I am really starting to feel my own “get-off-my-lawn” energy these days.
The internet was better back in my day.
The internet is bad for the kids.
Etc, etc, etc.
I’ve been trying to dig a little deeper into why I feel the internet kind of sucks now. I mean there was a time when I was completely obsessed with the internet. I lived online. Feel in and out of love completely online and learned who I was online.
It was messy. I didn’t always get it right, but I felt I was fucking around and finding out. It felt like a place for weirdos and less like the humble-brag shopping mall it’s become.
Why did it feel that way? Was it the product of the chemicals of puberty and bullying? Maybe, but I think there was something about the internet (particularly social media) that felt more experimental.
I recently heard about the idea of a push vs. a pull internet. The internet used to a pull experience. Where to find the things you love, you had search for them, pull them towards you. Scour your friends top 8 for new bands and music. Find sketchy torrents to download and hope you were actually downloading what you wanted.
You had to create as much as you consumed. Having a default MySpace page was incredibly lame. Many of today’s coders wrote their first lines of code customizing their pages. Tirelessly searching for the perfect match of Web-dings and cringy metal-core to play as soon as someone opened your page.
It was being as cringy as possible on your blog. It wasn’t always good, but it was unfiltered and interesting. Two things I am having a hard time finding online today. Today, aside from curated content, a short bio and profile picture there is nothing that separates one profile from the next. I miss the personality of it all.
I guess that’s why I write here now. I want more control. I want to use the internet to discover. I want to use it to explore.
I don’t think that you can do that when all the content you engage with everyday is given to you like a feeding tube when you login. Content is being pushed down our throat.
There is fine line between curation and a algorithm. Curation is about understanding someone else’s preferences and discovering something new you may have never considered. Algorithms are about showing you new content that you are most likely to like. It’s about what you already like and feeding you more of it.
Today there is little challenge and your content is delivered via a firehose.
What was the last album you knew front to back? Was it before streaming? That you loved so much you’d cry at
Anyways, welcome to my lawn.