> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model.
I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs, and they were a hub for discussion for real-life communities like music-band fandom or travel subcultures.
Besides the deleterious nature of engagement-maximizing social media today, I think another aspect of the problem is that there is less connection to real-life socializing simply because that has collapsed in so many countries.
This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being.
This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.
The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon).
Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.
For me the difference today is that most people sharing their passions are now doing for The Algorithm. It's a far cry from the scrappy days of the early web where people just posted stuff because they thought it was cool. I'm not saying their passion is any less, more just that is so much noise. People are now "creators" and are pressured to constantly create.
Even 25 years ago being “too online” - back then it was icq, livejournal, and forums - was already destructive as hell and always led to some pretty cringe outcomes. At least these days some people make a career out of it, back then it was purely negative
It wasn't purely negative for everyone. I still maintain ties with several people I hung out with on an IRC channel in the 2000s, and a couple of fellow heavy commenters on one blog in the same decade. Granted, this was aided by the fact that we were all in Europe and all traveled regularly, so we could do the IRL interaction that solidifies friendships.
Today, if one is heavily online, many platforms no longer offer a space where one can tell a fellow user, "I'll be in your town soon, let's meet up", or even if it does, the general culture has changed away from that.
My first date was a guy with fake photos. Ten dates later I settled for a married guy cheating on his wife. He eventually divorced but then I left him.
> Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
I've been thinking about this recently. The tools we use as desk workers are only ever one step away from endless streams of addictive content. And in many cases the software we use to do our jobs are adopting dark patterns similar to those which have been successful in consumer apps.
Often the advice is to opt out of the system. I make mobile apps, I can't simply drop out and use a dumb phone (unless I get a new career). My workplace is essentially inside the addictive environment. I have to keep my knowledge up to date and be on top of app/design trends to be successful in my job. This used to feel rewarding to me, but increasingly it doesn't.
I used to be able to go to Twitter and read+learn+be inspired a lot about web development for example, but now it's almost entirely short form video content. And I fall for it every time. And I actively tried to avoid this from happening, I barely use YouTube and I've never used TikTok.
My Dad was a carpenter and it's as if his day-to-day tools were cigarettes or something. It's hard/impossible to avoid this environment when we are increasingly working in it.
Pandemic really ramped it up. Also screen addiction has gone mainstream. In front of a screen 12+ hours a day 20 years ago? Total nerd. Now? Standard behavior.
> I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access
Interestingly, my digital consumption for idle entertainment dropped when I started working full time. I didn’t want to be in front of a screen when work was done.
My screen exposure for fun is primarily this site (where I spend too much time), and games where my friends and I treat the time as a multi-way group call with long distance friends.
I do know a lot of people who followed the exact course you describe: They watch screens at work and had periods where it was okay to spend a lot of time on social media or social news sites (Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, depending on the era). Checking those sites all day long became a habit for them and filled all idle time. Whenever they felt uncomfortable or bored, visiting a site would fix it.
Some of them broke out of it when they switched to workplaces where it wasn’t acceptable to do non-work things during the day. This is almost inconceivable for a lot of tech workers who have had a lot of freedom to date, but it’s normal in some industries. As an example, I have friends who work in areas where security concerns are so high that they check their phones into lockers before entering their work areas. Others worked at companies who did over-reaching analysis of computer use. Many just moved to companies with packed open office spaces where it would be obvious to everyone around if you were on Reddit or looking at your phone instead of the computer for an excessive amount all day.
What is interesting is that this seems to induce a split: Some people get broken of their Internet use habits this way and continue not using those sites outside of work. Others seem to have a rebound where they leave work and start gorging on Reddit or TikTok or their other preferred sites.
Im with you!
The most times Im late for "some things on a project" at work is, because, I wasted time reading through dozens of feeds/news/comments on "too many" days so I got somehow a "delay" ;-)
Esp. comments: Actually, I ready mostly those because usually they have more information or context etc.than the article itself. (BTW: thats the reason why Im here on HN :-)
Do you ever wonder, if you were born in a different era, like 1901, and still had the base drives behind this addiction, how would it channel itself? Like what would you replace the internet with in those days
One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind of thing.
Mr Rogers said it: look for the helpers. They may be few, but they are there. Find them and focus on them.
I think that's why historical education is so important (or just liking history as in my case), looked through the lens of history all of the current shit as bad as it is, is really nothing all that new either, the only constant is change after all.
As the aphorism goes: History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme.
Thanks for commenting and acknowledging that it's challenging. My mates and myself have definitely fallen into this. Reminds me of that hackernews post about how doomerism is a siren's song for genZ, forget where it is.
People sometimes get mad at this, like it’s callous or privileged, but what’s the difference between focusing on problems you can’t help and slowing down to stare at a car wreck?
This also seems to be spilling into the real world. Because of this internet addiction, it’s almost guaranteed that everyone has a relatively expensive computer in their pocket. This has turned into an increasing number of real-world scams, as well as supporting trafficking networks for stealing phones. The scams range from old school pickpocketers to sympathy schemes to full out phone-related accusations – anything to get you to take your phone out of your pocket, potentially unlock it, and have someone swipe it.
If it’s unlocked, they may do some further scams from what’s available on the device, but either way, within days, your phone is somewhere in Asia, disassembled, and sold for scrap and parts.
After reddit prevented browsing old.reddit.com without signing in, I got a lot more active on lemmy. There's some amount of old internet feeling there, you don't get exhausted by the amount of material and it's not overrun by corporations. So far it's been nice.
What killed Reddit wasn't just its corporate chase for profit. It was also the fact that the general public's default internet device shifted to the smartphone and its limited keyboard and screen, no longer the computer. That led to comments largely being reduced to 140-character quips, no longer substantial discussion.
I am skeptical any non-corporate replacement like Lemmy can bring the old internet feeling back, because even on those alternative platforms, you just won't get many people using computers again.
It also was because it became a target to influence and manipulate people both by every day scammers and marketers as well as nation state level actors.
