I Hate the Modern Internet

When I was a teenager, the Internet took several minutes to connect while your computer wailed in unholy agony. Websites were largely blocks of text with tiny images that often failed to load, especially if it was raining. The best way to stay connected to your friends was via email or AOL Instant Messenger. AIM was also fond of randomly blocking the people with whom you were talking, their usernames would not appear in your block list, and the only solution was to create a new account. What great memories!

It is obvious that I am an old geezer by modern Web standards. After all, I am going to be forty next year. I have arthritis in my right knee and shoulder. I am a Millennial and I am disintegrating before you. For you Generation Alphas I may as well have stolen fire from the gods and led the birth of civilization from my cave.

After graduating high school in 2005 I kept in touch with my old pals just like I explained in that first paragraph. Things were nice and we even managed to maintain our D&D campaigns while attending colleges all over the country. It was around midterms that my best friend began asking me if I had joined Facebook yet and that everyone was there. I had never heard of this place as I was more focused on school, jazz ensemble, and another relationship where I was being taken advantage of by my partner. Neat. 

In this age, registering for Facebook required a university email address (and later, a high school address for a weaker version of the site about which nobody cared). I could not access my student email because my ID number had two consecutive ones at the very beginning, and the college website wouldn’t acknowledge it as legitimate. I was never able to open the email that The Book had sent in order to create my account (or read messages from my professors) until December when the tech department finally helped me get that glitch rectified.

After creating my profile, I was immediately unimpressed with the platform. Everyone’s page looked the same. Messages were more like emails, and you received a real email when a friend sent you one for some fun redundancy. I quickly discovered that my first college girlfriend was cheating on me after seeing her account and her fiancé that she had just met two days after we had had lunch together.

I shrugged that place off and went back to perusing forums for fellow bassists and good ol’ Fiction Press to share my poetry and short stories. I never had MySpace until a year or two before it became completely irrelevant, and only because some other friends would not stop bugging me to join them there. It sucked, too, and was very swiftly deleted.

My most notable online presence was in the form of an extraterrestrial Viking character named Krowness the Skull Eater that I had created for a class and who mostly ranted on Blogspot about how much he hated football and other little annoyances that I blew out of proportion for laughs. My article on the Infamous Poets scam (Si apre in una nuova finestra) is just a simple rewrite of a classic from that old world. Sort of miss him every now and then. Maybe a modernized version of that football article will make a reappearance this autumn?

I emphatically hate what the Internet has become. We each had our own places and, for the most part, control over them. Now users censor themselves to appease YouTube algorithms (Si apre in una nuova finestra) and concoct words that desensitize us to real issues. Our willingness to stay within the ever narrowing guidelines of these behemoth platforms in order to protect a few cents has eroded our language. People are afraid to ask for help when they have a mental health crisis because they know that their plea will either be hidden or get them in trouble down the road. We are all at the mercies of billionaire (or even one hate-filled trillionaire) tech-bros who would rather see us fight each other in gladiatorial battles for a few slices of bread instead of using those unfathomable fortunes to actually help humanity.

Don’t worry though, I’m sure those Martian colonies are coming any day now!

I have tried to walk away from Big Tech but, given my job in music and the arts, it is not that easy when every local business and colleague expects you to have an Instagram account or wants to see what you’re up to on Facebook. Never mind the plethora of restaurants that now require you to have either of those accounts just to see their menus. Hell, just this article ended up being a rant announcing my departure from Instagram before I redrafted it into something more cohesive! Yet I am still there because I know that I would lose work and important contacts if I decided to rely exclusively on smaller, decentralized sites like Pixelfed. (Si apre in una nuova finestra) (Find me there, too!)

Every day we become deeper and deeper entrenched in a world that resembles Half-Life 2, and I’m so tired. I’m tired of losing old friends because of a political dispute that, more often than not, was based on bullshit (and/or Russian hacking). It wears me to no end when I see ridiculous conspiracy theories (Si apre in una nuova finestra) from people who should know better. No matter what site or platform we use, our data is being harvested and sold to the highest bidders. Relying on community notes written by porn bots and AI instead of actual, living fact checkers has destroyed critical thinking everywhere. I have even heard real doctors use words like “un-alive” when discussing mental health emergencies regarding self-harm.

What the hell is wrong with us?

Can we just have fun again, or make a video or blog entry for the sake of creating something instead of seeing it as a money printer? Can we just have working ad blockers (Si apre in una nuova finestra) and enjoy the Web with some semblance of privacy? Can we not hurl slurs at a total stranger because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity? Can we act like we were taught to in freaking kindergarten?

I guess I’ll just dig out my historically inaccurate horned Viking helmet and help myself to a cup of mead as both the online and real worlds burn for the pleasure of the wealthiest assholes to ever live. I’m going to bed. Wake me when the Idiocalypse is over.