The Internet Has Made Me Too Cynical
Recently, I was watching my nieces trying to learn a dance routine in the garden. I guess they sensed my confusion at what they were up to, because they stopped to shout, "it's a TikTok dance, stupid!" in that you're so lame tone only young tweens can deliver with such venom.
I told them I wasn't on TikTok.
Their response, which I assume was meant to cut me deep, was a very true reflection of where I am right now.
"Gawd, you're a cynical old man."
To clarify, I'm not that old, though I am old enough to have lived my entire youth free of social media. Let's be honest for a second — they really were the good old days. I hate seeing how hooked this generation already is on the dopamine of social media, and without the knowledge and understanding to know it's even happening. One niece once told me she'd die without her iPad. I'm going off on a tangent here. Back to my point, I'm not old old, but they certainly nailed the cynical part, even if they don't quite know what they meant by it.
I've been thinking a lot about my cynicism lately and how it got so bad. After some reflection, the answer is obvious: the Internet is to blame. Or, more specifically, the current form of the Internet is to blame — the social media era, Web 2.0, which came with the shift to the attention/engagement economy and the clamor for clicks and clout that became a race to the bottom.
It's turned what was once a wonderful place—as I reminisced about here—into a hollow shell, an experience that continues to worsen by the day.
Across the Internet and its various entities, social media, video platforms, blogging, news media, etc., I've found I can no longer take anything at face value. I do it without thinking. I'm instinctively critical. I over-analyze everything I see, read and hear. I think everything I see is faked or rehearsed or just some paint-by-algorithmic-numbers drivel. I assume bot farms are behind most engagement and discourse. Almost everything irritates me in a way I'd struggle to explain.
The whole experience leaves me thinking, why are you making this? Why do you think this is worth adding to the deluge of content that already exists?
When I see someone doing the same TikTok dance millions of others have, realize I'm listening to a podcast on a topic covered a hundred times before, read an article that is giving me deja vu because it's like everything else I've read, or scroll through another pointless, wasteful forum that didn't provide the answer I needed, or see a microphone put in someone's face and know the "take" I'm about to see is going to make me want to scream… I'm overwhelmed with the belief that most of it is utterly pointless.
It is pure, unfiltered brain rot.
I don't get it. Maybe I am too old for it all.
Worse than the content is many of the people producing it—another byproduct of this new engagement-first Internet.
I'm mainly popping at the creators who create for the purpose of selling, shilling courses on the steps to success or promoting shitty dropshipped products when their own success is predicated on good timing and some good luck. Everyone is telling the same old story in the same old formats because it somehow works, and they do it in the hopes of achieving some vague, gone-in-a-flash moment of fame. Why don't more of us see through it? It's not genuine. And I don't see why it's remotely helpful to anyone.
Part of it is this idea that creativity should be democratized—that everyone should be able to do it. I don't agree. Doing it because you can and not because you want to results in pointless, half-assed, mediocre output, especially when we add AI-generation tools into the mix. These days, people make content and produce products and services, and whatever, purely to capitalize on Internet trends or to make hay from hype bubbles, and it's so soulless. Why aren't we creating out of passion anymore? Why is everything to be monetized, gamed, hacked, and designed for engagement? What happened to people just making stuff for fun? Or to be helpful? It makes me long for those glorious early days of YouTube. It's becoming a noticeable trend — the number of people posting content is dropping, and the primary use of social media is now entertainment. Which, no surprise, has turned every platform into a creator platform, where users are now the audience, and their attention is now to be monetized.
I even find myself questioning the motive behind things that seem genuine. Say, for example, publications on this platform that exist to compile and share other publications. Or creators doing things for the homeless or for charity (think Mr Beast). Or those who give away stuff for free. Is it genuine, or is it a sneaky hack to try and game exposure? A ploy for clout? A trick to get an email address that can be plundered for every last penny?
I find it all so bleak.
I don't like that I've become this way.
My cynicism is part of the reason I hate the Internet these days. Heck, my wife would say it's bled into my day-to-day life too.
We can point the blame at the invention of smartphones, likes, feeds, algorithms, suggested content, the culture shift that everyone thinks they're entitled to be a celebrity and gain viral success, the money, the influencer deals, reality TV and probably plenty more, but we can also point the finger in the mirror.
Somewhere along the way, we sucked all the fun out of this.
We're all guilty of making this place, the Internet, a horrible, shitty, vapid hellhole.
To end, I should make an important point. I'm fully aware that I, too, produce content on the Internet. But I don't do it for money, or for clout, or for clicks. I don't know if I'll ever make money from it, and I don't care. I've done it for the past 8 years or so because it's fun, I've made some lifelong friends from doing so, and I'm deeply addicted to the pursuit of getting better at the craft of writing.
I told my niece — who wants to be a YouTube creator (what else?) — as much.
Her response?
"That's so stupid."
Maybe she's right.
I knew from pretty early on that the early form of the internet was probably doomed. The early, decentralized, "freedom" internet had a sort of ideology. And, that ideology was naive and flawed--it was obvious that it did not have what it took to stand up to the monetizers. The whole "the internet interprets censorship (and various other forms of control) as damage and routes around it" was a sweet idea, but lazy. People thought the internet protocols themselves would somehow insulate everyone from politics and big money, without anyone having to actually do anything about it. Which tacitly assumed that nobody had any ability or motivation to break that. This was a mistaken idea, Napster showed us that, and was kind of the starting gun for the closure of the internet "frontier".
The problem with the early internet is it was based around atomized individualist libertarianism, and the only way for it to have had a hope in hell would have been to be based around solidarity. If there is to be any chance of taking it back, it will require learning that lesson.
Agree 100%. It IS brain rot.