I'd like to preface this piece by acknowledging the irony of publishing this, and sharing it, exclusively on the internet, whilst being a pretty scathing piece about the increasing uselessness of the medium. I tried printing this and handing it out on street corners, but I got beaten up and called a nerd, so I'll stick to the safety of my online haven for now.
As a member of the late-era millenials who were born in the mid 1990s, I was priviliged enough to witness the impact of the internet as it became mainstream. I feel like I have never taken it for granted, as it was something that was introduced to us gradually throughout my life. It had existed in some form since around 1983, but access was limited to academic, research and defense organisations until the beginning of the 1990s. As a child, I became acquainted with the internet in the form of early broadband PC access, and for the longest time, the internet felt tethered to a physical place. It was on my dad's Windows XP computer in his study, and my access to it was tied to my limited daily allowance on the computer. I'd spend the time playing Runescape and Habbo Hotel, interacting with friends and strangers alike, watching amusing videos of cats on Google Video, or trying to download trailers for upcoming films.
Eventually, I got a computer of my own (a hand-me-down, so it was actually the same computer that I had originally been using), but the big difference now was that I was pretty much allowed to spend as much time as I liked on it. I set up my own email address, I had an iTunes account, a YouTube account, an eBay account - I was unstoppable! During this time in the mid 2000s, the internet felt like it was a truly wonderous medium that showcased and encouraged all that humanity could be - creativity, curiosity and discussion were all encouraged and unhindered.
I remember watching silly animations on Newgrounds, Collegehumor, Albinoblacksheep and early YouTube. Playing dumb flash games like Stick Wars, Crush The Castle and Happy Wheels. Watching webseries like Jake and Amir, Charlie the Unicorn and Salad Fingers. I spent very little time watching TV as a kid once I got a computer, because I preferred to just choose what to watch in my own time. I didn't like that shows were on a specific times, and I always hated ad breaks. Why should I have abide by the timetable decided by the TV network, when I could just choose to watch whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, online?
There seemed to be a plethora of quirky websites for all sorts of things, and almost all of them had been built from scratch. Anyone with basic HTML knowledge and a few quid to buy their own domain could host their own site or blog, and it felt like the sky was the limit with what could be created. And then there was Wikipedia. I honestly think that I wouldn't have passed half of my exams at school without the help of Wikipedia - an online encyclopedia absolutely overflowing with information. Its thousands of pages act as the perfect quick summary on almost any topic under the sun, with a vast directory of sources and extra information for those who want further reading. To me, Wikipedia was, and is, the internet in its purest form. A totally free resource that is maintained and upheld by volunteers and donors with the common good in mind. Despite it being slammed by parents and teachers alike for "not being a reliable resource", it was, and remains, one of the most well-maintained websites hosting a truly staggering amount of knowledge that is freely available to all, in over 300 languages.
For the entirety of my childhood and early teenage years, the internet felt like an exciting force for good. It allowed us kids to have our own safe space to hang out on digitally after school, whether that was in online games, on MSN Messenger or on sites like Piczo or Bebo, it felt like it was our own. Away from parents, away from teachers, away from other kids we didn't like. And beyond our own circles, there were forums and chatrooms for pretty much any interest or hobby you could think of. And it could all be accessed from the comfort of our own bedrooms.
While I was in secondary school, mobile internet was just beginning to rear its head. I remember being able to access very primitive mobile versions of websites on my Sony Ericsson K510i, but it was pay-as-you-go, and pages took forever to load, so it was almost never worth bothering with unless you were away from home for a while and desperately needed to check your email or MSN messages. This felt like a cool novelty, but the "real" internet was still very much tethered to that computer in my bedroom. It still felt like all of those websites, games and chatrooms existed in that space at my desk, which I would make a very conscious decision to access. Booting up my PC and sitting at my desk was an active choice - something that I was doing as an activity in the evenings. But more on that later.
One day though, things changed. Smartphones took the world by storm, and even though the original iPhone was released in 2007, it took a few years for them to become affordable enough for many people to own them. My first smartphone was the HTC Wildfire S, and it was lightyears ahead of any old candybar phone I'd had. By now, 3G mobile internet had taken off, and it no longer took a matter of hours to actually load and navigate websites. More and more mobile-friendly versions of sites were being made available, and a plethora of them were even available as standalone applications.
