When everything ever created is a few clicks or swipes away, is depth even possible anymore?

I guess kinda makes sense that every major tech product on the market currently exists as a billion dollar shit-sorter promising us that it deliver the perfect golden nugget?

Algorithms verge on necessary when it feels like we are trapped in a room with dozen speakers constantly blaring different radio stations at us deafening us with a incomprehensible din of brain chemicals as we try to pick our new favourite song out of it.

The irony is most of my YouTube recommendations are now pseudo-scientific grifters half heartedly promising that the cure to all this is a dopamine-fast. As if the chemicals themselves were the problem and we would be just fine if we could their complete a 30-day challenge and join their members-only Discord. These assholes are rebranding self-isolation as the monk-mode-grind-set. Stop and think about that. The idea of the entrepreneurial-keratin-fueled-spiritualist. We used to just call that starting a cult. Which isn’t so far off, we just call it “the community”.

None of this matters though. In the time it took you to read the last paragraph, I’ve already switched to hate-watching a teardown of some man-o-sphere influencer getting hypothermia from a cold plunge.

Once, I forgot I logged out of YouTube and was horrified. It appears you need a fuck ton of supplements to survive the carnivore diet.

What was this post about? As I type this I LITERALLY CAN’T REMEMBER. Scrolled up. Right, is depth even possible in a sea of content?

Maybe? But it sure is a hell of lot harder.

When I was young, dumb, and full of fun, I loved Timesplitters 2. A second-rate, pretty offensive in retrospect, FPS from the mid-2000s. I think my hours played is thousands. During summer break in high-school I would stay up all night creating custom levels and maps. One of them was a RC racing mini-game… in a first-person shooter… it was shit, but it was fun.

A major reason why I decided this was worth hours of my misspent youth was I didn’t have many other options. There was no auto-play. I owned like 10 games max on PS2. There wasn’t much other choice. So I made a fuck ton of levels that were fun for 10 minutes, then forgotten.

(I swear to you flying to the top of GTA Skybox to jump out without a parachute just to see what would happen was worth it).

Do levels I made matter? No. Not even a bit. I don’t even think I have the memory cards or consoles that held them any more. But I can tell you I loved the hell out of that problematic game and the broken mini-games I built with it. Wish I chose a better horse, but I was 13. I didn’t know what the word problematic meant (which is probably problematic in itself).

Anyways.

Creation is harder than consumption. That’s obvious. Sure, making somethings gotten a little easier, but consuming is like 1000x easier now.

I think I am just aging. But this my damn lawn, and your hanging out on it.

Making something feels like an act of rebellion now. Choosing to use your time for something other than consumption and shopping. Deciding to make something that’s going to suck and most people won’t like anyways is ~revolutionary~.

If a revolution is a rejection of the status quo in order to bring about drastic, accelerated change, then choosing to make something, not as a means to capital, but just because you want to is a direct act of transgression against a economic system that asks you to spend more than half your waking hours (I work too much and love naps) getting that bag and the other half spending it or giving your attention to become a resource to be sold and traded in exchange for hijacked brain chemicals then…

Ya, viva la revolution, bb.

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.