Sure, but that didn't hit a lot of small hobby subreddits until recently. But the discussion culture there had already declined starting a decade ago, and it was ordinary subreddit denizens and their phones to blame, not bots or geopolitical intrigues.
I follow reddit through RSS, at least that still works but probably that would be the final nail in the coffin for me. There are some really good subs out there and there is no replacements of those on the open internet. Maybe on Discord but I don't really like to use to that for anything else besides voice chat.
The internet is the people using it, if many of its users have come up with more effective ways to exploit the rest than the internet has become a worse place.
The internet is an ecosystem just like any other one on earth. Being it's a pretty new one the typical parasites and viruses that grow in every environment hadn't really developed to fill that ecosystem in the first decade or two of it. Now we are reaching the cambrian explosion of bullshit that the human animal isn't innoculated against.
So yea, the internet is a worse place, but really because the early internet wasn't realistically behaved for the amount of free energy it left around.
Internet deserves some blame too, when you have 8 billion people, but only 4 billion addresses, you are naturally going to end up with a lot of centralized services to work around those limits.
Economic exploitation is just one way to take advantage of people who lack internal contentment. The other forms are cultural and social.
Modifying one element in this environment in favor of others won't make things better. You could even argue that less people are being financially scammed online than they are cognitively.
These problems are not endemic to the internet. But the internet does cast a broader net and provide a wider variety of ways for people to become afflicted by whatever it is I'm trying to describe.
People should know more about data fusion. How browser javascript fingerprints and unique personal id of the adtech works. Hint it traveres VPNs. The seven has an id of you
This so exaggerated. If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes, you are either choosing the wrong places to be, or (more likely) the problem is with you.
1. If everyone you know is an asshole about some particular thing, then you're probably the asshole. Think politics or design.
2. Everybody is an asshole some of the time for some reason. Because the internet connects and exposes us to so many people that even if someone only acts like an asshole very rarely said connectivity and algorithm boosting ensures you get exposed to it.
It's written in a hyperbolic way, but I don't think your characterization is right. The author isn't saying everyone is an asshole, he's saying the systemic forces are mostly aligned in a predatory direction, and that part is absolutely true. I have a good time on Instagram despite the ways the platform is structured.
I don't think everyone is an asshole exactly but something is wrong with more and more people and you see it everything from how people drive to the degree to which so many things seem more adversarial or feel like part time jobs.
the internet is home to plenty of predatory cesspits, but the real stuff is still there too. it's not as convenient or addicting as content that doubles as a funnel for the ad machines, but the real spaces and media that aren't dominated by the advertising industrial complex still exist- just like in other forms of media that preceded the internet.
So I think there is an oversight in this essay, and it's that society becoming predatory is much bigger than the Internet: it is the story of the decay of America, reflected and exacerbated by the internet, as it becomes a anti-democratic huckster society dominated by grifters, theocrats, and snake-oil sellers.
Forget the internet, you can't get your home repaired, your car worked on, an appliance purchased, shop for food, or do anything else without wading through a corrupt morass of that mixes woo, subcultures, grift, and subscriptions. Maybe it's the hospital that wants to charge a $25 a day fee to make the hospital room TV grant access to basic cable channels instead of nothing. Maybe it's the elementary school district that mandates every physical interaction between students is called in to the police - like little Jenny shoved Johnny who skinned his knee because he teased her, call the cops, it's policy. Or the way that every customer service interaction is routed through endless AIs because it's cheaper than solving a problem. Or how it seems like nobody will do right by anyone else until lawyers get involved. Cut taxes year after year, while everything decays, we fail the younger generations, and everyone thinks you fake it till you make it because it's all zero sum... It's how America heads straight to banana republic, and it might be too late to turn.
It's interesting to me how complaints about widespread Internet political propaganda and "grifting" so consistently reveal the author's own political biases. It's really hard to write about it in a detached way.
(It's strange to see people accuse others of grifting but then continue to engage with the arguments made in that "grift" as though the other party sincerely believed the claims. In my experience, the claims usually probably are made sincerely, and the "grifting" terminology is used because the accuser can't accept that the other worldview exists, or else just as a generic boo word.)
We're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because they need your attention to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because it works. They're really good at it too.
I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.
I love Stephen's writing, and this is so well written.
> I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice.
I find myself worrying about this a lot. For what it's worth though, the non-grifters, the people interested in building a community, are still out there. To find them, you need to look for groups that add no financial value – join an art club, volunteer locally. When I spend time with those groups, I'm reminded that not everyone's a grifter in real life.
My feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.
I think the opposite. The vast majority of kind and gently people are suddenly observing a small but ultra loud obnoxious minority take the stage and burn resources like nothing else to get maximum attention. Attention wins and you don’t get it by being gentle, balanced, kind and most importantly, don’t care about maximum attention.
There is the saying "the empty vessel makes the loudest noise". This was part of the reason I eventually left Reddit, as I was getting sucked in to the habit of making empty meme-like responses to posts.
Some of the worst places for comments I've seen are on youtube - just the lowest effort ("who is listening to this in 2026?!") or the most obnoxious, or just misunderstood. Partly this is because of voting systems combined with large numbers of people. Partly because of bots I suppose.
I watched the announcement on the detection on gravitational waves on YT. The comments scrolling by were like from another world, I even made some screenshots, insane, obnoxious. Could be bots I suppose, I hear from political commentators here who advocate for thoughtful commentary "from the middle", that their social media posts are always very quickly flooded by the same kind of polarizing low-level comments that drown out any intellectual and thoughtful debate. It's probably partly bots, partly a small minority of people that get sucked into it by the bots. I have no problem believing this is Russia, or NK, undermining our democracy in a fully automated fashion.
This is the right takeaway. Before the internet went mainstream, these ultra loud and obnoxious minorities were restricted to being obnoxious within their local communities, and their speech was restricted to what they were willing to say to others face-to-face.
