Some great zingers in here. This made me laugh – "Like I said, I get to work from home and write for a living (actually contributing to the ad problem… what a cunt…)"
Never a truer word said in rant. Brilliant. And you managed to segue a mini rant about the hideously devious HP. For that, extra bonus points have been awarded from my imaginary point-awarding event.
YES! Gotta collect all those iPoints :D And cheers. I will also join you in trudging back to the internet to write words clients keep paying me to write. Bastards.
I'm finding it all too much sensory overload. I find my brain now filters so much as noise, that I half register things I scroll through. I notice I start reading and engaging in stuff online, only to never finish. I did however manage to finish reading your article.
With AI it just makes me much more distrustful of everything online. I was pretty skeptical anyhow because everything online feels agenda driven. Now I feel maybe I'm joining the guys in wearing the tin foil hats!
Thanks for making it all the way through the article – it was a big rant :) And I completely agree: we are now filtering so much because the level of garbage is through the roof. It is also absolutely agenda-driven – even inbound content is there to make you like them so you buy from them in the long run. That’s not to say some of it isn’t useful, but if it’s coming from a business, its agenda is always to get something from you.
Obviously any comments are immediately rendered ironic.
Virtuoso rant, mate. Absolutely nailed the icky, sticky, utterly dicky contemporary internet experience. Even that word ‘experience’. Ugh. Our online worlds. Toxic, addictive, life-destroying, life-affirming. Ultimately necessary and even a fucking human right, apparently. The good bits barely have a chance. Maybe substack is one of those watering holes in the mist.
I also hope the AI shitshow makes people think harder about whether ‘we should’ just because ‘we can’. Instead of automatically taking the quick, convenient route and pissing our critical thinking skills up the wall. The evangelising must stop, no one likes the bullshit. Though I suspect AI will make us a lot fucking lazier, stupider and ickier before that happens.
The dairy cash cow analogy will live with me forever. Fuck this, off grid sounds well alright for I too am a cunt.
"The good bits barely have a chance" – that's the real tragedy, right there. Cheers for reading mate, and I guess you out in the wild sometime. We can lament how cunty we were while sipping whisky in between chopping firewood.
I was wondering about this very thing recently: namely with the enshittification of social media and the accelerated "dead" internet due to AI if we'll actually find we've been living in a 30-year bubble that will burst in terms of how we use the internet. It probably won't go back to what it was in 1997 as the underlying technology has moved on so much. But I have been wondering if there will still be a broader disengagement from the internet as we've used it since the early 2000s to now.
I feel like we can't break from the internet now. It's too embedded in really mundane activities we have to do. No one's coming to switch it off, and that's probably a good thing. I am hoping the bubble of being enamoured with all things online will burst, though. I think there is a slow awareness bubbling in the back of people's minds that all this stuff is shit – and I don't just mean mass-produced crap from Temu etc. I mean interactions are becoming crap and hollow. The break-neck pace of social trends and everyone striving for laughs and attention is perhaps wearing thin. We had a good run, but it's time to step back.
Some great zingers in here. This made me laugh – "Like I said, I get to work from home and write for a living (actually contributing to the ad problem… what a cunt…)"
Never a truer word said in rant. Brilliant. And you managed to segue a mini rant about the hideously devious HP. For that, extra bonus points have been awarded from my imaginary point-awarding event.
Right. Back to the internet I go. *Hangs head*.
YES! Gotta collect all those iPoints :D And cheers. I will also join you in trudging back to the internet to write words clients keep paying me to write. Bastards.
I'm finding it all too much sensory overload. I find my brain now filters so much as noise, that I half register things I scroll through. I notice I start reading and engaging in stuff online, only to never finish. I did however manage to finish reading your article.
With AI it just makes me much more distrustful of everything online. I was pretty skeptical anyhow because everything online feels agenda driven. Now I feel maybe I'm joining the guys in wearing the tin foil hats!
Thanks for making it all the way through the article – it was a big rant :) And I completely agree: we are now filtering so much because the level of garbage is through the roof. It is also absolutely agenda-driven – even inbound content is there to make you like them so you buy from them in the long run. That’s not to say some of it isn’t useful, but if it’s coming from a business, its agenda is always to get something from you.
Obviously any comments are immediately rendered ironic.
Virtuoso rant, mate. Absolutely nailed the icky, sticky, utterly dicky contemporary internet experience. Even that word ‘experience’. Ugh. Our online worlds. Toxic, addictive, life-destroying, life-affirming. Ultimately necessary and even a fucking human right, apparently. The good bits barely have a chance. Maybe substack is one of those watering holes in the mist.
I also hope the AI shitshow makes people think harder about whether ‘we should’ just because ‘we can’. Instead of automatically taking the quick, convenient route and pissing our critical thinking skills up the wall. The evangelising must stop, no one likes the bullshit. Though I suspect AI will make us a lot fucking lazier, stupider and ickier before that happens.
The dairy cash cow analogy will live with me forever. Fuck this, off grid sounds well alright for I too am a cunt.
"The good bits barely have a chance" – that's the real tragedy, right there. Cheers for reading mate, and I guess you out in the wild sometime. We can lament how cunty we were while sipping whisky in between chopping firewood.
I was wondering about this very thing recently: namely with the enshittification of social media and the accelerated "dead" internet due to AI if we'll actually find we've been living in a 30-year bubble that will burst in terms of how we use the internet. It probably won't go back to what it was in 1997 as the underlying technology has moved on so much. But I have been wondering if there will still be a broader disengagement from the internet as we've used it since the early 2000s to now.
There are few really good videos I watched a while ago now about enshitification
Why everything you buy is worse now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHXBacEH0qo
The internet is worse than ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0
The internet is starting to break: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVYG1mu8Lg8&t=236s
I feel like we can't break from the internet now. It's too embedded in really mundane activities we have to do. No one's coming to switch it off, and that's probably a good thing. I am hoping the bubble of being enamoured with all things online will burst, though. I think there is a slow awareness bubbling in the back of people's minds that all this stuff is shit – and I don't just mean mass-produced crap from Temu etc. I mean interactions are becoming crap and hollow. The break-neck pace of social trends and everyone striving for laughs and attention is perhaps wearing thin. We had a good run, but it's time to step back.