I feel this too! The only counter I have is to say that my lonely little art website has no ads, popups, banners or paywalls. It gets practically zero traffic but it makes me happy to share my creative process and art....
I resurrected my old "homepage" from the late 90s the other day, which was just a picture of me with my CV and contact info. Now THAT is a relic of a more innocent time. I mean, does anyone even want to let anyone else know how to directly contact you these days?
But darn if it isn't a sleek and efficient way of finding that info. According to the carbon calculators, it uses less than 0.01% of the bandwidth an average "modern" web page on the polluted hellmaw we have left of what was once the Internet.
Imagine the amount of electricity we could save if web content today were made to the same standards, or better yet... Not made at all.
In the greater scheme of things, your site is probably the direction we SHOULD be going in.
Now that's a hopeful thought! I did have to remove the contact form because the spam got too bad but someone can still reach me, if they really want to 😁
I have a few sites like that, too. A decade ago they used to get a trickle of traffic and I'd get comments and emails from real humans. That stopped a few years ago when everyone started converging in the walled gardens like Instagram, where you can't link out, and when Google became useless.
I work in Big Tech, and it's amazing to me people don't see the rot from within. I do sporadically post about good things in tech, because I do believe tech still has ways of making life better without making it less fulfilling.
However, most who work in the industry don't see this and are on the constant chase towards the next big shiny thing, which has created the mess we have today. Even if more of us realize how bad tech has gotten recently, I am pessimistic we can do anything about it.
I’ve been warming to the theory that when it first arrived, the internet (and perhaps tech itself) was a tool. Now, it’s a destination — or the mode of entry to that destination — which means the parameters have changed, the expectations have shifted and the utility has evaporated, replaced with engagement metrics and “time spent”
Ladies and gentlemen, watch old movies! From the pre-70s era, regularly. It's so calming for the soul to see the world without all-present digital crap.
Hell yeah! I've gotten rid of all streaming services. I just get DVDs and watch long form content with my kids and they LOVE IT. Especially older animated stuff. It looks so much better than CGI.
I hate AI but I can't escape it🙁 Even my keyboard app is infested with it. Twitter is a dumpster fire and Facebook is pure shit. I miss the days of the "wild" internet.
I remember a time when tech, the internet in particular, was rough around the edges but got better every month. If I was building a website, for example, I was confident that the next time I built a website it would be easier and look better. Cars are the same way. Tech in cars used to make them better. I would always anticipate my next car because I knew it would be even better than the current one. But those days have been over for a long time. Everything keeps updating and new features keep getting rolled out but somehow nothing ever improves. I now dread updates and new features. I literally just bought a 2020 refurbished MacBook and a 2002 Toyota Tacoma because that’s when tech worked.
I swear my 2010 (ten) MacBook Pro worked better than my 2020 one. This one is slow, laboured, always blasting the fan. The other one was a proper machine — sure, it was bigger and little heavier, but I’d take that for it to work better
Ironically I just wrote my laptop off yesterday after spilling coffee on it. The main reason? Everything is now attached to the logic board and so it immediately becomes a “Tier 4” repair which is £1000. Get fucked.
Ads on subscription services. A trailer for another programme that you can skip - fair enough. But anything other than that is, as you say, degrading the user experience.
First, I don't really watch TV anymore. Secondly, I'm not sure that exists anymore. Apple is the best in that sense - fair price, no ads (aside the promos for their own shows). But I believe it's starting to pull back on the money it pumps into the service, so not sure what future holds for it.
When Netflix added ads, I wrote in an article that if everyone swallowed it up (same with the blocking password sharing), the rest of the industry would follow. That was the chance for consumer to say fuck you, and make a noticeable enough dent in sub figures or revenue charts to force them to take it back. We didn't. Instead, we INCREASED their sub count.
That was the bat signal to jump in.
Now, we're soon going to them all merging, and we'll probably be left with Netflix, Disney and maybe one more, all stuffed with ads... just like cable. So much for "disruption."
Yes, disruption is a crock. Or at least, disruption is just a phase to establish a different form of monopoly and exploitation. I agree Apple seems like the best - and there is a good selection of quality programming on there. I hope they don’t go the way of the others - and obviously, as a company, they’re far from perfect (squashed artist smoothie, anyone?). Do you think your real enemy might not be big tech, but capitalism itself?
