GoKawiilIf you only use social media and video hosting frontends - getting fed by algorithms and visiting the same 5 sites everyday on constant doomscroll, then the internet has never been alive for you. That experience is perhaps ~3-5% of what the internet could be.
For the vast majority of people, yes - the internet is dying: living inside an algorithmically controlled echochamber that they will never get out of, they live and die by what they are “supposed to see”. But, it does not have to be like this.
With the influx of slop that will be created (and already has been created) with LLMs, there is an ever increasing signal to noise on these platforms. This obviously means that we will see less depth of content, less interesting information, and less of the human - all of these are not positive things in any regard.
I had the displeasure of scrolling the tiktok feed on desktop for 30 seconds the other day, and it is a wonder to me how some of us have any attention span left at all. The content was designed to literally suck your soul from your body. AI generated “fruit love island” - It was too much for me. I shook my head and closed the browser tab.
We can use the internet as it was actually intended to be used: go to the protocol layer to interact with the data at it’s source. Throw off the facade of the modern social platform, and we start to see that freedom of information is within grasp.
The only way to actually use the internet in a way that is going to be beneficial to you is to disregard much of it. Using technologies from yesteryear, we can solve the problems we face today on the modern advertisement riddled, javascript focused, LLM slop, distracting, pointless, attention-seeking, corporate hellscape that is the web.
I believe the time is now (and has always been) to use the internet like it’s 1999.
In 1999, the internet was figuring itself out. There was no social media, no algorithm, hell, Google was just starting up. Only about 4% of the world’s population was online (compared to almost 75% today). But, I am not going to suggest we all log off and touch grass (though we should be doing more of that!) My thesis is that we must return to being citizens of the web, instead of users in some database - we must reclaim agency over our attention, and the technologies presented in the 90s and early 2000s allow us to do just this.
This was by constraint more than by design, but the idea behind how the internet should be used is what we are looking to re-instill. The HTTP, XMPP/IRC, email (SMTP) etc. protocols are genuinely good, hence their staying power. The perversion of the protocol is what we are directly assaulting here, the frontend and platform portion of the upper layer 7 (ironic Cloudflare link, as their monopoly is also against the principles we will discuss). The browser used to work for you instead of actively subverting your security and privacy with hundreds of tracking cookies and scripts on every page load.
The internet was (and never stopped being) a series of tubes that transmits data. That data is accessible and transparent to anyone, and the way we ingest, manipulate, and work with said data is that which we can change to benefit the individual. Let’s discuss.
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