a meaningful difference between the one we have today for me to simply write the whole thing off, especially when I have genuine cherished connections here. It really has enriched my life with all the things I have learned and engaged with. 

But it does feel like I have been sick for a long time and that this might be part of it. I wish I had the self control and the strength to reject myself indulgences, but I really don't. There was a time when these indulgences really were all I had. The benefits outweighed the harms. Does that still ring true, or am I too much of a coward to even look for an answer? Does the fact that it's two in the morning have to do with the melodrama of this?

I'll try and put in the work to at least invest in spaces such as this that aren't so exploitative, and I'll do my best to practice good digital health. I still need to learn HTML. There's a lot I want to do and half the time it's conflicting, but I hope for now it's enough to see what can be done. I'm tired and I can't change much, but hoping for a world where we can all be a little less tired and angry and isolated pushes me at least a little closer to building a better Internet in my own corner of it.