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.
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?
Do you think the internet is better now?
I don’t really get into that one way or the other, to be honest. I don’t think the internet is necessarily better or worse because I find the question to have so many parameters to it as to render it useless. If I catch myself thinking on something in the past and saying, ah, it was BETTER then, I’ll stop myself because that’s a destructive pattern of idealization.
Ah right, you can’t say that anything used to be better because there’s zero difference between good and bad things, how could I forget. The american space program didn’t used to be better when it had funding. Unions didn’t used to be better before they were defanged and disbanded.
