Three decades of being active on the information superhighway.
The original approach to this blog post was a reflective look back from my initial online forays during my first year of University, writing essays on hyper-reality as part of the course I was taking, then participating in the most early social networking platforms, right through to building businesses around the emerging space plus everything up till now.
I scrapped that as was getting bored and my fingers hurt. So started writing 30 things I learned (one for each year) in an attempt to extract some wisdom from being an early adopter.
But that went by the wayside as could only conjure up a dozen or so and they felt a little ‘preachy’, so, I’m just going to mark it with a simple side-eye and a tut.
A physical gesture and audible proclamation which sums up how I feel about the whole tech and interwebs space currently.
So many online platforms and services plus the technology we now use to access this incredible tool for humanity, is designed to purposefully trick and hide the fact that it’s all about extraction…
…extracting attention, the good vibes / kinship / playfulness which fuels our mortal souls, the pioneering spirit enabled through accessibility, plus even vacuuming up the whole web without permission and / or attribution to then build predictive-pattern-regurgitators-wrapped-up-in-AI-branded-interfaces which users can be charged again for.
This enshittification matches the stuff I wrote about a couple of years ago about suction media and the death of social, or the pauses we have lost, or the trend of email gating is eroding the web of trust, or how BookFace is worse than a casino and banks on you not caring (extra link on how the original cofounder thinks the same here), or the shitfire that Twitter has become.
Side-eye and a tut.
However, I still believe in the inherent positive power of the internet: how it creates unique opportunities for voice, agency, story, connectiveness, learning, to amplify intentional technology in enhancing the whole human project, through kindness and participation not commodification and engineered engagement.
So here’s to the next 30 years and the evolving nature of the online space, more laws and governance over data sovereignty, transparency of data use, the universal shift back to adding not reducing value, building opportunities for people to link up their creativity, along with and making people think and / or smile.