Even the fun things “on the internet” are mostly still possible, it’s just the bulk of things we do now are not fun and main companies aren’t quirky risk takers but the oil/train/steel barons of our day.
In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen).
Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.
I guess platforms like TikTok might better be thought of as "want to peep in on what a bunch of people do for money now?" which makes it feel (paradoxically, since it is a performance) a bit invasive and unseemly.
How do you balance that with the need for money to afford things in life though? There's a lot of things I could go do if I didn't have to think about bills to pay.
Well in the 90s and early 2000s you really could make money as a small local artist in a niche genre. Think of the people who could cut 500 white labels of their new UK Garage tune and reasonably expect to sell them from the back of their car and turn a decent profit on it.
The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.
The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.
That and also people weren't paying for Netflix, Disney+, PlayStation online, ChatGPT+, etc
Edit: Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids and work.
The bored DINKS with free time looking for hobbies is a relatively recent phenomenon in western societies (10-15 years).
Says who? Please define your definition of the word "needs" here in this context.
With this logic, nobody also "needs" to buy a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090, a recreational boat, drink Starbucks daily, etc if your definition of "needs" is just limited to day survival meaning just providing food and shelter but nothing more, and yet people buy them anyway, because it's entertainment, not because they need them to survive.
People will still want escapism and entertainment ESPECIALLY when their lives suck, like in times of economic depression, be it cigarettes, booze, junk food, porn, games, gambling, movies and TV shows, etc, even if you think people don't "need" them. This is how people function. It's scientifically documented.
Are you able to read and parse entire sentences and paragraphs in order to grasp the point of a comment, or do you form your opinion from a couple of random words you pick from a paragraph.
> That and also people weren't paying for Netflix, Disney+, PlayStation online, ChatGPT+, etc
Its disingenuous to describe those new expenses without considering those that largely have been replaced.
It used to be normal to pay for cable TV which was outrageously expensive. They used to go to movie theatres on a regular basis, and collect physical media for movies and music and games and tv. Etc.
And pay $1 a minute for long distance and even not so long distance calls. Not sure how everything balances out inflation and function adjusted but not convinced entertainment is broadly more expensive these days.
In the 90s, my parents made at least 50% more than I do (for similar work, not inflation adjusted), bought a house almost twice as big as mine in a nicer area for 25% less than mine, and traveled internationally for what it costs me to take my kids camping. Well, maybe that last one is a slight exaggeration, but the rest isn't.
I typed out a very snarky response which was in complete agreement with your point, and erased it.
You're right. The economy is... fucked. The "great wealth transfer" will be vacuumed up quickly, and it'll get worse.
World of Warcraft (of all things) had this kind of issue with stats and damage numbers getting into the absurd range, so they did a stat crunch. We need a global stat crunch.
“You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.”
- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
You do one thing you don't particularly enjoy too much for 8h/day as your job to earn money, then you do your hobby you can afford and enjoy for <8h/day, then you sleep for ~8h/day.
Yes, ish. Shopping is delivered, cooking is a hobby (or takeaway), cleaning services for a couple of hours a week is often practical even if actually having a full time housekeeper isn't. Convert money from the unenjoyable part into time in the enjoyable part.
No I mean that the 19th century 8-8-8 rule is nonsense today, when people's leisure time is being eaten up by their commute and other responsibilities, so it ends up being more like 7 hours sleep, 2 hours hobbies, 15 hours work.
>No I mean that the 19th century 8-8-8 rule is nonsense today
You think 19th century workers had time for 8h of hobbies per day? Let me have what you've been smoking because that's some good stuff.
>when people's leisure time is being eaten up by their commute and other responsibilities
You think 19th century people had no/less responsibilities?
How out of touch do you have to be to see yourself as more oppressed than 19th century workers, when you have abundant food in the supermarkets you don't have to farm, door to door food delivery, online solvable bureaucracy, cars, planes, ambulances and emergency rooms with MRIs, CT scanners and cures for most diseases, OSHA, social security, longest life expectancy ever in the history of mankind, residential heating and cooling at your fingertips, etc. stuff even kings in the 19th century didn't have, a society where you can live a life where you never have to leave your house if you don't want to, yet somehow you think workers had a more leisurely life back then. WHAT?!
> 15 hours work.
Put yourself in the position of an employer trying to start/run a business today. Are your customers gonna pay you extra so you can pay your workers for their private chores and commute?
Retired with substantial savings, refitting my 40 year old Hobie Cat 18, heading to the beach to spend more time with the dolphins and seagulls. ... and any interesting humans that I meet walking the beach.
I was JUST working on this based on the solarpunk forum article that was on Hackaday, yesterday.
I was trying to do Enigma with a captive portal wifi setup and a (heavily stylized) terminal in a browser. Figured a pi zero w2 might do the job on solar.
The idea was occasional fidonet pickup, some door games, and probably disabled file base. I could seed a few on friends and family porches in the neighborhood, and just see if anyone uses them.
It (enigma) was proving to be a real pain though, and I decided to shelve it for a bit.
Reticulum/Rnode is one option, but then mesh-core-tastic, signal, session, simplex, briar, whatschat, insta-don't sell a gram (no more e2ee) etc. etc. Let me know when the cool kids figure it out, you can reach me on my fossil instance over i2p :D
This. Yes, the mass internet is curated, created and censored. Usenet is a distant memory. But some changes are positive.
