We Used to Have Fun
some ragrets :(
Man, it really doesn't seem like there's much fun left to be had on the internet, is there? I guess I'm griping about topics that have been done to death by other internet opinion-havers but as of late, its been hitting me like a sack of bricks. It's like, every time I get on the internet it either makes me mad or I don't really feel much of anything at all. Part of the problem is the fact that a lot of my online time happens in social media apps, which I think are designed to push content that only ever seems to bounce between absolutely infuriating or just pleasant enough to keep you browsing for another hit of dopamine. Hell, that's the bulk of the problem when I really think about it. Social media sucks.
Of course, the problem is monopoly capitalism and its tendency, once competition has been eliminated, to provide worse goods or services at higher prices—I believe people are now referring to this tendency as enshittification. For most people, social media websites have replaced basically every other place on the internet. Blogs, forums, chat rooms, and the like have all been pushed out of the public consciousness in favor of algorithmically-determined slop feeds. Even other social media sites that didn't drive addictive behavior have been pushed to the margins. A million smaller communities have been replaced by four or five holding areas for online discourse, where each hyper-atomized voice can bray endlessly into the edges of a cold, dark trash heap.
I don't like the the type of culture this encourages. Everyone's too quick to anger, too keen to score a cheap win by dunking on someone else, too afraid of authentically being themselves to ever do something cool if it means you might fuck up and do something cringe. Oh, and like half of everybody talks like a neonazi now, so that's cool. That particular horror is probably the result of coordinated campaigns by online fascists boosted by certain government agencies (Mossad, in particular) and corporate initiatives to elevate far-right viewpoints online, but I digress. This kind of shit wouldn't be possible without the natural mechanisms of monopoly capital doing what they do best, and it makes me sick with anger and disappointment. The internet used to be fun, goddammit! We used to like going online. Now it seems like everyone's trying their damnedest to log off.
While I can't deny that logging off and spending more time in the outside world, building real relationships is a good thing, I still think there's room for the internet to enhance our lives, rather than overtake them. It's a wonderful tool for human communication and information sharing that has the potential to connect people in ways that were never possible before. People from all over the world can engage in cross-cultural exchanges or massive international undertakings to make really cool stuff, like open-source software or massive art projects! Of course, that still happens, but it feels like it's a smaller and smaller part of the web every day.
So what's the solution? Well, the actual solution is to build a united front against monopoly capital led by the working class and its political party, with the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and oppressed nationalities at its core, to seize power for the working and oppressed peoples via a revolution. But that's going to take a lot of work, and probably a long time, so I guess in the short term I'm going to try and spend more time in online spaces that aren't as toxic like the Fediverse and seek out things like old-style forums and the Small Web while limiting my time consuming my algorithmic slop feed. They're not systemic solutions to the problem by any means but they are a way to help mitigate some of the worst effects of the internet on myself, individually, and I suppose that counts for something. And maybe if I spend less time fuming at some dipshit on Twitter, I can be a little more effective working on that first thing I mentioned.
😎😎😎
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