“The once great internet”

Logging onto my site just now I read my own homepage blurb, “Welcome explorers of the once great internet”. It made me think, I wrote that over 6 months ago as it was obviously something I was feeling at the time. However fast forward 6 months and it’s got infinitely worse.

If I thought it was bad then, and now I’m looking back at how it was better (albeit still bad) than it is now are we just on a never ending downward spiral?

What will the internet look like in another 5-10 years. AI generated marketing masquerading as websites, places of human conversation legislated into extinction and our “consumption” being doomscrolling short form content that is most likely AI created too?

You can count me out.

I have enough games from the golden era before micro transactions and DLC to last me a lifetime, in both handheld and large screen form.

I have offline copies of Wikipedia for information.

I have a large collection of movies and series.

I already don’t rely on the cloud or have any subscriptions.

The point I’m making here is that if the internet does become a government controlled, whitewashed hell hole people will just step back from it. Yes you’ll have your people that are perfectly happy reading clickbait and doom scrolling and you know what? That’s perfectly fine, whatever gets them through their day. But for me I’d rather go back to not having it rather than putting up with that.

The “internet” is just a large network that we collectively agreed we’d connect and contribute to. There is nothing stopping people getting together and making their own, unregulated mesh networks. If we carry on down the route we’re going I wouldn’t be surprised if we see that start to happen, similar to what Cuban’s have done. I’d be all for it, a new wild west.