I recently retired. I've programmed for 50 years, both for work and for fun. My son asked: so what's your project? I had to think about it, and I've decided to learn GPU programming - something completely new to me.
With AI as a tutor, this will be massively easier than at any time in the past. In some ways, the state of AI now is reminiscent of the state of the internet 25 years ago.
I concur! Explore the big, bold world outside the internet.
Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.
Thanks for checking it out. There's currently over 30K blogs in the feed and we try to diversify it as much as possible. We welcome anyone to contribute more blogs, video channels and comics here:
Good question. No, unless we have similar interests and hobbies. Specialized topics and fields (I observe anecdotally) tend to be less vulnerable to the optimization this article laments!
The big, bold world outside the internet is arguably far more locked down, enshittified and regulated than the online world.
I mean look at cities, removing parks, benches, trying to make it impossible to even stand without paying for existing. The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property. Can't do anything anywhere anymore.
You'd have to go somewhere incredibly remote to find any boldness left, like international waters or the Australian outback. The civilized world is just bureaucracy with extra steps.
> The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property.
You’re missing out if you think that. People come from all over the world to hike, bikepack, or van-dwell American wilderness. Since Covid there has been a big boom in ”weekender” routes that Americans can do in their own neck of the woods. And if there’s so much reward in the USA, think about what rewards await in other countries that have even less of a culture of territorialness and privatization.
I do think there’s been some power law concentration since Covid and you can blame Instagram or whatever but still seems like a real phenomenon in my personal experience.
Everything you said is good, but I think it misses the point of the blog post.
The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.
I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!
That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.
It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.
Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.
Just realised that reading your message, I really feel this, I've been designing a game and I've recently been having discussions with friends and people interested in it and it's just a really different experience talking with them vs posting about it, don't get me wrong, having a weekly cadence is nice and Sharing Saturdays can be really helpful to get the word out there, but it's such a different interaction and mindspace I end up in during the "plan to explain to people in this weird advertising, but not process about my passion project", vs "talk to someone about my passion"
And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being?
For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area
This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging
Encourage yourself and all your similar-minded people to keep the fun going!
Yes, 99.99(however many 9s)% of the internet is walled-garden advertising garbage.
But, you can exist in the remaining space and bring your friends along!
I run my website and my blog like I've always done (since 1994), I run mailing lists for a few topics (some date back to 1991) and subscribe to many others. Zero corporate involvement, no ads, no monopolist in control. Just peer to peer real people. I run my email server so I can communicate without depending on the monopolists. There are still hobby forums for specialty topics, or start your own! I even still read Usenet weekly. And so on...
The fun parts of the Internet used to be all of it, now it is a niche, but it's still there for you. Keep it alive!
A little while ago I got my hodge podge Amazon soldering kit out and took the time to fix two DMG-01 Game Boys from my childhood. I opened up a bunch of PS5 controllers and replaced the analog sticks with hall sensors.
Nothing about what I did was impressive. I’m a novice at best. But I haven’t felt so fulfilled in such a long time. I had a serious moment of thinking, “I wish I could quit my career and just repair electronics for people.”
I repair electronics every once in a while and I've always hated doing it. If you actually like doing that, then you absolutely should try doing it for a living.
as someone who laments the loss of spaces and pastimes that once brought people together -- bowling alleys, dance halls, pubs, movie houses, etc. -- to work from home, home entertainment and especially anything and everything online, I keep hoping for some kind of reversal.
Maybe the day is getting closer when anything and everything internet-related is so drenched in uncanny artifice and extractionary intention that people will yearn for imperfect, multidimensional reality, and feel like the best thing they can do with their time is walk through the park with a friend.
That seems kind of like a non-sequiter none of that stuff has anything to do with what made the internet special so I don't see how doing so would help either bring the internet back or create a viable alternative.
I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this.
The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.
Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.
Over the last few years my wife and I have grown into a community of awesome people. It makes all the difference. Do literally anything you can offline. Go to some meet up. Volunteer. Go to a con or an event. Learn an instrument. Literally anything. Do as if your long term mental health depends on it, because it just might. Be silly. Be cringe. Dress up. Get far far away from the internet with actual people.
I swapped to Linux last year and my computer has actually been fun. Bazzite is great. I barely tinker with it if ever and it’s mostly because I feel like it, not out of necessity. I have a very reliable gaming and video editing machine, mostly using open source stuff, and I am in no way a coder/programmer/engineer. I just love using it.
Tinkering with retro consoles has also been very satisfying. I would say more than half of the consoles in my home are modded in some way or another. My kids love it.
Then of course there’s film photography. Talk about a great way to force yourself to be intentional and patient. You can buy any dinky camera and a nifty 50 for like $100, it’ll work just fine. Just get out there and shoot and send off your rolls to be processed. Even just getting one or two good shots out of a roll feels fantastic. Every single photo you take matters and is memorable. It’s refreshing.
Ironically, it was the Jacquard Loom that made redundant a generation of highly-skilled, mostly female, weavers.
Of course, any human can choose to take up this hobby manually, but we will never again compete in the job market with machines that are accurate, blindingly fast, and so far haven’t demanded the right to vote
make homebrew software for an old Nintendo console
pick up cross stitching or weaving
make an independent film with a friend; use stuff from your kitchen as props
find a borderline functional instrument at your local thrift store
write a 1 page short story in pen
it's not enough anymore to merely criticize this bad time we're having