For a brief moment in time, I attempted to blog under a different domain and Internet handle to be unencumbered by a "personal brand." These short posts were more documented streams of thought than fully written articles.

There is nothing on the Internet anymore… which sounds weird because there is more stuff on the Internet than ever before. When I removed myself from the algorithms of social media, I breathed a sigh of relief for exiting a trap of endless algorithmic scrolling meant to serve me advertising and keep me glued to the screen. I escaped to Mastodon for a bit, but then you get caught up in Mastodon politics: Arguments over the fediverse, instances getting blocked because one person said something offensive, getting chastised for not using a content warning because you hurt someone's feelings, and never quite breaking out of the "Mastodon is a Twitter clone for marginalized groups and tech people" label.

When you remove yourself from social media what is actually left? Wikipedia has a bunch of content, as does the Internet Archive. Google killed Reader, which made RSS and blogs hard to come by, and nobody wants RSS anyway because they can't ham-fist ads into it. All the articles I come across when I ask a question simply repeat my question, give me a long history of things I didn't ask for, and then (maybe) answer the question at the end. Gotta get those advertisements scrolling by.

The Internet is trash. The good protocols are only being visited by a handful of nerds, while the World Wide Web is a travesty owned by maybe three companies that are now trying to replace the Internet with a hallucinating chatbot.

Douglas Rushkoff once mentioned that the Internet was a communication revolution that corporate America usurped and rebranded as an information revolution because information could be commoditized and sold more easily. He was right. Social Media is about advertising. Content mills are about advertising. What remains? Stores to buy things where the profits end up far away from your local community?

End of line.