It was around this time, say 2010, that Facebook really seemed to catch on at my school. Everyone wanted to be friends with everyone else - friends on Facebook seemed almost to be a form of status and popularity - and for the most part, this cultivated a fairly positive and inclusive environment online that felt like a bigger version of what we had been experiencing with the likes of MSN. I felt plugged in and part of a community that existed physically and digitally at the same time, with both elements complimenting the other. During this time, Facebook felt like a platform that had been designed with the user in mind. It was built for you to keep in touch with people, with your feed consisting of a chronological list of photos and statuses posted by your friends and family. I may be wrong but I am almost certain that there were no adverts at all on the site at this time, and if there were, they were incredibly infrequent and unintrusive.
Fast forward a few years, and the smartphone era had continued to snowball. More and more smartphones were being launched, with more features, better connectivity and lower prices. Nearly everyone I knew owned a smartphone, and they were on social media. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, you name it. Mobile internet was becoming more reliable, more affordable and more tailored. By 2016, mobile internet useage had overtaken PC internet usage. This didn't feel like a huge milestone at the time, but looking back at it now, I think this is perhaps where things began to shift.
As the internet became available to more and more people, there were more and more eyes on it. What had originally felt like an exciting alternative cyberspace that existed away from big corporations and the constant need to monetise everything had slowly but surely become too big to ignore for the moneymen. I can't quite place the time exactly, but a shift began to take place towards the end of the 2010s. The user experience online was becoming secondary to something else - monetisation. For the first few years of most apps' lifecycles, updates would typically bring useful quality-of-life features to users. This is no longer the case - almost every update these days for the likes of Spotify, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube inherently worsens the user experience. The interface for Instagram has been changed multiple times to trick users into clicking on monetised sections of the app, moving the notification button and replacing the space with a shopping button, for instance.
Adverts went from being fairly unintrusive sidebar images that were simply occupying space that would otherwise be blank, to dominating prime real estate on your screen. My Facebook Messenger contacts are mingled in a list with adverts. Google search results are increasingly paid for, with the first couple of results almost always now being reserved for the company willing to pay for the top spot, rather than being the most relevant result based on the keywords in the search. YouTube videos are riddled with an increasingly obscene amount of adverts, ranging from pre-roll and post-roll videos, to intrusive interruptions that can't be skipped. And due to the increasingly volatile and difficult battle against the algorithm on YouTube, creators are having to rely on sponsorships to fund their channels. This has resulting in videos being littered with soulless scripts for the likes of NordVPN, Raid Shadow Legends, BetterHelp and Raycon earbuds being endlessly repeated ad nauseum to viewers on the platform. What was once a truly innovative and exciting new world of possibilities and creativity has slowly been whittled down and crippled to a frustrating experience for creators and viewers alike, but none of that matters because the big men in suits at the top are getting a fat paycheck out of it. And if you don't like adverts on YouTube, you can always pay a monthly subscription of £16 - yes, you heard me, sixteen pounds - to remove ads.
Speaking of subscriptions, this is the way that the internet has been heading en-masse. Services such as Netflix and Spotify that were once truly in a league of their own in terms of what they offered have too become hampered and crippled by their own successes. Back in 2014, Netflix cost a measly £5.99 a month. You could share this account with up to 5 people, meaning that if you split the cost per person it was costing you about £1.20 a month for the service. It offered a huge library of films and TV shows, and Netflix even began funding its own original content. Orange Is The New Black, Stranger Things, Black Mirror - these were all critically acclaimed shows that didn't need to pander to traditional TV network restrictions. This saw a rise in content that would traditionally be viewed as too niche or risky for TV, and of course, the fact that you weren't tied to the standard TV schedules meant that I was very pleased with the service. Similarly, Spotify was making waves (sound waves, heh) in the music industry for similar reasons. It was even cheaper than Netflix, and it offered users an enormously vast directory of most popular music with a clean and minimalist interface.
Fast forward to 2024, and both of these services are shells of their former selves. Netflix is now one of dozens of streaming services who seem to be in a rotating carousel of passing films and shows between each other. What was once the ideal way to watch shows has now become increasingly fractured, more expensive, and objectively worse for the viewer. The price of Netflix has skyrocketed to £10.99 a month, and due to a clamp down on account access, you can only share an account with people in the same household as you. Services like Amazon Prime list shows inside their app which are available to watch but still need to be purchased despite the application being behind a paywall, and paying users are now subjected to adverts inside a service that they already pay for. Oh, and Amazon are already pretty much the most profitable company in the world. Spotify, meanwhile, have made it their mission to push podcasts wherever possible because you can run adverts on podcasts, even for paying users, and even simple features like Shuffle don't work as intended. Constant UI changes and updates to the interface have made the user experience worse, and a trend that has unfortunately spread widely across sites and apps is the mobile-ification of the desktop PC experience. Applications and websites which once offered deeper, more comprehensive options and customisation settings have been restricted and redesigned with the mobile user in-mind.
