In general, I try really hard not to pull the “things were better back in MY day” crap. For one, they weren’t necessarily – a lot of my nostalgia isn’t specifically for the late 2000’s/early 2010’s so much as it’s for a time when I had fewer responsibilities and lived closer to my friends. Having said that, is everything just… kind of awful now? I mean there’s all the irl stuff – housing and everything else is stupid expensive, covid fucked up socializing for the better part of 2 years (and left everyone with varying degrees of anxiety/neurosis), and then of course there’s the fascism.
But what’s been bothering me lately is how totally unusable the internet has become in the past couple of years. Google is nearly useless – their AI summary thing is total bullshit, the rest of the first page is usually filled up with sponsored results and ads, and sometimes the actual results it does spit back are aren’t even related to the thing you were looking for. There’s way more examples of this… increasingly unhinged captcha challenges, the sheer quantity of different chat apps you need to stay in touch with everyone in your life, the untrustworthy shit show that google maps has become (I have zero sense of direction so this one especially pisses me off).
But the big one, the main event of current internet fuckery, is social media. I’m not on Instagram because I enjoy it – it’s buggy, ad-ridden, and filled with AI slop. It takes real time and effort to wade through the algorithmic bullshit and find your friends, or keep track of anything you actually care about. I desperately want to delete the fucking thing but I follow a bunch of small local venues and bands that don’t have web sites, or don’t keep them updated, and don’t have the option to subscribe to a mailing list. In centralizing and homogenizing everything, meta et al has succeeded in trapping us in a walled garden full of ads and slop, but because we’d lose touch with our friends and community if we leave, we continue to put up with it. There’s always been an exit, but no one is willing to use it.
People far smarter and better informed than me have said all of this, I just wanted to add my voice to the growing chorus of “it wasn’t always like this, and it doesn’t always have to be like this.”
ETA: Just stumbled upon this post that does an excellent job of laying out the ways the internet has become an inscrutable shit show.