dreaming of a better internet

if aliens ever land,

we'll board their ship

and discover that they have

a better internet

than we do.

When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism: The more there is to know, the more likely we feel that truth is elusive. Information super-abundance, or the condition of “digital plenitude,” as media scholar Jay David... See more

Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.

Social networks have become “the web” for many... See more

Large parasocial platforms transformed the internet into a hostile and impersonal place. They feed our FOMO to keep us clicking. They exaggerate our differences for "engagement". They create engines for stardom to keep us creeping. They bait us into nutritionless and sensationalist content. Humanity cannot subsist on hype alone.

Small and sincere... See more

I don’t know how to explain it, exactly, but when I scroll down the timeline now it feels like everyone has gotten 100 times more smug? And literal and pedantic? They always think they are dunking on someone. But on who, and to what end? It’s so weird. Everybody is like, sticking their tongues out all the time. It’s very “be careful or your face

... See more

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content. That this is spoiling the Internet is perhaps the best hope for finding our way back to what is real. Let the virtual world be one of customized content for... See more

and it's obvious -

that we all like computers,

- a lot -

in a super-creepy way,

and it is not a phase.

it's something that's really happening,

and it's going to continue.

and we can't stop.