If you wanted to watch the Pokémon anime from start to finish, you would need access to nine separate platforms. This isn't a joke. The official Pokémon website has a breakdown of where you can access each series. This is the most egregious offender I'm aware of, but plenty of other films and shows are regularly rotated or only partially available, making your watching experience considerably more frustrating and confusing.
It's become a genuine puzzle to work out what shows and films are hosted on each service, and there are is an increasing amount of content that is being altered or censored by these services. There are episodes of Always Sunny, Scrubs, Community and The Office that are just entirely unavailable on streaming services, and aren't even acknowledged in the episode listings. It's like they simply never existed. Countless shows funded by Netflix are being cancelled after just one season, resulting in a reluctance to engage with a new show for fear of it being abandoned by its creator. There are also now a number of films that are owned solely by these streaming services which never had a physical release, and have since been pulled from the platform, essentially becoming lost media. These are films that hundreds of people worked on for months that are entirely unavailable, lost to time unless you are willing to pirate it online (a discussion for another time, that).
The web at large is now much more homogenous than it was in the early 2000s. Gone are the majority of quirky homemade websites, niche forums and silly flash video websites. Most content on the internet sits on a platform like Squarespace, Wix (like this site...) or GoDaddy, and many forego having a website entirely, choosing to exist solely within the social media ecosystem. This has resulted in most sites looking and feeling very similar; corporate and soulless. And since the introduction of data compliance laws like GDPR, every website asks you a plethora of questions about cookies, notifications and mailing lists when you first visit. More and more news sites are behind paywalls, but because they have paid to be shown at the top of the Google search results, you'll click on them anyway before realising that you can't even view the article you wanted to look at. The experience is objectively worse for almost every website you visit than it was ten years ago.
And... poor Facebook. What once felt like an exciting digital counterpart to the social circles of my reality has become a cesspit of misinformation, questionable adverts, bizarre community groups and screenshots of tweets from people that I don't know or follow. And whilst it's by no means the only culprit, Facebook has become one of the worst offenders for utilising social media algorithms designed to feed outrage and cause division, all because it is profitable to do so. People respond more strongly to content that enrages them or contradicts their world view - and a click is a click, whether it's an angry click or a gentle click. And in a world where ad revenue is generated by site traffic - views - the more, the merrier. David Lauer wrote the following in a review of Facebook's ethics:
Facebook's ethical failures are not accidental; they are part of the business model. [...] A deeper look at their business model suggests that it is far more profitable to drive us apart. By creating “filter bubbles”—social media algorithms designed to increase engagement and, consequently, create echo chambers where the most inflammatory content achieves the greatest visibility—Facebook profits from the proliferation of extremism, bullying, hate speech, disinformation, conspiracy theory, and rhetorical violence. - David Lauer, CEO of Urvin Finance
All of these backwards steps, from frustrating UI changes to engagement algorithms, are described wonderfully and aptly by a term that has come to be known as "Enshittification", coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022. "Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that function as two-sided markets. Examples of enshittification include services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber and Unity." What was once a digital wild west has become a digital toll road that is at best, congested, slow, uninteresting and corporate, and at worst, dystopian and outright dangerous for democracy and our mental health. He describes it further here:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. - Cory Doctorow
Somewhere along the line, the fact that we had the internet in our pockets and within our grasp at all times caused something to change. Instead of logging onto the computer and finding a handful of messages or emails to respond to, we've become chained to our devices, expected to be immediately contactable at all times, and slaves to our notifications. We instinctively open up apps to check what is happening. To check our likes or comments. To view people's stories who we haven't spoken to for months or years, not because we want to, but because it's become a habit. Companies employ psychologists and behavioural scientists to make online apps and games more and more addictive, prioritising user engagement, data scalping and in-app purchases over the user experience and long-term wellbeing of its audience. I mentioned earlier that enaging with the web was once a conscious and deliberate act, where you'd sit down and be on the computer. That feels like a very distant memory now, as more and more of us are dominated by the black slabs of glass in our pockets. And it's bleeding into real life. I've witnessed entire concerts being viewed through the portrait orientation of a smartphone by someone in the crowd in front of me, so desperate to capture the moment that they forgot to enjoy it for themselves. I've hung out with people for a catch up, only for them to whip out their phones and mindlessly scroll through feeds of content that has been curated to hold their attention for as long as possible. They don't do it out of rudeness or malice, but out of habit and reliance on it. I don't blame anyone for ending up this way, I just ask that they consider why they are doing it. The answer is very rarely one that holds any weight, because it's not something that they were even actively choosing to do; how scary is that?
