What happened to the Internet? Seriously!

It seems that anywhere you look it has become full of misogynistic ranting. Around every corner there is some idiot trying threatening to kill some woman because he didn’t agree with her review of his beloved game. Or some jerk is proclaiming his superiority.

Imagine an Internet without all this disgusting behavior… Yep, still terrible. The whole thing has been engineered to engage us in “content”. This content is then polished with SEO compound until a blinding sheen is obtained. So what if it is just Bondo with no real substance under there…it’s so pretty!

Even you, the individual, is supposed to have a glistening brand and cultivate it. Get those embarrassing photos removed from Facebook. Demonstrate significant knowledge on a single topic. Have your elevator pitch ready. Make your LinkedIn profile tell a story. You are being required to construct a life that you don’t even have time to live.

I’m done with it

I want my quirky Internet back. So what if it was a little cheesy; those scrolling marquee headings were endearing. And frankly black text on a white background is sort of easy to read. Who cares if there wasn’t an infographic accompanying every blog post. It was full of quirky sites made by real people.

I remember my first website. I went looking for it today on the wayback machine, but unfortunately Geocities didn’t let crawlers scrape its pages (It would have been glorious if I had found it). Anyway, I made it when I was 11 in 1996 and it mainly was about ferrets (thank god my mom won that argument). But, I loved my little plot of the Internet in “Cape Canaveral”.

There were thousands (millions?) of other sites out there just like it. Made by real people about their quirky interests. The Internet wasn’t cool; it just was a place to experiment.

Now the quirky residue is all but gone, hidden under a highly polished veneer of branding with a bunch of dents left by the trolls.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want the innovation to vanish. It’s completely magical that any piece of knowledge is at your fingertips, or that you can pull up directions to any destination on your phone, or that you can book a room in someone’s house for a night. I just want that innovation to flourish in an environment of realism. It should grow in a place free of judgment both in the sense of who that person is and how the world demands they present themselves.

Lets take the Internet back, start building things to help actual people and begin having conversations about real things, like ferrets.