Now, both of those restrictions have been lifted: they can now act obnoxious in front of a global audience that will be forced to listen to them, and they no longer have to worry about the potential consequences of being obnoxious in person.
Yes. I remember reading a piece on /r/SlateStarCodex subreddit many years that said something like, "Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people," and that had an impact on me. In fact, many articles by Scott Alexander had an impact on me, though I don't know what he's up to these days.
I'd say at least 1/3 of internet commenters clearly have GAD (generalized anxiety disorder). Most of them undiagnosed. Anxiety triggers ancient animalistic parts of the brain and the "need to do something NOW" which often then gets released into negative / angry / aggressive posts.
Depressed people are the opposite, they tend to lurk and not care that much
I remember back in the "old" internet pre-2010, there was basically zero anxious people posting.
And the SlateStarCodex people are also, for the vast majority, batshit insane people behind a veil of "no but you see i'm a rationalist". That includes Scotty.
Yeah, I just came back from traveling a couple of weeks, and I have had such wonderful experiences with people. There were times where I just wanted to hug a taxi cab driver (ie when a Grab driver was holding an umbrella over my vomiting daughter [car sickness] and me, with his car stopped by at the side of a highway... etc.)
I came to comment the exact opposite. People are good, caring, kind, helpful, thoughtful, funny, interesting. It’s visible every day in real life beyond the streets… in both small and big interactions.
When you choose to see beyond the surface, it becomes clear this is the cause of a system. A system that is nearly impossible to escape, and which will last for the rest of our lives. But still a system, and not the people participating.
This is how humans behave under anonymity, towards an anonymous crowd of people. It is something you don't see on the streets with the exception of a few assholes, but you see it a bit more on the road, where being in a vehicle puts some distance.
It is not a lack of shame and the treat of consequences. Take soldiers for instance, instinctively, they don't want the enemy they face dead, it takes a lot of conditioning to have them kill without hesitation and it often results in mental health issues later. And solders are rewarded for killing the enemy, it means the shame and threat of consequences go the other way. Normal people just don't want to hurt others.
But the more detached we become from the actual person, the easier it is to be an asshole. This is what happens on the internet where people are just entries in a database, at best a name and an avatar.
The internet has a big "dogs barking at each other through the closed gate" dynamic. People are much more rude and aggressive to each other from a safe distance.
I think it's actually inverted, the sudden arrival of this new information layer is bringing out the worst in people as they try to suddenly adapt to this new social environment. Even worse, is that it works(ed) and now the behavior is influencing real life.
Well, the guardrails, by which I assume you mean legal and social accountability, were the norm for most of human history, which is why I don't consider the behaviour of anonymous and unaccountable humans on the internet to be "normal". Of course, humans are capable of great evil, but we are also pretty good at building social structures to prevent the worst of it. But those structures don't work so well on the anonymous internet.
> You see this in real life on the streets too.
To nowhere near the same extent, in my experience. Most people in real life are still fairly polite, even to strangers. It's insane to me how rude people can be on social media. Some of the aggressive responses I've received on Reddit (to fairly innocuous comments) I would never in a million years get in real life. (And this is also true of the 90s internet.)
I actually think the opposite, the hatred on the internet seems artificial to me.
In the current day when AI is so prevalent, it always makes me wonder how many posts are made by agents instructed to maximize engagement by making people angry.
Sort of the paradox of humanity. I actually like the majority of people I meet in person. But ‘humanity’ in the aggregate is just fucking terrible and constantly finds new and interesting ways to lower my expectations further.
This reads to as pure AI slop to me, and Pangram agrees (100% AI).
To use one of the idioms that give this impression, this is not just knee-jerk whining. It's material to what the article is about. If you're going to raise this topic, be a human and say something constructive. An AI generated ragebait whinge about ragebait is ragebait squared with heaped serving of hypocrisy on top. This exemplifies everything it complains about.
But forget Pangram. This passage, from the conclusion, is 100% rock-solid proof that Claude was a key contributor.
> "The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does. The question is whether human existence should be organised around alien and inhuman objective functions no human chose and nobody can inspect or understand."
Also, I think that "grift" (repeated throughout the article) is very poorly defined. I also think that most cryptocurrencies are, in the general case, a bad example of a "grift."
An AI-written post with a "license" button underneath it is a pretty pure example of grift, though.
What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization. Monetization will basically ruin anything meant to be fun, even a simple board game with friends and family, if it stopped being about spending quality time and having fun and now there’s a competition of how much will each make at the end, it won’t be fun, you will see tribalism, manipulation, cheating, and other shenanigans.
Note, however, that even with achieving this first step, we'll still have a platform full of profit-motivated actors, because our economies incentivize this behavior whether online or IRL.
Both problems need solving, but the first one is easier, and demonstrating its solution on a large scale could help convince everyone that it's an endeavor worth applying to all domains.
Part 1: Everything was turned into social User Generated Content to reduce editorial costs. Part 2: Predatory third parties ranging from nation states to SEO agencies started mass filling UGC with anxiety inducing brain rot. Part 3: the brainrot generation is automated by AI and it silences any real people or voices. Part 4: People go outside to touch grass and Part 5: That leaves opportunities for platforms for real people with good culture
I saw a video of a doctor answering a call and the caller started saying some strange hate/concensus-pushing message about Jews hating people who hate Jews in a very angry tone. Neither the doctor nor the commenters suggested it was AI, but it certainly sounded like it. I got a flash of a future where every telemarketer call is either an angry voice ready to convince you of something, or the gender you like trying to woo you.
How discouraging would it be (intentionally) if every time an AI had access to your attention, it was trying to make you angry. This would probably cause a lot of people to disengage, a lot to get angry, and a few able to live without being affected by the laser guided anger and manipulation
tl;dr: The internet is the thing that needs the most attention when educating your kids.
I get a lot of value from the internet. I fell for some traps (instagram, facebook with very little value but lots of wasted energy) that I mostly got rid of.