And then there's AI. You may have heard about the Dark Forest Hypothesis when it comes to why we haven't come across any alien life in the universe. This may seem like a strange tangent, but please stick with me here. The Dark Forest Hypothesis speculates that space is like a big dark forest, full of life, but the life is both silent and hostile, intent on remaining undetected for fear of being destroyed if they are detected by another form of intelligent, and hostile, life. Maggie Appleton, in her own words, a "Designer, anthropologist, and mediocre developer", argues that our internet is fast becoming a Dark Forest of its own, becoming increasingly lifeless and homogenised. Tools like online reviews and comment sections which once encouraged genuine human discourse are being overtaken by bots. The sheer volume of mundane, low-quality and uninspired content across the web is skyrocketing, with tools like ChatGPT allowing literally anyone to freely create "content" that fits the SEO (search engine optimisation) bill enough to show up in search results, regardless of the content's usefulness, validity, or truthfulness. Like a dark forest, all the living creatures, the humans, are quietly hiding out of sight.
Increasingly, people I know are choosing to engage with the internet in "bunkers", or "cozy web spaces". Hidden, curated corners that are private. Discord servers, WhatsApp groups and private gaming servers that are away from the "front-facing" noise of the web. The enshittification of what were once great services, the constant fight for your attention and your money through mailing lists, notifications, subscription services and the increasingly dystopian online landscape consisting of AI-generated content that is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from human-created content have all made the "front-facing" web an absolute calamity to engage with.
Here's a terrifying fact for you. ChatGPT churns out more text than has ever been published in every book ever printed every two weeks. And it won't be long at all before the overwhelming majority of content online is AI-generated, or AI-assisted. Soon, deepfake videos will be so lifelike and convincing that it will be harder than it already is to determine fact from fiction. Expect much, much more robust iterations of CAPTCHA to prove that you're actually human in the coming months and years, including a reverse Turing Test. What began as the fun, magical computer box that allowed me to interact with friends online and buy Lego on eBay has slowly but surely morphed into an all-consuming monster that wants all of your attention, all of your money, and is beginning to erode truth itself.
I will admit that I am nostalgic for the web as it existed in the early 2000s. I know that it's unreasonable to expect everything to simply revert to how it was - Pandora's Box has truly been opened now, and it's too late to put it all back. I also understand that we live in a world where money has to be made in order to keep many of the services and platforms I mentioned running. But I am entitled to lament that almost all of these sites, apps and services have gone from providing a genuinely useful and innovative service to making the end user into the product, gathering data to feed into algorithms to sell them things they don't need, or bait them into doomscrolling endlessly. The shift has gone way too far. And knowing how good we once had it, I am saddened to see how much the internet has deteriorated in so many ways.
So, what's the solution? Well, for me, it's an almost complete retreat from the dark forest of the "front-facing" web, delving deeper into my "cozy web" spaces that offer more authentic interactions, and choosing to prioritise the physical world. I've long been a collector of physical media, from books, video games and DVDs to, more recently, records. These won't ever be shut down, censored, lost or spliced up with advertising. For me, this is a straightforward and transparent transaction - I pay for the thing, and I now own the thing. In a world of subscription services where the user owns nothing, I am enjoying the simplicity of physical media more than ever before. And when it comes to getting away from the incoming AI storm, the best way to prove your humanity is... by being as human as I can be. Being out in the real world with your friends and family, just absorbing the feeling of being in the moment. I can promise you that a real conversation with a friend will be infinitely more interesting and engaging than watching their Instagram or Snapchat story.
I'm not done with the internet; it's too inherently ingrained into our lives now, but I have fallen out of love with it. I fell out of love with it a number of years ago, but just like the myth of the poor boiling frog, the change has come so slowly that we didn't notice the temperature rising.
I have the choice to decide what I engage with and when I engage with it. I think it has taken me a long time to truly realise just how much shit we put up with nowadays. You too have a choice to engage with, or not engage with, almost all of the aforementioned stuff from this article. Don't let your time be lost, your attention consumed or your money wasted.
And add me on MSN Messenger. Much love. 💖