I guess it could be both. The shareholder control/growth-at-all-costs/number go up shit has had a huge impact on the industry. But I also blame those inside it; too many egos, too much power, too many grifters, too much self-indulgence, too much of this idea that being a founder makes you an elite form of human being (looking at you Mr Altman).
I guess the one breeds the other: neoliberalism produces Ayn Rand disruptors who think they hold the world on their shoulders. Consumer activism doesn’t work, because the cannibalistic nature of capitalism means that bigger fish swallow the smaller fish, until the only consumer choice is between equally unethical corporate behemoths. Until one day there is only Disney! Thank you for this cheery chat! I’m off to grow tomatoes and build my own back-garden wind farm.
I think that this viewpoint is far more common than people realize. Back when ChatGPT first exploded late 2022, I figured that 2023 was going to be a year of breathless wordgasm over The Future, but by 2024 people would wake up and see we'd been fed a load of shit.
I feel this too! The only counter I have is to say that my lonely little art website has no ads, popups, banners or paywalls. It gets practically zero traffic but it makes me happy to share my creative process and art....
I suspect it's a dinosaur of the internet LOL
It may be a relic. But hey, if it brings you joy — unlike the rest of the noise around you — lean right in
It does! I'd like to think it brightens the day of the folks who do find it 🙂
I resurrected my old "homepage" from the late 90s the other day, which was just a picture of me with my CV and contact info. Now THAT is a relic of a more innocent time. I mean, does anyone even want to let anyone else know how to directly contact you these days?
But darn if it isn't a sleek and efficient way of finding that info. According to the carbon calculators, it uses less than 0.01% of the bandwidth an average "modern" web page on the polluted hellmaw we have left of what was once the Internet.
Imagine the amount of electricity we could save if web content today were made to the same standards, or better yet... Not made at all.
In the greater scheme of things, your site is probably the direction we SHOULD be going in.
Now that's a hopeful thought! I did have to remove the contact form because the spam got too bad but someone can still reach me, if they really want to 😁
I have a few sites like that, too. A decade ago they used to get a trickle of traffic and I'd get comments and emails from real humans. That stopped a few years ago when everyone started converging in the walled gardens like Instagram, where you can't link out, and when Google became useless.
Same here. Site comments have dropped off. The herds are wandering the pastures of Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Oh yeah - I remember the real humans too! I miss that and it just makes the tech degradation point more powerful 😔
I left the socials last year so the site and my Substack are pretty much my last outpost...
“That gum you like is going to come back in style”
That's disappointing but it's true. I hope you'll keep that website going anyway because the world needs it.
I work in Big Tech, and it's amazing to me people don't see the rot from within. I do sporadically post about good things in tech, because I do believe tech still has ways of making life better without making it less fulfilling.
However, most who work in the industry don't see this and are on the constant chase towards the next big shiny thing, which has created the mess we have today. Even if more of us realize how bad tech has gotten recently, I am pessimistic we can do anything about it.
Yeah. I wrote recently about how I’m tired of hearing of — or having forced on me — the “next big thing”
Most never live up to the hype
I think a good direction is to cease creating solutions that don't have problems.
Just because something is a shiny boondoggle — and can be marketed to make money — doesn't mean we all need or want that shiny boondoggle.
Certainly feel this as recovering “digital transformation” corporate type.
What I’ve come to realize is that although tech is simply a tool to be used at the surface for tasks, it has been assigned paradigm-level importance.
We attempt to fix everything with tech. It simply leads to more problems.
A tool can never be and should never be a value or a principle for change.
Look up a list of typical values. You won’t find tech listed there but it’s exactly what many have made it.
Use the wrong tool for the job, you end up with a mess of an outcome.
I’ve been warming to the theory that when it first arrived, the internet (and perhaps tech itself) was a tool. Now, it’s a destination — or the mode of entry to that destination — which means the parameters have changed, the expectations have shifted and the utility has evaporated, replaced with engagement metrics and “time spent”
Yep!
Kinda what I’m saying….that the tech itself has become the objective or the underlying value instead of legit human values.
