week 3 - where do we go from here?

where do we go from here?

i mean, the internet the way it is now, that is. it just feels like a huge loss, or misstep. some ongoing digital catastrophe that seems like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering sticks and rocks and dirt until it turns into an avalanche.

after experiencing what the internet had to offer in the early early 2000s, and what it could have been (and bitterly thinking to myself, 'what it should have been'), i find myself hating it. the internet. which is a sad and dreadful thing to think about, considering my relationship to it. but it's not the same thing that i grew up with, and for people who have been on it before i clicked on my first hyperlink, during the times of IRC and usenet and BBSes (i still remember dialup fondly tho), this internet probably seems pretty alien. i mean, i didn't see it coming either, and i was barely there for web 1.0. web 2.0 was gathering steam when i first got online, but even in its earliest iterations there were misgivings by people who probably saw the writing on the wall. could you have a place like miniclip on a web 1.0 internet? you could have social media. arguably, geocities filled that space. BBSes. the first primitive instant messengers. anyone remember xanga? the way we think about the internet and its function have fundamentally shifted. before, it was optional, a supplement. now, it's a requirement, a lifeline. without it, you die, conceivably. in some convoluted way the internet is your umbilical cord to a world that doesn't seem too different from what it's connected to. and now the barriers are being pushed further into dissolution territory. the disappearance of local storage in favor of cloud storage. VR headsets you buy that now require a mandatory social media presence to function. much of the internet is hosted on servers belonging to a single company. more than a third of the world's population with a social presence on applications owned by a single company with little to no regulation and seemingly no failsafes, no responsibilities. ads everywhere, anytime, all the time.

this is hell, isn't it?

so where do we go?

do we click 'accept cookies' once more and let the ads roll down the page of the latest news article we read? allow the embedded video to autoplay in the background with the sound on? use a google search to find some innocuous service, bypass the top search results which happen to be ads, click a link to the website (also loaded with ads and trackers) and then get told to log in or sign up to create an account in order to buy a t-shirt, look at pictures of cats, or fill out a job application?

is this it?