I’ll start: it wasn’t too long ago that one wasn’t expected to pay out of one’s coked up nose for programs (apps). One used to be able to buy a thing and then own the thing. Vacuum cleaners. Video games. Photoshops. Now one has to sign up for it, enter one’s credit card info and fucking pay monthly for some harebrained “service.”
And I blame all of you. Probably 9/10ths of you are on apple products and/or are locked into absolutely insane digital ecosystems and you all laid down and took it. All of you fucking libs. You took it, you normalized it, and fuck all of you.
That’s just nostalgia doing your brain a fuck. It wasn’t better 15 years ago, especially because smart phones allowed millions of people of color to actually get online. I think we’re way better off now, and the internet actually, y’know, loads.
Nah. 15 years ago was 2005, right before social media really took off, during the height of places like newgrounds. There were individual forums or IRC channels for any niche interest you could possibly want - things were a lot more federated. Corporations weren’t viciously after every single crumb of metadata about you. Things weren’t nearly as ad-driven. Now pretty much all the content on the web is on reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and maybe tumblr. It was easy to glue together a geocities page or cobble together some spaghetti php and have your own little corner of the internet.
It’s good that more people are able to get online, of course. But the quality of the internet itself has been completely rotted by capitalism.
This is what I mean by nostalgia doing your head a fuck, because Friendster and Myspace were already huge in 2005. And let me tell you, adtech was already very much keeping track of your shit and cobbling together your interests. While it’s true that Facebook has made that easier, there was already a massive infrastructure in place to get your eyeballs on ads at every step of the way. Remember at this time that the internet was still being driven by AOL, although it was already past its apex at this point, and it would provide a model for content engagement that’s survived through today.
Adtech of the mid-2000s was childs play compared to now. Storage was still expensive enough that it wasn’t seen as worth it to collect every single scrap of data and metadata about your online activity. You didn’t have people tracking your gps position at all times. Companies weren’t trying to put corporate spyware in peoples’ homes.
Friendster and Myspace were big then, yes, but this was before the corporate push to add social network features to everything. Pseudonyms and not linking your real life to your online life were still highly encouraged (long before this practice was thoroughly stamped out by things like required facebook omniauth).
Do you think the internet is better now?
