Do You Miss Popup Ads? You Should
With just a few years before implants put interfaces in our eyes, let’s fix the internet.
Ah, the glory days of the internet: Slow loading images, blurry 240p videos, and forums of text instead of memes. Was it great? Kind of. Is it better than now? Not at all.
It was slow, clunky, and filled with spam but some of us haven’t moved on.
Recently, Elon’s Musk has been entirely clouded by the smelly armpits of Twitter. Everyone’s debating over what kind of adult the 16-year-old social network is going to grow into now that it’s chosen to go to the College of Elon.
Musk— the polydactyl of having fingers in many pots — is to the media what chocolate is to dogs: Delicious but poisonous. They can’t resist a scoop of his poop.
Because of that, it’s easy to forget some of his many intentions for the future of technology. Did you remember he’s putting computer chips into living creatures? Neural implants seem to have been digested and shat back out of public awareness in the space of a year.
The idea is to create the very first cyborgs. Experiments have even gone so far as to find success in clinical trials with a monkey named Pager (the implication that this macaque is now a messaging device for brokers in the 80s).
The implications of this technology are huge. Musk wants to use it initially to empower the paralysed. A display of goodwill to the human race before brain chips inevitably enter the couch potato, allowing Just Eat orders to be made by the power of the mind alone.
But can we fix the internet before putting tech inside us, please?
I’m aware that Musk’s team isn’t developing a next-gen Google Glass. The idea isn’t to put computer use as we know it inside our heads, yet. However, the unsettling neon glare of so many cyberpunk dystopias can’t lie unseen when considering this kind of technology.
The thought of technology inside my head immediately conjures the image of text scrolling across my eye line informing me of the nearest Hot Singles whilst a Raid: Shadow Legends advert farts itself into my deeper consciousness.
The internet needs to change. Spam has become uniform. Websites are now a haven for cookie-fuelled ads that line once-innocent websites and are shamelessly built into websites, sometimes breaking them beyond usage.
The free and universally available society of information that the internet offered has been poisoned by capitalism.
Why do I miss pop-up ads? They were aggressive, separated from the site itself, and I appreciate that they had no shame in their slime. The frantic behaviour of modern websites with ad-induced Parkinson’s disease where you misclick 50% of the time as an ad bumps the page up is just not user-friendly; it’s user-hostile.
As in the old days of the skkzzzuuzzaaazzhh dial-up modem, a website will take a minute to load but it’s no longer because of our limited connections. It’s because your device is struggling to load all of the site elements with so many advert blocks interlaced between it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not longing for the days when a computer would overheat in the process of sneezing 30 tabs of breasts, cash prizes, and computer virus alerts over the screen. Both of these options suck.
We have apps like AdBlock but that skirts the issue, like building more food banks to serve an increasingly poor population. Many sites offer paid alternatives that ditch the ads which I respect (we’ve all got to make money) but not at the cost of making free information so abhorrent you either pay or go without.
We can do more with this jewel we’ve created. We owe it to ourselves to preserve the internet as a bastion of information and people power without the pollution of profit.
If you want to advertise, I get it. But, if you want people to use your site then make your content the priority and let adverts cuddle neatly into it.
Where will we go next?
Mars? Underground? Into our deeper consciousnesses? The end of the universe is the limit at the rate of technological advancements we’re making.
But first, let’s fix the fucking internet and make it usable once more.
