The internet has always been my salvation.
As a socially underdeveloped kid, I’d spend my lunch hours in the high school library on those public desktop computers, reading fandom sites about my favorite video games. Computers always made sense to me. I even owe my entire career to them.
But the internet today feels wrong. Whatever the fuck kind of psychological warfare is happening right now with this Epstein stuff is too much for my mind to handle. I can’t do it anymore.
I will love. I will vote. I will support my community and continue to oppose this fucking nightmarish system we all find ourselves in. But I need to sign off.
Imagine the door closing sound effect when logging out of AIM.
If you feel you have to step away, then do it for yourself - keep being mindful of the cause. Because it’s not a shut and close situation.
Life is always changing, tonight you might not want the internet - half a year from now you might need a very obscure information and you will be able to look it up and log off again.
I love the internet, because it is amazing tool. And so much knowledge is at the tip of your fingerprints! In my childhood if I wanted to learn something I hoped we had the right book home, or it’s library time with the cards and looking for books and hoping the book had an appendices…
Internet does have a rotten part to it - but to give up all the free education YouTube has, all the wikis on the world - it would be going backwards for me.
Knowledge was at your fingertips. Now it’s not quite that. I put a question into a search engine and don’t get a good answer. Not from the search page, and the enshitified results are almost all written by machines, repeating the question over in every way it could be said, and explaining in exhuastive detail why someone would want to know the answer, all to hit the search engine requirements, then maybe a sentence or two with a lousy answer.
But you might not be able to find the answer on the page. I’ve to cycle through multiple pages and scan ai written prose to find an answer that I used to get instantly right from the search page.
I know it can work better, because it did work better. 2021 the enshitification became ubiquitous. That is hardly the only way information is no longer available. Dependent as we are on Search Engines for access to this information, and malign forces having their hooks into those For Profit search engines, we are entering a dark age.
Unless we get some players not in the Shit Trust, the anti competitive providers of any sector that have decided to all do a shit job to maximize profit rather than compete to offer the best products.
Or Trustshit, trustshittered search engines, I’m still workshopping the name.