Where Did the Good Guys of the Internet Go?
The last two decades of the Internet have been a trip from the quirky fun and possibility of togetherness into a noir reality show of ‘this is just how ugly society can get’.
From afternoons while in high school in the late 90’s when Yahoo was a barely usable index of web pages, to the present, so much has changed. The one thing that seems to have vanished though is the innocence.
Gone are the days when Craigslist was just a community of community members sharing rides, used stuff, and the occasional odd job.
Gone are the days when friends and family shared pictures of each other in their Facebook feeds without the ever lurking fear of a blood pressure spike from some troll or provocateur pissing in the feed in that moment. Not to mention a family member directly attacking another in a comment.
It’s been years since Google was a search engine anyone could dream of having search results on without months of hard work, involving analysis, co-operating inbound linking strategies, quality scores, NPA validations, the list of shit we have to deal with to achieve a good PageRank goes on and on and gets longer every day. It takes a masters degree and a constant eye on the ever moving indexing and SERP rules to have a chance of reaching the top of anything that isn’t remotely arbitrary as far as search terms go.
Influencer marketing has become an entire industry, frightening as it is, that is still in its early days, yet has already transformed the way whole swaths of people use and post content. I can’t help but think of all the poor kids who see influencers’ posts and find themselves wanting to buy crap, look prettier, be skinnier, get lipo, get collagen, and get this and get that. Wanting to make trips to far away places in the east only to take a picture with the same background. Can’t nobody eat a meal without taking a picture of it and posting it online. WTF. And forget about the idea of a positive influencer, someone who encourages people to just be happy with who they are, with how they look, those types either have too good of a conscience to get pulled into the mind fucking mess that is social media and influencing, or they just gave up because the great audience of social media doesn’t care for, and therefor doesn’t have an algorithm tuned to seeing those kinds of posts. People don’t respond as well to stuff that just tells them to chill! They need to feel insecure, that gets the algos going!
It would do us all a service to have an instant translator in the back of our heads, so that when we hear some of those tag lines and brand names, or in the instant we think of going to look something up we remember who we are dealing with. Here’s a cheatsheet I’ve prepared but feel free to come up with some of your own:
“Do no evil” — gone. That’s just not true.
“Make the world more connected” more like “make the world more divided”.
“Craigslist”- Creepoville.
“Reddit” — Rednecks and haters.
“Instagram” — Insecure-grab.
“To organize the worlds information” — rather “To profit off the world’s increasingly feeble attempt to find information in a pile of paid ads and mega budgets used for optimizing search result positions.”
Youtube -> “you forgot why you came here but can’t stop watching this crap-tube”
What have I forgotten?
