Remember when the Internet was big? Remember when you would explore and find fun things — fun people — and tiptoe into their worlds?
The internet, the web, they are smaller now. I’m guessing you have five places you go. I’m guessing that you have no RSS feeds.
Me, I have four places. Two sites I pay for (Defector.com is the pinnacle of journalism), and two I visit. One of the two I visit is this very blog. There are a couple of other places like Wkikpedia that are useful resources, but not destinations.
There was a time when I would think, browsing bleary-eyed late at night, “shit, I’ve got to get out of the wormhole and get some sleep.” That doesn’t happen anymore. In fact, it’s the opposite: I’ve read the articles, checked the scores, rolled my eyes at the idiot congressmen and then… I’m done. Nothing more to see here. Gone is Dr. Pants. Forgotten is Izzy. FaceTwitaGram invited us in but left us on the stoop.
There are nights I stare at my computer, sure at a biological level that there is some entertainment to be provided if I knew where to look. But it’s all dead. The world wide web is now just six places with a bunch of people shouting.
This humble blog is just a shadow of its former glory; we all know that. And even its glory wan’t all that much. It’s a dinosaur, but one I like.
I dunno… the kids still shirk chores on reddit and insta and tiktok and …. and, well, maybe it isn’t the internet that changed, is what I’m thinking. ;)
Oh, it’s definitely not just the internet, but those are examples of the giant corporate sites that have shrunk the internet down to a few sites (perhaps more meaningful to say “a few algorithms”) – though I will grant that reddit is a little more wide open.
Thank you for reminding me of MNFTIU (My New Fighting/Filing Technique Is Unstoppable). Oh, and Get Your War On, which I will now probably waste some of my evening re-reading: http://www.mnftiu.cc/category/gywo/war81/
Much of the old internet is still out there, somewhere. Along with all the dumb shit we ever said.