Good Things Come to Those Who Take

I came up in a world where the internet was still relatively new, widely available but not all-encompassing as it is today. It's a bit strange to look back on now. The family computer (or rather, my computer) was in the living room for parental monitoring. They were less savvy, never much ones for parental controls, mostly because I don't think they understood how they worked.

I really value the freedom I had though. Did I always make good choices? Absolutely not, but you need to make bad choices to learn what the good ones are. I value the supportive little communities I found over time, the people that made my experience that much nicer. I can also say that some of what I saw was scarring, not suitable for any eyes or ages.

It was around this time we began to see the proliferation of the feed. It was new, interesting, and as of yet optimized for maximum engagement. We collectively flocked to these sites, exceited to have an easy way to keep track of our friends, both from online and off. Things weren't great, but they weren't terrible either. I could disconnect at any time, log on and off without it being able to follow me to the ends of the earth.

Tracking, while present, was still nascent. It all was underdeveloped but hopeful. Services that were too corporate didn't catch on, they needed to be a bit scrappy. The web still felt fun. It was just starting to bring in the wider population. Mom and Grandama hadn't quite shown up to make a new service lame.

I look at today and it feels... different. It's a map so overwrought and dense you need a degree to even begin to understand. Once you're inside it's as overstimulating as possible. The major hubs are just a lightning-fast stream of Content™ and Advertisements. The communities outside are starved and barely clinging on. Add in some hubs that have a huge problem with hate crimes and just a general conservative tone that's where we are today. We technically have the knowledge of the entire world at our fingertips, but it's hard to find at times and impossible to know who to trust.

This is all to say, I don't like where we are. I've taken some deliberate steps to remove myself, deleting Twitter, moving away from GMail, self hosting media where possible. I also have much more to go, eventually deleting GMail, deleting Facebook, hardening my setup to reduce tracking, etc. I miss the old internet, and I can only hope that more people see it for what it is.