Compared to its early days, the internet is a smoldering heap of trash and it’s never going to course-correct.

I understand this isn’t an original sentiment – especially for our generation – but, damn. I remember my 8^(th) grade teacher back in 1998 telling the class that the internet was going to create fantastic amounts of money, but nobody had quite figured out how yet. Those were the days of AIM, Excite, MapQuest, chat rooms, and the insanely hilarious whitehouse.com.  It was fresh and new, and not quite commodified. There were so many directions that the internet could take and there seemed to be so much freedom and possibility.

Here we are, 26 years later, and it hardly seems as though the internet could have turned out worse. First, they learned how to commodify. Then they learned how to manipulate. Then they learned how to turn us against each other. Now it's fake content. And they’re still going.

Which social media or search engines are trustworthy these days and provide genuine, helpful, meaningful content? Not very many, because "genuine, helpful, and meaningful" can’t make as much of a buck as "commercialized and metric-driven." Google changing their slogan from “Don’t be evil” or whatever was hilariously on-the-nose. Because everything you do on the internet now leads to someone, somewhere money.

Do the search engines absolutely suck these days? Well yes, of course – but you haven’t thought of next quarter’s earnings reports, have you?

Just being a person has somehow been commodified, with so many people trying to be an influencer for some reason, and turning their lives and the lives of those around them into reality TV in order to appeal to as many viewers as possible. Want to be an influencer? Well, better hope your hobbies and interests are vague enough to appeal to a wide audience, and they better be broad enough so you can keep making “content” that will bring in those views. Added bonus – a billion “hacks” on how to do every day life a little differently. No problem if your hack is stupid, because that just generates more conversation in the comments and so you still come out a winner.

Fucking social media. Ads everywhere – from influencers, from hidden ad campaigns, and from straight-up regular ads. Want to see what your friend is up to on Facebook? Well screw you, you can’t commodify that - instead you can see what one acquaintance from 12 years ago has to say about current events, see posts from six groups you’re not even a part of, and comb through a bunch of other posts that might be ads or might not be. Want to join a group? Well, I hope there are good moderators, because otherwise we have to be on the lookout for scammers all the time. And please know that every click you make goes into dozens of databases to run regression analyses in order to get you ads designed even more for you.

Then you get into the good group, but regular people seem to have gone insane over the last ten years. The internet has turned everyone into total dickheads. We think we're experts in everything, and that we're obligated to mark our opinion down on everything, and that anyone is disagrees with us is a goddamn moron. And that they need to know that they’re a goddamn moron, for no other reason that the internet is basically a forum for quips and insults now. Much of which is fed by misinformation campaigns from foreign actors who have no other goal than to just make us all mad.

And, while I don’t have a moral objection to “porn” as a concept, let’s not try to pretend that porn these days is anything close to opening the Playboy (or Playgirl!) back in the 90s. We’ve come a long way from “Yeah, naked people are on the internet!” to “Let’s try literally anything and everything to get views, regardless of how degrading it is and how far it strays from normal, healthy, sexual activity.” I’m well aware that there’s a path laid out from the Heritage Foundation to destroy communities by starting out with porn bans  - and that society should work hard to avoid doing as such - but it’s unacceptable for kids of any age to easily access the sort of literally insane porn that is on the front page of free porn sites. We’re teaching kids awful lessons that sex is about casual abuse, involves no intimacy, and is basically an obstacle course of extreme and unpleasurable obstacles to accomplish. I could care less about what kink you have, and go ahead and do whatever consensual activity you and other consensual adults want to try. But let’s not pretend that the internet teaches anything other than the exact opposite of healthy sexual education. Why? Because we all know where the money is.  

You have to subscribe to EVERYTHING, and the EVERYTHING will beat you to death with emails and updates. If you have a paid service, congrats, you still get to deal with ads a lot of the time, along with plenty more opportunities to “upgrade,” in addition to always being on the lookout for general “we’re charging you more so we can continue to bring you the same level of service!” notices.

Don’t reuse the same password or make them too simple. Get a password manager and pray nobody gets access to it, because if they do then your entire life is ruined and your credit score will be -6,000. Use two-factor authentication whenever possible, except that’s not as secure these days so maybe something else. Don’t use an unsecured wifi, don’t open email attachments, don’t click on “weird” URLs, and basically don’t trust anything because it’s almost definitely AI, spam, or a malicious actor.

We’ve sure come a long way from “LOL, this person definitely isn’t 15/f/Tulsa.”

All that said, holy cow, A.I. is the nail in the coffin. It’s SO GOOD. Have you seen these videos? It’s hard enough to navigate the “world wide web” with spam and bots and ghost accounts, but now we have those entities creating terrific A.I. content that looks like real life. We’ve proven that we’re unable to act responsibly with the internet, so what exactly is going to happen when the majority of content is fake? Is your Uncle Joe really going to source his video, or is he going to just repost it in order to validate whatever position he happens to hold on the controversy de jour? The internet, as we even know it now, will be destroyed by A.I.

And what’s worse is that all of this was to concentrate extraordinarily disgusting wealth in the pockets of a pitifully small number of evil dweebs. ($50 million for a wedding? Well, good thing there aren’t otherwise any hungry kids to feed, amiright?) You don’t have to be a socialist to think that the concept of a “billionaire” shouldn’t exist – but instead, we allowed “the wild west” internet of the 90s and 2000s to be tamed and owned by a bunch of assholes who think that tearing down old systems without a plan for building new systems is basically a religion.

We made this all happen because we voted with our money to allow Google and Amazon to become the Walmarts of the internet, because the policymakers who lead the committees to regulate these things are a bunch of geriatrics (who can forgot the “series of tubes” comments from Ted Stevens?), and because our society commodifies everything.

I’m finding myself in a strange transition away from the internet. I say strange because it’s been such an integral part of my life since my early teen years, but it’s become such a money-grab, so unhelpful, and so gosh darn angry that I would be ashamed of myself if I let followed whatever path the internet is going to next. I’ve given on it reaching the plateau we all thought it would reach back in the 90s, and I’ve come to accept that my life is better when I’m instead touching grass. Because, to me at least, the internet was always about the promise of what was to come – but the promise will never be realized, and I have to stop acting like any part of the internet is a stand-in for real life.

I’m so worried about the next generation who are being born into the internet as it is now, because their reality will be so different than what mine was as a kid – their internet will be more hostile, more defensive, more capitalistic, and less real. I hope they learn to touch grass.

Rant not over. I’ll continue to be a curmudgeonly millennial, just in-person and not on the damn internet.