I think I've been ruminating a bit too much, but maybe this
resonates with other people out there as well. The internet
used to feel like a place that you explored. It felt like a
place that reacted to your actions and your intentional behaviour.
You would seek out things to read, see, and do. At least that's
what it felt like to me as a kid.
Now it's a place where things happen to you. Ads are shoved into
your brain in a million different ways. Things masquerade as
anything but advertising but are in fact, just that. Everything
is something as a service that you pay a subscription fee to,
and the service is never really any good. There's an argument
to be made that I'm just an old man shouting at clouds.
It may go something like this:
if the internet is a barren hellscape of nothingness,
where no one is doing anything creative and wonderful
anymore, why do we have so many "Content Creators"?
It's a whole new type of job that didn't exist before!
Fair point. But content creators in general seem so overtly
commercial and kind of sinister. Their goal isn't really to
"create content" (what a fucking weird way to say "make things")
but to steal your time, attention, and to make money off of us.
I miss just strolling around on the interwebs and stumbling
across actual people. But it isn't all gone, is it? In fact,
it's kind of been here the whole time, sitting under the
shite up above. It feels good to be back in these kinds of spaces,
intentionally exploring and finding. I don't want to be force
fed what these so called "algorithms" want to feed me.
