It’s funny how quickly things change. Circa 2004, I remember ordering a hemp t-shirt off the web. It was a dark shirt, I think blue or like navy/dark grey. I’m not sure exactly what I’d call the color. Then, there was a dark maroon boombox on it. I bought it from some site that I think specialized in hemp clothes. It was certainly not the first thing I bought online, but it seemed different. Whereas I had bought books and CDs from Amazon and CDnow and miscellaneous stuff (junk) from ebay, I had not previously bought clothes from the web.
That boombox shirt was memorable, in part, because around that time, I felt like I was really becoming an adult, and I was seeing the adult world online for the first time. What I failed to realize is that I was merely seeing a moment in time. When I look at the web now, I see page after page of SEO crap, as if the humans have simply stopped appearing on the web, leaving only shops behind.
Twenty years ago, the worldwide web was a hodgepodge of idiosyncrasies, but the modern web is like an in-flight shopping magazine: overpriced refuse I simply don’t need and can’t imagine that anybody would.
I fantasize about the “real” web being out there — somewhere, but the advertisers and search engines have coalesced on showing me crap because they get paid to distract users like me. Whereas this business model once artfully concealed companies’ ultimate intentions, the mask is off nowadays: companies simply want revenues, and whether they even address — much less actually solve — a problem is secondary.
I think of MySpace as a pretty terrible site because it lured in users then, later, displayed ads relentlessly. I see this business strategy as pretty much what DARE warned me that drug dealers do, Yet, for reasons I fail to understand, this model has been brought online where it remains quite popular: the big “AI” companies use this same strategy now. Whereas the appeal of the web was that offline companies had become lazy and cynical rent-seekers, the same “business” model has come online.
As a kid, I wanted to believe life on Earth could get better. Indeed, I actually believe it can. However, I don’t believe we can get there by accident. If anything is to ever improve, it only will if we improve it.