Glad for my books
How shitty is enshittification? It's turning me back to my 2000s habits
As a younger gen-x (or xennial, that micro-generation of the late 1970s and early 1980s) I've known the rise of the Internet. Though my father was a builder and my mom a homemaker and we were a thoroughly blue-collar family, we had a deep interest in tech. My father had several self-made old computers that ran with cassettes attached to them to upload the data to, and we were the first in our street (early 1990s) to have dialup Internet. At the time, I had the distinct optimistic sense that the Internet would open worlds of communication and connection, as I could watch it all in real time. My electronic encyclopedia, called Encarta (housed on a CD) quickly made way for the awesome open-source project that was Wikipedia.
Now, decades later, I've grown terribly disenchanted with the enshittification of big tech.
If only cold profits were the bottom line, we could live with that. Tech companies would at least be incentivized to keep at least some modicum of functionality.
But no! We have to endure these tech billionaire bros personal pet projects and weird ideas that inform their disastrous business decisions (Musk's pro-natalist and white extinction delusions are apparently why my and so many other Twitter experience was ruined). And all of them are on a personal mission to squeeze as much out of us as they possibly can, to the detriment of their business model.
Take Youtube. I think users understand (I certainly do) you need to endure some ads so that creators can be paid, incentivized to put their content out there. But why are there so many ads? Youtube had become unwatchable for me. It starts out with 2-3 ads of things I don't want and have zero interest in. I'll never take auto insurance (I do not have a car, and I have no interest getting one), I'll never rent a Vrbo which looks like something out of Dante's Purgatory, I'll never get any of the other things they offer me. But OK. Typically three ads, of which two unskippable. Then finally I can watch lute videos, or continue following my Latin class, which takes 15 minutes and yet Youtube has the gall to put another ad in the middle of it. And to top it all off, an ad all at the end.
You can see why I installed an ad blocker. I just can't with this stuff. Now, Youtube has blocked my ad blocker. People are telling me sophisticated techy ways to circumvent this new limitation. But actually, I'm just done. I'm buying a Latin for beginners handbook and it will be just as fine.
I'm annoyed because I put a lot of care and effort into my public outreach on social media. I've made countless carefully curated Twitter threads. I'm waiting for Substack to go downhill, just like FaceBook, Twitter, Medium and all the rest. I had a good engagement with Medium. Over 2000 followers, lots of interaction, some trolling (I wrote mostly on Brexit, so expected). Then Medium decided to shaft their creative writers and prioritize the Atlantic, New York Times, and to deprioritize free content to such an extent that engagement cratered. Result: like so many other people, I left Medium and as an aggregator of New York Times articles, it lost its relevance.
I'm glad for my books. At least with my physical books, there's no chance an ad will suddenly materialize in between my pages as I'm reading a very compelling passage, or some new clause that I need to sign meaning I don't really own my books and that I can only still access them if I pay a $15/month subscription fee.
As an xennial, I'm happy I never lost the habit of just reading physical books and I intend to go back to them more. I even have some old CDs that still work perfectly. Also, I have books of 300-350 years old that I recently bought and it's so alluring to read pages that hands centuries ago have held. How big is the chance that someone 300 years from now will watch your carefully made Youtube video? So I'm just going back to reading, playing my lute, and listening to CDs like it's the early 2000s. Except unfortunately post 2008 crash and the quantitative easing and the resulting never ending housing crisis and of course climate crisis which now seems that much more dire than when I was in my 20s.
This post isn't as polished and researched as some, but I just had to say it in this raw format: from someone who was very early in the rise of the Internet for everyone, the way we're always screwed over by tech is deeply disappointing and disengaging.
I wouldn't feel the sting of all of this as deeply if there were a richer offline social culture in my town. I was born in the 90s and I hear all the time how much friendlier and more approachable people apparently were in the decades before. Well I see it said all the time in posts and comments.
And awful advertising aside, whatever YT has become over the past ten years is very upsetting to me.
I share your disappointment. An additional disappointment and annoyance of mine is that the people who develop/create/own these internet platforms have developed a culture in which they are comfortable with practicing zero responsibility to their users/customers. If one lives only by the dollar, one’s soul departs long before the body dies.