The unusability of the internet these days
What is your online life like these days? I’m genuinely curious because mine is changing and not at all in the ways I expected, and I think this has much bigger implications for society than it might appear at first.
I had included a social media rant about this in my November #rawvlog and wanted to expand my thoughts on this further…but of course the more I thought about it and the more I looked around for other views, I found that a much more clever people than me have done so already. So let’s signal boost them while perhaps having a bit of a convo, just us Decadent Nationals.
I’ve been terminally online for the better part of two decades, and this after being a first generation adopter for most (not all!) of the digital revolutions of the last three. This includes nearly 20 years of blogging, and spending a good portion of that “curating” good reads and links for other readers. It was my most regular feature; I barely do it anymore.
Not because good writing and content isn’t out there, but it’s increasingly difficult to find and so easily drowned out by content mills, bullshit, and recycled - not to call it regurgitated - clips, memes, and fragments of usually-other-people’s work. It’s not a fun to wade through the bullshit to find the gems anymore, it’s exhausting and demoralising.
*Sidenote on the problem of other people’s work, if you haven’t heard about the impact of British YouTuber Hbomberguy’s video on plagiarism and its ripple effects, you are missing out.
The internet is mostly an industrial churn of sales pushing these days, and call me idealistic, but I’m just sort of sick of being pressured to buy shit nonstop. Even where I pay for a media subscription, I’m typically bombarded by ads unless I install special software plugins to silence them. This is an unwinnable cold wars as platforms continuously crack down on adblocking because of course it’s how they make their money, but eventually it drives users like me away when I can’t escape the ads.
But recently, it’s getting worse. I’ve seen an uptick in ads specifically targeted to encourage me to buy shit that will supposedly help me trick other people into buying shit from me, from cryptocurrency to MLMs to business coaching to whole ideologies…
Grift. It’s grift as far as the eyes can see. And it’s not attractive, interesting, engaging, inspiring, clever, helpful, enjoyable, or any other positive adjective I can conjure. Here is a deep dive by another more clever than me person that illustrates the issue:
The recent explosion of AI has perhaps forced a better awareness of the problem by enabling hyper-production of bad content and influence based activity, and therefore accelerating a potential inevitable endgame. Perhaps the endgame of hypercapitalism writ large: slash and burn an ecosystem for the final dregs of value, and move on to the next environment.
In the real world, we are running into the inevitable problem of infinite growth assumptions on a very finite planet. Our environment is shifting around us faster than our species will be able to cope, and our politics are paralysed by ideological differences so profound that the only agreed upon tactic is to avoid confronting systemic issues by picking surface level fights instead. Once again, almost entirely based on drumming up views…and of course dollars.
I don’t pretend to know the answers to these problems, and as I said at the start, it would be easy to dismiss the decline of social media and “enshittification” of the internet as unimportant or trivial, but I can’t help but feel it’s indicative of the decline of a lot of other breakages in society.
Specifically, how the financialisation of everything is playing out politically.
For example, high profile professor and media personality Scott Galloway also delved into the issue of plagiarism as it has appeared in the political and shouting heads classes of late: bad faith culture wars. His point, though I don’t think he ever used this term explicitly, is how money and power are consolidating in fewer and fewer hands to create functional oligarchs who are choosing to throw their weight around in increasingly impactful ways. The New York Times published an excellent piece on this recently, delving into the playbook of rich and powerful people using their money to attack initiatives they disagree with.
Perhaps this feels like too much of a leap for you, social media decay to oligarchy, but every aspect of our life is being driven towards monetisation. Hobbies now need to be “side hustles” or considered a waste of your billable time. Silly online community has morphed into a continuous ad deck and if you aren’t participating, you’re potentially losing out on payments. Click here to learn more and buy my programme which will teach you how to use TikTok to make millions!
And why? Because without enough money, healthcare, food, housing and even political participation is in supposed democracy is increasingly out of reach for more and more people. There is no hustle culture fix to continual price hikes and this kind of inflation. At some point, whole groups will no longer be able to afford to live. And the moral and social implications of that level of implied desperation and disempowerment at scale should feel scary.
