TechTakes

This is a bit of a lower effort post, heads up.

I've always tried to be a bit less pessimistic about trends and platforms that are irrelevant to me. For a few years now I've been a bit apologetic when friends in group chats described TikTok as some kind of digital disease, for example, when they share some kind of egregious screenshot. I didn't use it, I didn't plan on using it, but I wasn't going to fault people for using internet platforms that they clicked with. I remember similar arguments about platforms like Pinterest, DeviantArt, or Tumblr in the past. Like they weren't for me but I got what they were going for there. They served a purpose, and they had a certain culture that was usually catalyzed by the platform's features.

My patience has been wearing thin, and the catalyst for it has been the nonstop torrent of what is affectionately being referred to as "AI slop" by the kids online. Every element of personality and personal escapism that seemed so foundational to the idea of cyberspace (remember the word cyberspace?!) is being mined and then worn down to dust in the pursuit of a nonsensical internet whose only interesting concepts seem to flourish in spite of the current trend.

I remember when things started transitioning from text and images to more usable video. Being in a part of the world with exceptionally bad internet, the video revolution was kind of a step back: video just took forever to load. But video was also more personal, and amateurishness was harder to cover up in a video than in a blog post. There were so many weird accents out there, regardless of English proficiency, that gave every clip of someone's voice a sense of place.

I only write this to contrast with the absolute hatred I have for AI-generated voice overs for slop content. I absolutely abhor the grating, EQed-for-loudness, syntactically perfect AI voiceovers I hear from people around me scrolling through short form video. This is a fucking waiting room, put some earphones in or do literally anything else. That type of voiceover really really gets under my skin. Robotic TTS was bad enough, but there is a "yuck factor" for me when a robotic voice feigns emotion or personality. It makes me think worse of whatever's being narrated. I cannot stress how much cheaper the average piece of internet "content" feels now that everything is gated behind multiple machine learning black boxes.

My internet upbringing came about a bit earlier than people my age. We still had dialup until around 2008 where I am, so until that point the internet escapades I was able to go on were quite limited. The bandwidth was extortionately expensive, and it was hard to check much out since we were still quite reliant on the landline for actual calls. It was only when the DSL came about in a few years (which we are still on... thanks third world!) that I was able to properly "surf". (I'd quite taken to the term used in French media for internet users - "Internautes" - basically like astronaut but for the online world... It carries a fragment of this sense of wonder I am chasing now. Cooler than "users" who "surf").

I loved the early web. 2010 or thereabouts was hardly the golden age of the web, of course. Web 2.0 was well underway and I was really exploring the recently-vacated ruins of an age in decline. But I loved what I saw. I would Google something that I wanted to know about - let's say, Windows keyboard shortcuts after a typing error and a subsequent eureka moment - and I'd click on what seems the most interesting. While I'd now look for something like a Microsoft help page, Reddit post, or a Github-hosted text file for such a query, I clicked on articles (I think the main one was from Lifehacker?) and naturally, blogs and personal pages. I remember discovering what gifs are and for the first month or so after that discovery I exclusively thought they were used for MSN emotes. "Dragonball Z emoticons animated gif" was probably my most searched query in like 2010.

I was never a blogosphere guy but I loved old hacked-together HTML personal sites. Sure most people were using Blogger or Wordpress (at least most people I could reach incidentally through tangential searches). I still return to Skytopia every few years, and sometimes write something in its now-desecrated guestbook. I'd found it while just looking for "3D fractals" online.

I have a few scattered memories that I look back upon fondly. I got really into origami and then papercraft models, for a duration of time that I can't quite remember. I very vividly remember stumbling upon a link to this model in a list of papercraft links, one cold winter. It was in an unremarkable HTML table list, that contained other, less impressive models. I still used that PDF's password as a sort of catch-all, basic zero-security password for years after finding this model, despite never putting in the effort to actually build it.

I'm rambling (I am full of too much alcohol and cheese as I'm still on vacation) but the point of this post is that I don't feel this way about the internet at all anymore. I don't feel like sitting in front of the computer and "experiencing the digital world" is giving me any escapism or inspiration, and it hasn't in a very long time. This is even worse, considering how much more time I spend now on an internet-connected anything now. Back when I was feeling the most connected to a bunch of cool scattered nerds online, I was spending a few hours at most every month in front of a web browser. Now it's multiple hours a day, split about evenly between business and pleasure. At least, pleasure in intent. The experience itself has been less than pleasing.

One step afterward was the early app age on iOS. It might sound very bizarre for the older and/or more privacy minded, but early app platforms were mostly populated by curious early adopters. Right before microtransactions and subscriptions absolutely blew up, these online communities were a small microcosm of the wider internet that skewed a little younger, and it is a strange thing to feel nostalgic about. My point is that there was some magic left in there. The main platform I have in mind is a defunct little proto-Discord (all groups were publicly listed with various privacy configurations) called Groupie, that was full of a very odd cast of characters. Of which I was one.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here. My post reads like old man yells at cloud, only the Cloud is a meaningless term and I'm by no definition an old man. I just miss the internet being magical. I'm sure there are parallels to people missing curated print media, missing having more options for quality (arguable) live television, missing the zeitgeist being transmitted through radio. I can't deny that there has to be a nigh-opaque layer of rose tint making this era of the internet seem like it's more than it was. But it meant something, dammit. The uncensored, fully customizable and unapologetically crusty looking personal pages carried a promise of some kind of techno-utopia that never happened.

A few months ago as I was looking back through the documentation for IndieWeb, this personal blog was linked. I got a tiny hit of that internet euphoria, in a weird way. Nothing about how this person seems to post their location appealed to me, as someone in a tiny country the size of a shoebox. But most of the early internet involved stuff I wouldn't do, so - experiencing things I dislike about modern social media but in the milieu of a personal website was a nice compromise.

What really got me was everyone's favorite article I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. It is a generational piece of writing that I will treasure like the other Fediverse darling, Cory Doctorow's Tiktok's Enshittification. Alongside the Reddit exodus of 2023, these really made me feel like I could be doing more to interact with the side of the internet that is still trying to be more personal.

I have a bit of internet doomerism left inside me, even knowing about initiatives like IndieWeb. I'm fully aware that the early aughts web aesthetic and culture explicitly arose from the disconnect between people and the limited tools the average person was willing to wrap their head around. It's very different to now, an era where I find myself disgusted by people formatting videos that will only circulate among friends in a closed group chat in the same way that an Instagram video would be formatted, practically looking like an advertisement in terms of pacing... Like the main goal of being online is "content". We all have our own rant about the word "content", so I won't rehash mine right now - especially after writing this whole rant post.

I just hate how everything is converging into the very thing we complain about AI slop outputting. Garbage out requires garbage in and I can't help but feel like we are increasingly encouraged to create, gargle, and consume garbage, from even before this current era of machine-generated slop.

I wish I had a positive note to end this on. I don't want my writing to be whiny screams into the void. But at least it's my own writing - and unfortunately, the bar is just getting that much lower. I feel like I need to apologize for insufficient editing.

I originally posted this to my personal blog. I try to post better stuff on there than this, but hey - if I only posted posts that were perfect, I'd post nothing.