The Internet Sort of Sucks Now The internet, and more specifically social media, is awful now. Ad after ad after ad. I search for artistry and the magic of fibre optic cables grants me 3,230,000 results in 0.39 seconds! More information than previous generations have ever had access to on a singular topic. 3,230,000 links to purchase polyester stained red by the blood of exploited hands. The “social” element of social media is dead. We are all plugged in and our ears are bleeding, but everyone is silent. Instead of life updates from my friends or muse, my feeds are flooded by spoiled LA brats, brains pumped full of botox trying to sell their vapid lifestyles as the only way to be human. Passions are only worth as much as they can be sold for. You cannot be a fan if you are not also a consumer. And yes, there are things of value hidden in the depths of these platforms, but the algorithm does not care about fulfilment beyond profit so they will be lost forever. The World Wide Web’s sinews have been reknit into the tower of Babel, with everyone clambering towards a non-existent heaven. If you are not marketable, you may as well not exist. Only as the perfect product and consumer are you worthy of the Internet.  Who are you? Do you know? Well the algorithm certainly thinks it does. Like Procrustes, it stretches and slashes you into a parody of yourself until you fit a neat market demographic before pumping out the same endless slop over and over and over. God forbid you exist as a multifaceted being. Branching out? Unheard of. How are you supposed to learn new things, expand and grow, when you don’t even know what to look for? The algorithm doesn’t want you to find out. The internet isn’t all bad, of course not. Personal web pages and real life actual human beings still exist. You’re here right now, aren’t you? But they’re damn near impossible to come across organically. Google ignores websites that aren’t focused on SEO or bolster ad revenue. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a webpage that was a wall of text for its own sake? I’m guessing it was even longer ago something like that showed up at the top of a search engine page. Flash doesn’t exist anymore and neither do the browser games of your childhood because they are a form of digital loitering, a speed-bump for consumer culture and capitalism. Oh, you want to opt out? Good fucking luck. There is no escape. Everything is digitised now (yay progress!) and you cannot function in society without acquiescing to the constant pinging of notifications and every byte of your data being stolen. Technically you give your consent, but we all know there’s no other way. Dating apps and LinkedIn are especially grim symbols of this phenomenon. Package yourself all pretty in hopes of being picked. Swipe through human beings like they’re a Tesco Meal Deal. All connections serve an ulterior motive. And somehow, even if you manage to avoid all of that, you are never safe from the possibility of being filmed against your consent and paraded to the masses in hopes of a viral post. Good luck trying to find an answer to any question you look up without being bombarded by ads and pop-ups and cookies and trackers and demands to steal your data. They’re making you pay to opt out now. So much for consent.  Honestly, it's hard to assign all the blame to evil corporations and lizard men. The truth of the matter is, awful as these things are, we’re the ones who allowed them to propagate. We might complain the whole time we’re doing it, but we will sacrifice our privacy and personhood for convenience. Who cares if your phone is spying on you if you can use it to get next day delivery on a microtrend ‘I <3 NY’ t-shirt? Nobody wants to set up an RSS feed and I’m met with incredulous bafflement every time I suggest someone set up their own webpage. Short form content and dopamine addiction has melted us to complacency. Nobody wants to do anything anymore.Beautiful, clunky websites full of text and hyperlinks no longer exist because one actually needs to pay attention to the contents to glean information from them. Affiliate link riddled listicles and AI summaries are soooo much more convenient. Even basic profile customisation is a lost art. A profile picture, bio, and at most a banner are all you’re allowed for self-expression. Because at the end of the day, YOU ARE NOT IMPORTANT. Instant gratification is all that matters. The Good Old Days You really can have too much of a good thing. A large part of my disillusionment from the modern Internet is owed to the blurring of the lines between online and real life. When I was a kid, everyone online was somebody’s alter-ego. The number one rule of the Internet was not to use your real name. Even a user ID like mine was cutting it dangerously close. But now there is no distinction, and we cannot escape it even when we log off. It is no longer sacred. For a long time, for me, the Internet was a place. It was the desktop computer I was only allowed to use for a few hours a day, browsing WikiHow articles and AngelFire websites. Most of them have been purged from the web now. Lost to time and remembered by few are the beautiful sites made for their own sake, such as the collection of blogs made for people’s teddy bears. Inspired, I made several websites of my own over the years as hazy echoes of their idols. These were just normal people. The blogs and YouTubers I admired posted because they were passionate about it, or had something to share. Not for the sake of creating content. Nowadays, the focus on engagement metrics and profit means it’s damn near impossible to find things made by random strangers. I was just posting into the void with my blogs. I didn’t care about being seen, I just wanted to create.  What I Want Out of the Internet The internet from our memories is long gone. It is dead and past revival, and I am not naive enough to hope for its return. Instead, we can only look forward. The way things are going right now, the future does look grim, I’ll admit. But you can’t just hurtle towards disaster vaguely hoping for someone else to revolt and save you. It’s this laziness that got us here in the first place. If we want the internet to be more human and personal, it's up to us to imbue our spirit into it. You hate social media? Delete it then. Humanity has survived millenia without Instagram and TikTok and will outlast it. I can already hear the excuses bubbling up in your mind and honestly, I don’t care. If you want to escape, you need to accept a little discomfort at first. Do you really want to keep prostituting yourself to a platform that feeds off you with no reward for the sake of convenience? We do not need corporations to facilitate our communities for us. The Internet was made for us all so you should freely, proudly take up space. Create your own webpage! It is nowhere near as difficult as one might assume on first instinct, and is a labour of love that creates a bond between you and your site that will never exist on social media. There is no pressure, no standard and most importantly, no hierarchy. We all need to do our part to rebuild the internet, and part of that means not being afraid to be yourself unapologetically. Too often we suppress parts of ourselves that aren’t professional or marketable enough and that is a sin against our souls. How do we expect to connect to others when we cannot even face ourselves on screen? We do not need constant streams of hollow content, we need people in all their complex glory. I’d read the rambling secret blog of a teenager complaining about her classes any day over any Tweet (yes I am deadnaming that platform) on my feed. Every keystroke on a HTML page has the breath of intentional creation within it. Yes it is inconvenient but that is what makes whatever you publish that much more special. How wonderful it is to see someone care about something so much they devote hours to formatting their thoughts about it! And to be found, diamond in the rough, because someone was looking specifically for someone like you! Not merely tossed around by the algorithm and abandoned when you do not perform as you “ought.” Dear Lord it is 3AM and I am so tired and this is incomprehensible but I cannot be asked to proofread. Bottom line is fight back! Do your part to make the Internet a better place! Limit your reliance on preexisting social media sites and make your own – make it truly for yourself! I promise you, a community of even 2-10 people on the indie web is a billion times more rewarding than 100K Instagram followers. The Internet is so much much more than shopping and ragebait, and the best time to make the shift to the people’s web is now.