But I have many products I am very happy about, that I got to know through other people on the internet.
Sadly, one of the contributors to this are the "Little" Tech Bros. They have drunk the kool aid at work. A bit libertarian or right wing in nature, they salivate at the latest Full Self Driving (supervised) lie, or AI hype, or crypto when it first came out. In their view, any attempt to regulate or draw boundaries around "tech" equates to communism marxism, and attempts to curtail so called freedom of speech. Don't use it if you don't like it, they say.
By Little Tech Bros i mean developers with lots of technical skills, but who haven't been lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time. They keep evangelizing thinking lightning will hit them the next time. It won't. More likely, a layoff notice. Because Big Tech Bro figured out how to grab all the money from your excess productivity.
Well duh, was this not expected? The Internet userbase has transitioned dramatically over the past several decades.
It moved from an outpost for computer nerds in the early 1990s, to a middle-class product in the 2000s, then everybody got access in the 2010s with the spread of the smartphone.
The demographics of the internet look nothing like they did when it was created.
That’s why you’re seeing stratification reemerge imo. Paywalls are probably the most obvious feature of this, where information worth accessing these days tends to be paywalled. By contrast high volume, low quality slop supported by ads is generally free.
I don't doubt that there are very large communities of grifters, but to say that they are "the Internet" seems a bit much. If you see grifting as the central core of the Internet, maybe that's a problem with your filter bubble. You need to filter that stuff out.
I have only one agenda - my own. People hate that I think nowadays.
You need to be in some kind of camp, even for something so minor as skincare brand or fanfiction.
I think that it was fine until the internet started to influence the real life way too much. You used to be able to log out and gain distance to the bullshit on the web.
Now the bullshit has permeated into the mainstream and you need very drastic measures and personality to reject it.
You will lose some people for this but there are still some older folks that can talk about anything and will never get offended. Never conform but also don't become a contrarian for the sake of it.
The modern life is an art how to stay weird in a world that wants to squash you into some kind of label. How to stay genuine
It starts during simple social interactions in real life. You make a joke about alcohol, now you feel the pressure of the crowd to become 'the funny drunk'. Squash it as soon as possible now you are a teetotaler. Now tell them joke about drugs. Make it all too confusing at all so they lose any idea about what to make of you. Obfuscation. Now you are free in the purest sense. There is no template for you aside from the one you craft or discover for yourself.
I even went further and made myself genderless so that these norms cannot easily qualify me into anything really. There is 50% chance if someone calls me a woman or a man.
Sometimes I support the feminism. Sometimes I give myself to patriarchy and observe how that feels.
Maybe I made it all up and nothing I wrote is genuine.
We should strive to be stranger or at least do not treat it as something bad but as a virtue. Of course do not try hard but just explore the weird and see where it takes you.
I've seen this same discussion in a million guises.
This particular essay starts with
> I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet.
... and then contains a lot of predictable stuff about how and why avalon became: tarnished, effete, weak, tawdry, despoiled, no-fun, toxic, predatory, rapacious etc. You can take your pick, it doesn't matter. It's the same argument no matter which adjective you choose.
It finally gets to
> The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does.
That's a truism of no value.
Take the whole essay, replace "internet" with a country's name and amend some of the details. You've seen it before? You read it every damned day in every form of media. It's used to justify just about anything; the good and the bad. In the end it's a boring, repetitive argument.
At the edge, it reduces to: my country used to be great and now it's crap because it's not how it used to be - so, we need to roll everything back despite the number of years that have passed between then and now, and despite any of the positive things that may have come during that time.
> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model.
I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs, and they were a hub for discussion for real-life communities like music-band fandom or travel subcultures.
Besides the deleterious nature of engagement-maximizing social media today, I think another aspect of the problem is that there is less connection to real-life socializing simply because that has collapsed in so many countries.
This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being.
This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.
The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon).
Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.
For me the difference today is that most people sharing their passions are now doing for The Algorithm. It's a far cry from the scrappy days of the early web where people just posted stuff because they thought it was cool. I'm not saying their passion is any less, more just that is so much noise. People are now "creators" and are pressured to constantly create.
Even 25 years ago being “too online” - back then it was icq, livejournal, and forums - was already destructive as hell and always led to some pretty cringe outcomes. At least these days some people make a career out of it, back then it was purely negative
It wasn't purely negative for everyone. I still maintain ties with several people I hung out with on an IRC channel in the 2000s, and a couple of fellow heavy commenters on one blog in the same decade. Granted, this was aided by the fact that we were all in Europe and all traveled regularly, so we could do the IRL interaction that solidifies friendships.
Today, if one is heavily online, many platforms no longer offer a space where one can tell a fellow user, "I'll be in your town soon, let's meet up", or even if it does, the general culture has changed away from that.
> You could meet cool new people
My first date was a guy with fake photos. Ten dates later I settled for a married guy cheating on his wife. He eventually divorced but then I left him.
Username checks out. /s
> Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
I've been thinking about this recently. The tools we use as desk workers are only ever one step away from endless streams of addictive content. And in many cases the software we use to do our jobs are adopting dark patterns similar to those which have been successful in consumer apps.
Often the advice is to opt out of the system. I make mobile apps, I can't simply drop out and use a dumb phone (unless I get a new career). My workplace is essentially inside the addictive environment. I have to keep my knowledge up to date and be on top of app/design trends to be successful in my job. This used to feel rewarding to me, but increasingly it doesn't.
I used to be able to go to Twitter and read+learn+be inspired a lot about web development for example, but now it's almost entirely short form video content. And I fall for it every time. And I actively tried to avoid this from happening, I barely use YouTube and I've never used TikTok.
My Dad was a carpenter and it's as if his day-to-day tools were cigarettes or something. It's hard/impossible to avoid this environment when we are increasingly working in it.
Pandemic really ramped it up. Also screen addiction has gone mainstream. In front of a screen 12+ hours a day 20 years ago? Total nerd. Now? Standard behavior.
