I miss the Internet
"[The arts] are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
It began with a single post on my newly-minted WordPress in 2020. I had just started my journey as a music teacher-turned software developer, and was convinced that my new WordPress would not only serve to outline my progress as a developer, but serve as a useful tool for others that came after me. Here was my new clarion call - I could save the world and teach others to save it, too.
It was all for naught, of course. That first post on my WordPress was also my last. It was a good post, to be clear! At least, I think it was. And had I continued with that kind of output at that level of writing, I bet I could have really made something out of that blog. And therein lies the rub - why do we need to make something out of every creation on the Internet? When are we happy with "good enough," and when can we just create something for creation's sake?
I find myself putting this blog together on Bear almost strictly because of this revelation. Herman introduced Bear on Reddit back in 2020 (about a month before my doomed WordPress's birthday, as it were), and 1/3 of the top-level comments (and plenty more upvoters) are asking some flavor of the same thing: how can I make money off of a platform like that? It almost made me laugh when I stumbled on the post. Like, hey, here's a novel idea: what if you spent your time doing something that isn’t primarily driven by the desire to turn a profit? It's the impetus behind my current coding passion project, though I'll delve into that more in my devlog.
I guess what I'm getting at is this: I match the growing sentiment among folks in my demographic that, within the past ~5-10 years (though one could argue this can be traced back nearly 20 years), the Internet has lost a certain luster. It almost feels like a microcosm--or perhaps a macrocosm--of late-stage capitalism. It's as if every little thing on here has been meticulously crafted to squeeze every cent out of you. And if something can't get any money out of you directly, it demands your time. And if it can't wring either of those out, then it figures out any which way to harvest the most valuable resource: you. Or, more aptly, your personal data.
Other folks have written about this at length, and have done a much better job than I could ever hope to do, so I'll leave you with this: I miss the Internet. I miss what it used to be like. I miss hopping onto a chat room with my friends late at night and not being prompted by half a dozen different services along the way to bump my subscription up to xyz nuclear edition, or download abc: the app because the experience is better when not directly in the browser and oops, wouldn't you know it, the app has a lot more sponsored content in it than you remember seeing, or hey-we-saw-your-eyes-glance-at-a-picture-of-a-shampoo-bottle-for-1.2-milliseconds-do-you-need-shampoo-NOW?
I'm just tired of the noise. I'm tired of feeling like I need to blanket my garden with Roundup just to be able to sit down and enjoy the space for 30 minutes a day. And I hope that, by participating in the curating of spaces like these, I can help beat some of the noise back for others.