I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?
I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.
It makes me glad for having been born when I was. I am a younger Millennial, so I wasn’t online for the early internet, but I am old enough that when I read this blog post, it reminds me that I have seen firsthand that it wasn’t always this bad — even if, like you, I was surprised to realise how bad things have gotten. I feel like a frog boiling in water that started cool, but gradually became hotter[1]
I feel sorry for Zoomers and younger, who have grown up only knowing the walked gardens of big tech. It invokes an odd sense of ethical duty in me; many of them believe they hate tech in all its forms, because all they know is the toxic cycle of dark patterns and a culture that expects them to be always contactable, making it hard to disengage. However, there’s an entire world that they don’t know that beyond the walled garden. I wish I could show them what I have seen, but you can’t easily convey the magic of a memory — after all, the internet that shaped me no longer exists.
So I guess the challenge ahead of me is trying to figure out how I can work with them to co-create a vision of a better internet. We can’t put all the enshittification and spambots back in Pandora’s box, but maybe we can build something new if people like us can use our memories to distribute hope to where it’s needed.
You say “after all, the Internet that shaped me no longer exists.”
In a way, that’s true, but the reality is that most of it is still there; it’s just dwarfed by what came after.
I can still log on to mume.org and play on a Middle Earth-based MUD. I can still connect to IRC.
FirstClass BBSes, Hermes BBSes, Hotline servers and trackers, a plethora of self-hosted HTTP1.0 compliant sites, Gopher servers, FTP sites, and more.
The only real victim that I can think of is Usenet; AIM servers are back again, as are ICQ servers, shoutcast servers and battle.net servers.
Dialup is gone, but people have built TCP wrappers so all the old dialup stuff can be used over the Internet. You can even run the operating systems and software packages just the way they were in 1979 (or the year of your choice).
The callenge is finding all that when your phone and computer do all they can to direct you to Instagram, Tiktok and Temu, and system defaults use add on technology that has only existed for a decade max.
I do agree that there is much that remains. Indeed, I have found a lot of joy by discovering all the weird little personal websites that people are building as an act of rebellion. However, the culture has irrevocably changed. It makes me think of the line “man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man”.
Many of us who grew up on a more free and chaotic internet have become jaded over time. If I went back in time, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the internet in the same way I used to because I’d be too acutely aware of what lies ahead. That’s why I prefer to focus on moving forwards — it feels like a kind of healing
Ironically somehow AI is making disabling JS better nowadays, because text/markdown is becoming normalized, so receiving a pure text version of a page is a thing again.
I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?
I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.
It makes me glad for having been born when I was. I am a younger Millennial, so I wasn’t online for the early internet, but I am old enough that when I read this blog post, it reminds me that I have seen firsthand that it wasn’t always this bad — even if, like you, I was surprised to realise how bad things have gotten. I feel like a frog boiling in water that started cool, but gradually became hotter[1]
I feel sorry for Zoomers and younger, who have grown up only knowing the walked gardens of big tech. It invokes an odd sense of ethical duty in me; many of them believe they hate tech in all its forms, because all they know is the toxic cycle of dark patterns and a culture that expects them to be always contactable, making it hard to disengage. However, there’s an entire world that they don’t know that beyond the walled garden. I wish I could show them what I have seen, but you can’t easily convey the magic of a memory — after all, the internet that shaped me no longer exists.
So I guess the challenge ahead of me is trying to figure out how I can work with them to co-create a vision of a better internet. We can’t put all the enshittification and spambots back in Pandora’s box, but maybe we can build something new if people like us can use our memories to distribute hope to where it’s needed.
1 ↩︎
You say “after all, the Internet that shaped me no longer exists.”
In a way, that’s true, but the reality is that most of it is still there; it’s just dwarfed by what came after.
I can still log on to mume.org and play on a Middle Earth-based MUD. I can still connect to IRC.
FirstClass BBSes, Hermes BBSes, Hotline servers and trackers, a plethora of self-hosted HTTP1.0 compliant sites, Gopher servers, FTP sites, and more.
The only real victim that I can think of is Usenet; AIM servers are back again, as are ICQ servers, shoutcast servers and battle.net servers.
Dialup is gone, but people have built TCP wrappers so all the old dialup stuff can be used over the Internet. You can even run the operating systems and software packages just the way they were in 1979 (or the year of your choice).
The callenge is finding all that when your phone and computer do all they can to direct you to Instagram, Tiktok and Temu, and system defaults use add on technology that has only existed for a decade max.
I do agree that there is much that remains. Indeed, I have found a lot of joy by discovering all the weird little personal websites that people are building as an act of rebellion. However, the culture has irrevocably changed. It makes me think of the line “man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man”.
Many of us who grew up on a more free and chaotic internet have become jaded over time. If I went back in time, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the internet in the same way I used to because I’d be too acutely aware of what lies ahead. That’s why I prefer to focus on moving forwards — it feels like a kind of healing
It is mostly because the bar is measured in time to display content (forgot the name of the metric)
So the huge about of bullshit gets hidden by fast internet and asynchronous jobs.
I think it’s “First paint” or something like that.
https://web.dev/articles/fcp
Yeah, you are correct
Just like the bad old days, when entire sites were made in Flash and Linux users were shafted. Ridiculous.
Ironically somehow AI is making disabling JS better nowadays, because text/markdown is becoming normalized, so receiving a pure text version of a page is a thing again.
The average user doesn’t know or understand technical details, and don’t believe they have any power to change anything
Also capitalism means a small number of assholes make most of the decisions for reasons that benefit them