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Like the Internet of Old
Oct. 27th, 2021 09:26 pmBy May 2020, I uninstalled Windows and installed Linux on my PC. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. For a few months, I wouldn't go to YouTube on my PC. I'd go to Internet Archive, Bitchute, or Odysee. I should still be doing the latter, I think, but YouTube has crept in again. It numbs the same way alcohol does, the mindless clicking through suggestions that narrow the synaptic path of mind and memory and feeling until you forget what you went there for. "Neurons that fire together wire together" they say in neuroscience. YouTube suggestions will do all that for you. At what point does it go from you wiring the algorithm to suit your tastes to the algorithm wiring you?
I put my mind on a shelf for nearly a decade, or so it felt like last year when they dialed up the fake to proportions that still stun me. I got my first "smartphone" in 2011 - late by some standards, of course. It wasn't long before I was browsing the internet on my phone more than my PC, something that I'd observed people younger than me doing for a good couple of years and something I was sure I'd never enjoy. Well, work from home sitting in front of your PC will make any other screen more appealing, if a screen is what you want to look at. And social creatures as we are, in this increasingly lonely and atomized world, the internet replaces what we lost when we signed on. It giveth and it taketh away.
I remember having a LiveJournal account long ago, and this reminds me of that. I've never stuck with an online journal for long, so we'll see how it goes. Things have been stickier as I get older, so this might stick, too. In the past, my need for privacy always kicks in. I'm an open book in a real life conversation - or at least I used to be - but I've never liked pieces of me floating around in the digital world, all those intangible yet indelible packets of information scared me. And I could never present myself in a satisfactory way. A profile always felt too real or too fake. Sometimes they were.
I put my mind on a shelf for nearly a decade, or so it felt like last year when they dialed up the fake to proportions that still stun me. I got my first "smartphone" in 2011 - late by some standards, of course. It wasn't long before I was browsing the internet on my phone more than my PC, something that I'd observed people younger than me doing for a good couple of years and something I was sure I'd never enjoy. Well, work from home sitting in front of your PC will make any other screen more appealing, if a screen is what you want to look at. And social creatures as we are, in this increasingly lonely and atomized world, the internet replaces what we lost when we signed on. It giveth and it taketh away.
I remember having a LiveJournal account long ago, and this reminds me of that. I've never stuck with an online journal for long, so we'll see how it goes. Things have been stickier as I get older, so this might stick, too. In the past, my need for privacy always kicks in. I'm an open book in a real life conversation - or at least I used to be - but I've never liked pieces of me floating around in the digital world, all those intangible yet indelible packets of information scared me. And I could never present myself in a satisfactory way. A profile always felt too real or too fake. Sometimes they were.
