Rambling
For a long time now, I have been feeling something I can't quite describe. It's hard to put into words, no words that don't make me sound like a brooding cyberpunk protag anyway. I'm a so called "digital native", I grew up on the net. My formative years where spent roaming the internet, seeing what I could get up to. My home situation was tumultuous to say the least, we were lower class, broke, my alcoholic father haunted our house and my dreams daily. The net offered an escape from the role I was cast in by my family trauma, it was freedom.
I spent hours downloading questionable things off the Gnutella Network, talking on forums, learning the basics of networking, the windows command line and dual booting linux. The net felt alive, a place where everything was just one website away. I felt I could be anything, regardless of my real life circumstances.
For the last few years, like a growing number of people I have been feeling something else. What was once a thriving, living ecosystem now feels like a barren wasteland, a verdant forest felled to build a parking lot. Perfectly uniform websites, streamlined to keep your attention and drive sales. Never ending scrolling feeds curated by an ominous black box algorithm, tweaking our watching habits to manipulate our political extremism as our technofascist overlords desire.
Like everything subversive, the internet was defanged by capitalism through co-opting. It has left me with no small feeling of dread, to see what I once called home so cold and devoid of the human chaos that made it so free.
However, there is still a sliver of life left in this parking lot, grass yet sprouts up around the uniform stripmalls of facebook, google and the rest. As long as there are rebellious gardeners tending to their patch, our forests will one day reclaim it all.