> I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access
Interestingly, my digital consumption for idle entertainment dropped when I started working full time. I didn’t want to be in front of a screen when work was done.
My screen exposure for fun is primarily this site (where I spend too much time), and games where my friends and I treat the time as a multi-way group call with long distance friends.
I do know a lot of people who followed the exact course you describe: They watch screens at work and had periods where it was okay to spend a lot of time on social media or social news sites (Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, depending on the era). Checking those sites all day long became a habit for them and filled all idle time. Whenever they felt uncomfortable or bored, visiting a site would fix it.
Some of them broke out of it when they switched to workplaces where it wasn’t acceptable to do non-work things during the day. This is almost inconceivable for a lot of tech workers who have had a lot of freedom to date, but it’s normal in some industries. As an example, I have friends who work in areas where security concerns are so high that they check their phones into lockers before entering their work areas. Others worked at companies who did over-reaching analysis of computer use. Many just moved to companies with packed open office spaces where it would be obvious to everyone around if you were on Reddit or looking at your phone instead of the computer for an excessive amount all day.
What is interesting is that this seems to induce a split: Some people get broken of their Internet use habits this way and continue not using those sites outside of work. Others seem to have a rebound where they leave work and start gorging on Reddit or TikTok or their other preferred sites.
Im with you! The most times Im late for "some things on a project" at work is, because, I wasted time reading through dozens of feeds/news/comments on "too many" days so I got somehow a "delay" ;-)
Esp. comments: Actually, I ready mostly those because usually they have more information or context etc.than the article itself. (BTW: thats the reason why Im here on HN :-)
And even worse, if you're addicted to soda, it is cheaper than bottled water, what if you don't have tap water?
The dealer is in your pocket.
Do you ever wonder, if you were born in a different era, like 1901, and still had the base drives behind this addiction, how would it channel itself? Like what would you replace the internet with in those days
If my history reading is any indication the answer is ‘getting drunk at the pub’
One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind of thing.
Mr Rogers said it: look for the helpers. They may be few, but they are there. Find them and focus on them.
I think that's why historical education is so important (or just liking history as in my case), looked through the lens of history all of the current shit as bad as it is, is really nothing all that new either, the only constant is change after all.
As the aphorism goes: History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme.
The knowledge that 1932 was kinda similar is not comforting at all. Or whatever run up to historical horrible events we talk about.
I genuinely dont like what history sais follows after times like this.
Thanks for commenting and acknowledging that it's challenging. My mates and myself have definitely fallen into this. Reminds me of that hackernews post about how doomerism is a siren's song for genZ, forget where it is.
If you can’t help, it’s okay to look away.
People sometimes get mad at this, like it’s callous or privileged, but what’s the difference between focusing on problems you can’t help and slowing down to stare at a car wreck?
If you don’t slow down are you being insensitive?
Obviously if you can help it’s different.
This also seems to be spilling into the real world. Because of this internet addiction, it’s almost guaranteed that everyone has a relatively expensive computer in their pocket. This has turned into an increasing number of real-world scams, as well as supporting trafficking networks for stealing phones. The scams range from old school pickpocketers to sympathy schemes to full out phone-related accusations – anything to get you to take your phone out of your pocket, potentially unlock it, and have someone swipe it.
If it’s unlocked, they may do some further scams from what’s available on the device, but either way, within days, your phone is somewhere in Asia, disassembled, and sold for scrap and parts.
After reddit prevented browsing old.reddit.com without signing in, I got a lot more active on lemmy. There's some amount of old internet feeling there, you don't get exhausted by the amount of material and it's not overrun by corporations. So far it's been nice.
What killed Reddit wasn't just its corporate chase for profit. It was also the fact that the general public's default internet device shifted to the smartphone and its limited keyboard and screen, no longer the computer. That led to comments largely being reduced to 140-character quips, no longer substantial discussion.
I am skeptical any non-corporate replacement like Lemmy can bring the old internet feeling back, because even on those alternative platforms, you just won't get many people using computers again.
It also was because it became a target to influence and manipulate people both by every day scammers and marketers as well as nation state level actors.
Sure, but that didn't hit a lot of small hobby subreddits until recently. But the discussion culture there had already declined starting a decade ago, and it was ordinary subreddit denizens and their phones to blame, not bots or geopolitical intrigues.
Reddit ended up gamifying for engagement/rage-bait instead of natural, authentic discussion.
Just a hunch, but I think Aaron Swartz would be disappointed.
(Then you bring up Aaron Swartz and Obama's DOJ on reddit and it's massive downvotes calling you a MAGA nazi blah blah blah.)
I follow reddit through RSS, at least that still works but probably that would be the final nail in the coffin for me. There are some really good subs out there and there is no replacements of those on the open internet. Maybe on Discord but I don't really like to use to that for anything else besides voice chat.
Ok article, and has similar points to “You should quit Reddit” (which was a pretty good book).
About 2/3 in, the sentences got choppier and shorter, and you could tell some context rot was setting in.
Internet didn't change, it's population did. It's 8 billion potential victims and all bit more sophisticated thieves under one roof.
Can't blame Internet. People which were scammed "offline" are now scammed online.
The internet is the people using it, if many of its users have come up with more effective ways to exploit the rest than the internet has become a worse place.
The internet is an ecosystem just like any other one on earth. Being it's a pretty new one the typical parasites and viruses that grow in every environment hadn't really developed to fill that ecosystem in the first decade or two of it. Now we are reaching the cambrian explosion of bullshit that the human animal isn't innoculated against.
So yea, the internet is a worse place, but really because the early internet wasn't realistically behaved for the amount of free energy it left around.
Internet deserves some blame too, when you have 8 billion people, but only 4 billion addresses, you are naturally going to end up with a lot of centralized services to work around those limits.
Economic exploitation is just one way to take advantage of people who lack internal contentment. The other forms are cultural and social.
