I wish the internet loved me like I love the internet. I wish the internet cuddled up next to me on a cold night and gave me a hot cup of tea when I needed one. I wish the internet was a older sibling, teasing me a little, but beating the shit out of anyone who fucked with me.

I wish the internet ran on home servers tended to like rose gardens that would raze themselves to the ground if we poisoned the well with Google Analytics. I wish vandals could draw dicks on the fences of websites that took any data from visitors that wasn’t freely given.

But the internet doesn’t love like that. It hums along like a i-see-both-sides-neo-liberal-fence-sitter letting techno-capitalists run our brains dry of any naturally obtained chemicals we have floating around our skulls. Depressed at 2:00 am, flirting with chatbots we are dissected into into datasets, our compulsions extracted and fed back to us in till the pit in our stomachs can be filled with offensively timed Uber Eats push notifications.

Every post I make I swear it sounds like I hate the internet. Maybe I do. I hate this internet. Every time I go back and listen to the music I used to listen to when I truly loved the internet, it makes me cringe. I get embarrassed I didn’t see the abusive writing on the wall. Maybe the same internet that auto-played those assholes on my MySpace page wasn’t as hot shit as I remember it to be.

I think I remember the internet not as it was, but as I wanted it to be. I don’t think my personal blog utopia every actually existed, but I think I pretend it does because, like a unfinished puzzle, the pieces are all there in front of me reflected in bi-sexual lighting of a 3 hour YT essay. I am just trying to fit those pieces together, even when I don’t know how to pull that off.

– xoxo goblin girl.

I think the web matters more than ever.

Maybe I am just trying to feel self-important as a lil’ web-dev goblin, but it feels like something that once felt infinite is being boiled down to a few mobile apps with half-assed web-apps that I constantly refresh.

Ya’ll remember Stumble Upon?

If you don’t it was a website that would take you to a random, often funny, sometimes boring, sometimes interesting website for you to browse. It was like Google without a query. Just a series of results that might tickle your little fancy.

Not my idea, but it seems like that kind of website only existed when the internet was a place you visited and hung around in). Like you were online, at home, waiting for your crush to log on to MSN Messenger anyway so might as well checkout what the hell was on the internet today.

The curation was chaos and during it’s death rattle it got algorithm-ed and enshit-ified to hell like everything fun online, but for a while there, it was a portal through the dark forest of the internet.

It was a line on a random campfire to cozy up next to before moving on to another obsessed nerds personal passion project.

Money and the internet have always been at odds though. The web exists because a nerd gave it away for free. Tim Berners-Lee literally gave the technology (that most of our life runs on) away to the public domain. Since then he has advocated for a free and open web and been building tools that allow users to have better control of their own data.

So basically, the dude who built it… gave it away, took up advocacy, and believed in universal access. This was anti-capitalist as hell. Like by the definition of the term. It’s such a punk move. I have something that has the potential to change the world forever? Give it away. Everyone gets it.

God, I love a soapbox. I love screaming into the void.

We, as people who use the internet, the web, whatever, every day have a responsibility to care for it and uphold our rights and the rights of others online. The internet will suck if we let it. If we allow our reward centres to be mined, then they will be minded relentlessly for profit, regardless of the effect on well being.

Side note: Mark Zuckerberg believes there is no link between the decline in teen mental health and social media. How. How is that is his take? This has massive “Big oil denies climate change” energy.

The end result is an connected network where we have no clue if the people we spend time with (or fuck, or fall in love with), the music we like, or choices we make in life were really because we wanted them, or was it because a corporation decided that it’s the content we would spend the most time with.

There is a real key difference there. Just because we spend time with something doesn’t mean it’s fulfilling. It’s not necessarily what we want. It’s just want is easy to do, feels good, and at least correlated with something we give the smallest amount of a shit about.