I don’t know if you have noticed but the internet kind of sucks now. Not all the time. You still meet really cool people and go on really cool research spirals. But, more than before, the internet has started to suck really hard.
Going online used to be much more fun. People would make their own websites about some niche topic. You found all kinds of personal websites about esoteric matters and fictional stories. You can still find interesting websites but you have to search much harder. Somewhere down the line, the internet turned into screenshots of the same three big platforms over and over again: Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok.
No more following your favorite random person who just happens to understand all of your same horrors and joys as they write overly long journal entries about all of their peculiar thoughts from the day. No more building your own website not just for a business or dropshipping but because you need a place to put your observations about the 12 laws of alchemical transformation. Now, your online persona is supposed to be a persona and not an id. Your online persona is supposed to read as professional because the internet has become a place for work.
The internet used to be for eccentrics who like to dream. At least, that was how I imagined it when I was a teenager. How did it become a place of work?
Maybe it all began when we started to use our real names online. Our government names. Now, almost everything you see online is an advertisement of some sort. What’s that quote? I can’t remember who said this: “The best minds of our generation are sitting around trying to figure out how to get people to click buttons.”
People say that Reddit is still anonymous and has less ads or whatever. But take a closer look at who runs a lot of the subreddits. Mostly, these are corporate accounts started for the purpose of advertising a product or service. A lot of people don’t notice until every single post about some big scandal that hurts the company’s image just happens to get deleted on all relevant subreddits.
Don’t even get me started on Google. If you google anything, almost every single search result on the first page will be from a corporate account.
I did some research. Did you know that the internet was created by the Department of Defense so that military networks could connect with other military networks?
The internet sucks now. But you know what? Maybe it has always sucked. I don’t really believe that the military created the internet just because it made ARPANET. Every person who uses the internet creates it every single day. Every single thing that made the old internet fun was made by weird and interesting people. And guess what? People are still just as fascinating and we have always been.
Community still exists even when it has to transgress around the limits of infrastructure. When our communities are co-opted, we revitalize them by switching up our language or boycotting a platform. It’s possible and it happens all the time. The internet is not a place of community. The internet is a tool of censorship. However, people will always find creative ways to misuse the tools that were made to discipline us because that’s what people do.
I don’t mean to be overly idealistic here. I understand that Russian linux developers have been cut off from their own work. I understand that Elon Musk bought Twitter and made it a platform for promoting far right ideology. I understand that the biggest mass arrest of Chinese BL writers occurred just this year with possibly thousands of people incarcerated for writing queer romance stories online. I truly mean it when I say that the internet sucks now. It is a tool of corporate and state censorship.
Who has the right to be online? If you ask this question to your local politician or the people running the platforms that you use, you might be surprised about their response.
But I’ve also met people here. Penpals, email companions, and people I sent weird articles to and people who email me cool stuff out of the blue. The internet isn’t just a place for corporate promotion or spam. It’s a place where queer people from around the world try to find each other. It’s a place where organizers can start movements without having to go through old institutions. It’s a place of curiosity, of invention, and a place where people who like to talk too much (like me) can be as long winded as we like.
The internet is a tool. It wasn’t designed for human connection and intimacy in mind. Like any tool, we can seize it.
People are here. Not just products. This isn’t a marketplace. It is a tool of domination and control that people try to resurrect into something else by using it in ways that it wasn’t intended to be used. The internet has always been two internets. Every tool has two faces, one of use and one of misuse.