Modifying one element in this environment in favor of others won't make things better. You could even argue that less people are being financially scammed online than they are cognitively.
These problems are not endemic to the internet. But the internet does cast a broader net and provide a wider variety of ways for people to become afflicted by whatever it is I'm trying to describe.
People should know more about data fusion. How browser javascript fingerprints and unique personal id of the adtech works. Hint it traveres VPNs. The seven has an id of you
Check your id https://amiunique.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_fusion
This so exaggerated. If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes, you are either choosing the wrong places to be, or (more likely) the problem is with you.
There are two competing ways of looking at this.
1. If everyone you know is an asshole about some particular thing, then you're probably the asshole. Think politics or design.
2. Everybody is an asshole some of the time for some reason. Because the internet connects and exposes us to so many people that even if someone only acts like an asshole very rarely said connectivity and algorithm boosting ensures you get exposed to it.
It's written in a hyperbolic way, but I don't think your characterization is right. The author isn't saying everyone is an asshole, he's saying the systemic forces are mostly aligned in a predatory direction, and that part is absolutely true. I have a good time on Instagram despite the ways the platform is structured.
>This so exaggerated
No, it's just what's happening online.
>If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes,
Wrong thread? Doesn't seem to correspond to anything in the article.
I don't think everyone is an asshole exactly but something is wrong with more and more people and you see it everything from how people drive to the degree to which so many things seem more adversarial or feel like part time jobs.
There’s also a bad side.
the internet is home to plenty of predatory cesspits, but the real stuff is still there too. it's not as convenient or addicting as content that doubles as a funnel for the ad machines, but the real spaces and media that aren't dominated by the advertising industrial complex still exist- just like in other forms of media that preceded the internet.
A good quote: "Sell people a worldview, and they will advertise it for free because criticism of the product now feels like criticism of the self"
So I think there is an oversight in this essay, and it's that society becoming predatory is much bigger than the Internet: it is the story of the decay of America, reflected and exacerbated by the internet, as it becomes a anti-democratic huckster society dominated by grifters, theocrats, and snake-oil sellers.
Forget the internet, you can't get your home repaired, your car worked on, an appliance purchased, shop for food, or do anything else without wading through a corrupt morass of that mixes woo, subcultures, grift, and subscriptions. Maybe it's the hospital that wants to charge a $25 a day fee to make the hospital room TV grant access to basic cable channels instead of nothing. Maybe it's the elementary school district that mandates every physical interaction between students is called in to the police - like little Jenny shoved Johnny who skinned his knee because he teased her, call the cops, it's policy. Or the way that every customer service interaction is routed through endless AIs because it's cheaper than solving a problem. Or how it seems like nobody will do right by anyone else until lawyers get involved. Cut taxes year after year, while everything decays, we fail the younger generations, and everyone thinks you fake it till you make it because it's all zero sum... It's how America heads straight to banana republic, and it might be too late to turn.
My favorite comments here are the ones that go "What predatory cesspit?" and "The author of this article is the problem!"
In other words, spending hours scrolling addictive, deceptive crap every day is healthy. The only concern is calling attention to it.
It's interesting to me how complaints about widespread Internet political propaganda and "grifting" so consistently reveal the author's own political biases. It's really hard to write about it in a detached way.
(It's strange to see people accuse others of grifting but then continue to engage with the arguments made in that "grift" as though the other party sincerely believed the claims. In my experience, the claims usually probably are made sincerely, and the "grifting" terminology is used because the accuser can't accept that the other worldview exists, or else just as a generic boo word.)
We're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because they need your attention to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because it works. They're really good at it too.
I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.
I love Stephen's writing, and this is so well written.
> I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice.
I find myself worrying about this a lot. For what it's worth though, the non-grifters, the people interested in building a community, are still out there. To find them, you need to look for groups that add no financial value – join an art club, volunteer locally. When I spend time with those groups, I'm reminded that not everyone's a grifter in real life.
Also, this explorable by Nicky Case is evergreen: https://ncase.me/trust/
My feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.
I think the opposite. The vast majority of kind and gently people are suddenly observing a small but ultra loud obnoxious minority take the stage and burn resources like nothing else to get maximum attention. Attention wins and you don’t get it by being gentle, balanced, kind and most importantly, don’t care about maximum attention.
There is the saying "the empty vessel makes the loudest noise". This was part of the reason I eventually left Reddit, as I was getting sucked in to the habit of making empty meme-like responses to posts.
Some of the worst places for comments I've seen are on youtube - just the lowest effort ("who is listening to this in 2026?!") or the most obnoxious, or just misunderstood. Partly this is because of voting systems combined with large numbers of people. Partly because of bots I suppose.
I watched the announcement on the detection on gravitational waves on YT. The comments scrolling by were like from another world, I even made some screenshots, insane, obnoxious. Could be bots I suppose, I hear from political commentators here who advocate for thoughtful commentary "from the middle", that their social media posts are always very quickly flooded by the same kind of polarizing low-level comments that drown out any intellectual and thoughtful debate. It's probably partly bots, partly a small minority of people that get sucked into it by the bots. I have no problem believing this is Russia, or NK, undermining our democracy in a fully automated fashion.
I hope you are right
This is the right takeaway. Before the internet went mainstream, these ultra loud and obnoxious minorities were restricted to being obnoxious within their local communities, and their speech was restricted to what they were willing to say to others face-to-face.
Now, both of those restrictions have been lifted: they can now act obnoxious in front of a global audience that will be forced to listen to them, and they no longer have to worry about the potential consequences of being obnoxious in person.
Yes. I remember reading a piece on /r/SlateStarCodex subreddit many years that said something like, "Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people," and that had an impact on me. In fact, many articles by Scott Alexander had an impact on me, though I don't know what he's up to these days.
Okay, found it -- https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
Edit: It was written in October 2018 -- 8 years ago. Feels centuries ago, to be frank. We're moving at absolute breakneck speed in tech.
