I believe that the web survives because of this strange phenomenon where you can see one of my thoughts and become my friend for 45 seconds. You. Wherever you are in relation to me temporally, culturally, financially; regardless of my status, my job title, my choice of clothing or even my general temperament. You don’t know anything about me, save for this one thought that crawled out of the perplexagonal grunt machine that rests behind my eyes. I become defined entirely by a single interaction I had with a machine, in isolation, and you, upon discovery of a mental doppleganger or refreshingly untrodden territory, become a member of a tribe which may not yet exist. With explicit consent and unbelievable ease, our connection could be as short as a moment and as deep as the emotional core.
For a decade, this was our collective hallucination: open, distributed, and inclusive world-building. The internet exploded into consciousness and demanded we spin a web together! Technology developed under the guise of machinery of war went moonlighting as a means for liberation. I caught a glimpse of this event - tilting and clicking on the beige box in my grandparents' garage before I could fully read. I didn’t really know what I was seeing and took it all for granted until much later, now that the deterioration of the magic is psychologically destabilizing. The web used to strategically link us together on-demand for great moments in a sort of infinite show-and-tell. Not anymore.
Instead, people are tied together in knots by a cabal of addiction-peddling supervillains. You are not allowed to forget your high school crush; You must remain connected to your middle school bully; their marriage to each other is required viewing on your timeline. Every true moment of human interaction in your life is now an exploitable trigger point for the grand capitalist’s sale of | Sustainable | Free Range | Micromodal | Couples' Matching Underwear.
All of your connections are superficial. Sorry, we don’t support collaboration or nuanced concern, you’ll have to choose one of the five Emotion Badges handcrafted by our world-class Emotioneers . Not expressive enough? You can pull a gif from the Unified Historitainment Stream! As long as it’s not too taboo, deemed too critical of class or poverty, or infringes upon the beliefs of any nation we seek to do business with now or at any point in the future! Oh, and the first 5 rows are paid ads.
I miss the old web when people paid attention - always their own - a home where I was never algorithimically assigned a fraction of my peers' zombified lifeforce based on innumerable, unknowable transactions stamped across 12 availability zones faster than I can blink.
Please, link me your blog. No, I won’t join threads.