When we use a tool as a driving value, it becomes about finding ways to measure the tool regardless of it impact on the overall environment / system.
What a subtitle — "Gosh."
I've kinda always hated everything about tech.
Ladies and gentlemen, watch old movies! From the pre-70s era, regularly. It's so calming for the soul to see the world without all-present digital crap.
Hell yeah! I've gotten rid of all streaming services. I just get DVDs and watch long form content with my kids and they LOVE IT. Especially older animated stuff. It looks so much better than CGI.
I hate AI but I can't escape it🙁 Even my keyboard app is infested with it. Twitter is a dumpster fire and Facebook is pure shit. I miss the days of the "wild" internet.
I remember a time when tech, the internet in particular, was rough around the edges but got better every month. If I was building a website, for example, I was confident that the next time I built a website it would be easier and look better. Cars are the same way. Tech in cars used to make them better. I would always anticipate my next car because I knew it would be even better than the current one. But those days have been over for a long time. Everything keeps updating and new features keep getting rolled out but somehow nothing ever improves. I now dread updates and new features. I literally just bought a 2020 refurbished MacBook and a 2002 Toyota Tacoma because that’s when tech worked.
I swear my 2010 (ten) MacBook Pro worked better than my 2020 one. This one is slow, laboured, always blasting the fan. The other one was a proper machine — sure, it was bigger and little heavier, but I’d take that for it to work better
You capture some thing so well with your explanation here.
Everything keeps changing but nothing ever changes.
Ironically I just wrote my laptop off yesterday after spilling coffee on it. The main reason? Everything is now attached to the logic board and so it immediately becomes a “Tier 4” repair which is £1000. Get fucked.
Ditto. Tech has become large anti-life.
You are not alone with these thoughts.... if only there was a 'retry' button on reality.
The good all “turn it off and back on again”
Ted Kaczynski was right
You are not alone
I feel this so much! And this was probably one of the realist post I’ve read in a long time. You are not alone!
Ads on subscription services. A trailer for another programme that you can skip - fair enough. But anything other than that is, as you say, degrading the user experience.
I makes my blood boil
Are there any streaming services you like? Which you consider good value for money and treat the user with respect?
First, I don't really watch TV anymore. Secondly, I'm not sure that exists anymore. Apple is the best in that sense - fair price, no ads (aside the promos for their own shows). But I believe it's starting to pull back on the money it pumps into the service, so not sure what future holds for it.
When Netflix added ads, I wrote in an article that if everyone swallowed it up (same with the blocking password sharing), the rest of the industry would follow. That was the chance for consumer to say fuck you, and make a noticeable enough dent in sub figures or revenue charts to force them to take it back. We didn't. Instead, we INCREASED their sub count.
That was the bat signal to jump in.
Now, we're soon going to them all merging, and we'll probably be left with Netflix, Disney and maybe one more, all stuffed with ads... just like cable. So much for "disruption."
Yes, disruption is a crock. Or at least, disruption is just a phase to establish a different form of monopoly and exploitation. I agree Apple seems like the best - and there is a good selection of quality programming on there. I hope they don’t go the way of the others - and obviously, as a company, they’re far from perfect (squashed artist smoothie, anyone?). Do you think your real enemy might not be big tech, but capitalism itself?
I guess it could be both. The shareholder control/growth-at-all-costs/number go up shit has had a huge impact on the industry. But I also blame those inside it; too many egos, too much power, too many grifters, too much self-indulgence, too much of this idea that being a founder makes you an elite form of human being (looking at you Mr Altman).
I guess the one breeds the other: neoliberalism produces Ayn Rand disruptors who think they hold the world on their shoulders. Consumer activism doesn’t work, because the cannibalistic nature of capitalism means that bigger fish swallow the smaller fish, until the only consumer choice is between equally unethical corporate behemoths. Until one day there is only Disney! Thank you for this cheery chat! I’m off to grow tomatoes and build my own back-garden wind farm.
I think that this viewpoint is far more common than people realize. Back when ChatGPT first exploded late 2022, I figured that 2023 was going to be a year of breathless wordgasm over The Future, but by 2024 people would wake up and see we'd been fed a load of shit.
Same
To be like water is to understand your natural, authentic self.
——Be Water，My Friend (written by Shannon Lee)