I'd say at least 1/3 of internet commenters clearly have GAD (generalized anxiety disorder). Most of them undiagnosed. Anxiety triggers ancient animalistic parts of the brain and the "need to do something NOW" which often then gets released into negative / angry / aggressive posts.
Depressed people are the opposite, they tend to lurk and not care that much
I remember back in the "old" internet pre-2010, there was basically zero anxious people posting.
And the SlateStarCodex people are also, for the vast majority, batshit insane people behind a veil of "no but you see i'm a rationalist". That includes Scotty.
Thank you
Yeah, I just came back from traveling a couple of weeks, and I have had such wonderful experiences with people. There were times where I just wanted to hug a taxi cab driver (ie when a Grab driver was holding an umbrella over my vomiting daughter [car sickness] and me, with his car stopped by at the side of a highway... etc.)
I came to comment the exact opposite. People are good, caring, kind, helpful, thoughtful, funny, interesting. It’s visible every day in real life beyond the streets… in both small and big interactions.
When you choose to see beyond the surface, it becomes clear this is the cause of a system. A system that is nearly impossible to escape, and which will last for the rest of our lives. But still a system, and not the people participating.
This is how humans behave under anonymity, towards an anonymous crowd of people. It is something you don't see on the streets with the exception of a few assholes, but you see it a bit more on the road, where being in a vehicle puts some distance.
It is not a lack of shame and the treat of consequences. Take soldiers for instance, instinctively, they don't want the enemy they face dead, it takes a lot of conditioning to have them kill without hesitation and it often results in mental health issues later. And solders are rewarded for killing the enemy, it means the shame and threat of consequences go the other way. Normal people just don't want to hurt others.
But the more detached we become from the actual person, the easier it is to be an asshole. This is what happens on the internet where people are just entries in a database, at best a name and an avatar.
The internet has a big "dogs barking at each other through the closed gate" dynamic. People are much more rude and aggressive to each other from a safe distance.
I think it's actually inverted, the sudden arrival of this new information layer is bringing out the worst in people as they try to suddenly adapt to this new social environment. Even worse, is that it works(ed) and now the behavior is influencing real life.
Well, the guardrails, by which I assume you mean legal and social accountability, were the norm for most of human history, which is why I don't consider the behaviour of anonymous and unaccountable humans on the internet to be "normal". Of course, humans are capable of great evil, but we are also pretty good at building social structures to prevent the worst of it. But those structures don't work so well on the anonymous internet.
> You see this in real life on the streets too.
To nowhere near the same extent, in my experience. Most people in real life are still fairly polite, even to strangers. It's insane to me how rude people can be on social media. Some of the aggressive responses I've received on Reddit (to fairly innocuous comments) I would never in a million years get in real life. (And this is also true of the 90s internet.)
I actually think the opposite, the hatred on the internet seems artificial to me.
In the current day when AI is so prevalent, it always makes me wonder how many posts are made by agents instructed to maximize engagement by making people angry.
Sort of the paradox of humanity. I actually like the majority of people I meet in person. But ‘humanity’ in the aggregate is just fucking terrible and constantly finds new and interesting ways to lower my expectations further.
so normal human behavior is immune to shame and consequences?
The internet
Is
For porn
This reads to as pure AI slop to me, and Pangram agrees (100% AI).
To use one of the idioms that give this impression, this is not just knee-jerk whining. It's material to what the article is about. If you're going to raise this topic, be a human and say something constructive. An AI generated ragebait whinge about ragebait is ragebait squared with heaped serving of hypocrisy on top. This exemplifies everything it complains about.
Yes. "High confidence." I confirmed it myself:
> https://i.ibb.co/m5tPKPYS/Screenshot2026829-1.png
But forget Pangram. This passage, from the conclusion, is 100% rock-solid proof that Claude was a key contributor.
> "The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does. The question is whether human existence should be organised around alien and inhuman objective functions no human chose and nobody can inspect or understand."
Also, I think that "grift" (repeated throughout the article) is very poorly defined. I also think that most cryptocurrencies are, in the general case, a bad example of a "grift."
An AI-written post with a "license" button underneath it is a pretty pure example of grift, though.
[delayed]
What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization. Monetization will basically ruin anything meant to be fun, even a simple board game with friends and family, if it stopped being about spending quality time and having fun and now there’s a competition of how much will each make at the end, it won’t be fun, you will see tribalism, manipulation, cheating, and other shenanigans.
> What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization
Agreed, and the first step ought to be a push for demonetized / citizen-owned platforms:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Note, however, that even with achieving this first step, we'll still have a platform full of profit-motivated actors, because our economies incentivize this behavior whether online or IRL.
Both problems need solving, but the first one is easier, and demonstrating its solution on a large scale could help convince everyone that it's an endeavor worth applying to all domains.
If you don't know the song Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham, allow me to introduce you to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
(Heck of a karakoe number if you can pull it off.)
Part 1: Everything was turned into social User Generated Content to reduce editorial costs. Part 2: Predatory third parties ranging from nation states to SEO agencies started mass filling UGC with anxiety inducing brain rot. Part 3: the brainrot generation is automated by AI and it silences any real people or voices. Part 4: People go outside to touch grass and Part 5: That leaves opportunities for platforms for real people with good culture
> Crypto has become the subject of my verbal ire so often because it is the apotheosis of the grift economy.
AI is replacing Crypto on the topic in some sense.
Hell is other people.
I saw a video of a doctor answering a call and the caller started saying some strange hate/concensus-pushing message about Jews hating people who hate Jews in a very angry tone. Neither the doctor nor the commenters suggested it was AI, but it certainly sounded like it. I got a flash of a future where every telemarketer call is either an angry voice ready to convince you of something, or the gender you like trying to woo you.
How discouraging would it be (intentionally) if every time an AI had access to your attention, it was trying to make you angry. This would probably cause a lot of people to disengage, a lot to get angry, and a few able to live without being affected by the laser guided anger and manipulation
AI slop (like the article) makes it a worse place.
I ran this article through through Pangram and it says the text is AI written
Heh “predatory cesspit”. Ironically, the internet is kind of returning to its roots in this respect.
tl;dr: The internet is the thing that needs the most attention when educating your kids.
I get a lot of value from the internet. I fell for some traps (instagram, facebook with very little value but lots of wasted energy) that I mostly got rid of.
But I have many products I am very happy about, that I got to know through other people on the internet.
Everything is kind of a predatory cesspit now
Sadly, one of the contributors to this are the "Little" Tech Bros. They have drunk the kool aid at work. A bit libertarian or right wing in nature, they salivate at the latest Full Self Driving (supervised) lie, or AI hype, or crypto when it first came out. In their view, any attempt to regulate or draw boundaries around "tech" equates to communism marxism, and attempts to curtail so called freedom of speech. Don't use it if you don't like it, they say.
By Little Tech Bros i mean developers with lots of technical skills, but who haven't been lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time. They keep evangelizing thinking lightning will hit them the next time. It won't. More likely, a layoff notice. Because Big Tech Bro figured out how to grab all the money from your excess productivity.
maybe the physical world is the moderator of the dream world (internet). In the absence of the physical world the dream world runs rampant.
with no empirical reference, truth becomes a matter of popularity or the loudest argument.
with no space, everybody lives next door to a thousand assholes.
Half the comments here, for instance.
If you go to doomer places on the internet (this thread included), you will see the internet as doomed
A billion hungry discorporate souls, roaming a vast non-space, looking to feed their hunger, looking to eat each other. Some call that hell.
Well duh, was this not expected? The Internet userbase has transitioned dramatically over the past several decades.
It moved from an outpost for computer nerds in the early 1990s, to a middle-class product in the 2000s, then everybody got access in the 2010s with the spread of the smartphone.
The demographics of the internet look nothing like they did when it was created.
The tools, business models have changed just as much as the demographics if not more.
That’s why you’re seeing stratification reemerge imo. Paywalls are probably the most obvious feature of this, where information worth accessing these days tends to be paywalled. By contrast high volume, low quality slop supported by ads is generally free.
You could replace nearly every instance of "the Internet" in this article with "capitalism" and it would make perfect sense.
I don't doubt that there are very large communities of grifters, but to say that they are "the Internet" seems a bit much. If you see grifting as the central core of the Internet, maybe that's a problem with your filter bubble. You need to filter that stuff out.
Literally 100% AI generated slop, disappointing
Now, for the last 20 years.
Everything on the Internet is designed to enrage or sexually arouse you as quickly as possible, including this article.
I am aroused by this reply
I am enraged by your arousal
You can have both very quickly at the same time if you start playing League of Legends
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-KvpO804M
lol never seen that before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAQSicsoEu0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random you may get lucky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint%27s_triad
I have no words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komarodin
I’m neither aroused nor enraged. Good job.
Nah dawg, here's some chill pills:
Bird bath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BJ0L750B9A
The Wind in the Willows live action movie (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZAq_4ZO_3U
its late, go to sleep…: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bATLAjEkI (this whole channel is a ..vibe)
Samorost 3: https://store.steampowered.com/app/421120/Samorost_3/
Wingspan: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054490/Wingspan/
Tiny Bang Story: https://store.steampowered.com/app/96000/The_Tiny_Bang_Story...
There's good shit out there and everywhere, if you but let yourself take a break
I have only one agenda - my own. People hate that I think nowadays.
You need to be in some kind of camp, even for something so minor as skincare brand or fanfiction.
I think that it was fine until the internet started to influence the real life way too much. You used to be able to log out and gain distance to the bullshit on the web.
Now the bullshit has permeated into the mainstream and you need very drastic measures and personality to reject it.
You will lose some people for this but there are still some older folks that can talk about anything and will never get offended. Never conform but also don't become a contrarian for the sake of it.
The modern life is an art how to stay weird in a world that wants to squash you into some kind of label. How to stay genuine
It starts during simple social interactions in real life. You make a joke about alcohol, now you feel the pressure of the crowd to become 'the funny drunk'. Squash it as soon as possible now you are a teetotaler. Now tell them joke about drugs. Make it all too confusing at all so they lose any idea about what to make of you. Obfuscation. Now you are free in the purest sense. There is no template for you aside from the one you craft or discover for yourself.
I even went further and made myself genderless so that these norms cannot easily qualify me into anything really. There is 50% chance if someone calls me a woman or a man.
Sometimes I support the feminism. Sometimes I give myself to patriarchy and observe how that feels.
Maybe I made it all up and nothing I wrote is genuine.
We should strive to be stranger or at least do not treat it as something bad but as a virtue. Of course do not try hard but just explore the weird and see where it takes you.
So ...it's the same social dumpster fire humanity has always been?
Cast aside the syntax and semantics of religion for financially engineered beliefs; buy low, sell high or you'll be "left behind!"
Small step forward from "believe in my take on Christianity or your soul will be eternally damned!"
Mirror neurons fostering same flock building via corps people used to build via scripture.
Just more lazy people who want zero responsibility to themselves and everyone else to have responsibility for them.
I've seen this same discussion in a million guises.
This particular essay starts with
> I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet.
... and then contains a lot of predictable stuff about how and why avalon became: tarnished, effete, weak, tawdry, despoiled, no-fun, toxic, predatory, rapacious etc. You can take your pick, it doesn't matter. It's the same argument no matter which adjective you choose.
It finally gets to
> The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does.
That's a truism of no value.
Take the whole essay, replace "internet" with a country's name and amend some of the details. You've seen it before? You read it every damned day in every form of media. It's used to justify just about anything; the good and the bad. In the end it's a boring, repetitive argument.
At the edge, it reduces to: my country used to be great and now it's crap because it's not how it used to be - so, we need to roll everything back despite the number of years that have passed between then and now, and despite any of the positive things that may have come during that time.