The Vanilla Internet

Tech companies are trying to hide the chocolate sauce and the sprinkles

Vanilla is melting your brain / Image: Badly edited by author

I've written before about how I feel the Internet of today is a shallow, soulless and frankly horrible place to spend any length of time, certainly compared to its early days, where it felt like a place of wonder, an endless ocean of possibilities, of knowledge, and most of all, joy. 

That was Web 1.0.

Unfortunately, it was nothing more than a fleeting moment in time. The engagement era — perhaps the social media era or Web 2.0 — has slowly whittled away at this, tearing at the very fabric of what made this place interesting and, more so, actually useful as a utility. 

The root cause of the change has been the shift to the attention/engagement economy. When advertising became king, social media platforms, media sites, apps and search platforms realized it was all about keeping a user hooked, sucking them dry for data points to target with advertising.

A consequence of this cynical development was the dawn of algorithms. 

And these algorithms have created the Vanilla Internet.

Put another way; we're into an era of the Internet that could be summed up as "Why try anything else when you can get the same shit fed to you day in and day out?"

Algorithms have been so well designed and executed these days to find related content or to recommend content based on what your (stolen) data points indicate — think TikTok — that they've removed the need for a user to explore. They've taken away the desire to widen horizons. They've removed curiosity, instead replacing it with more of the same, your next hit of whatever it is it thinks you want to see. It might sound convenient, but it's important to remember that convenience always comes at a cost; in this case, it's all of the interesting opinions, writing, music, facts, history, culture and more that you're missing out on because you've allowed tech companies to automate the process of finding content. 

It's all paint by numbers — and we're the numbers. 

These algorithms have infested every platform, made us more insular, and developed tunnel vision. It's partly why the younger generations who were born with a phone in hand seem to like the same stuff, but it's not because it's good — it's because too many are happy to consume what they think they want to, or worse, what a platform "recommends" they do, or what they get blasted into their eyes and ears every time they open an app or use a website. They all watch the same three shows, like the same three bands, listen to the same podcast, and seemingly watch the same stupid, pointless videos while scrolling — looking at you, Hawk Tuah.

We've been turned into sheep and pushed into an already-too-large herd. We aimlessly wander, waiting on our tech overlords to tell us what style is in fashion, what music is cool, what films are trash, and what writing hot takes are in. 

I think what I hate most about algorithms is that they aren't even effective at what they were originally designed to do. They were created — or so we were told — to show us what we wanted to see. They were supposed to able to understand our preferences. The current reality is the opposite. Twitter X's 'For You' feed is an abomination. Spotify recommendations make it seem like the platform intentionally ignores my music history. Facebook's feed now serves up AI slop that has oblivious boomers engaging with it none the wiser. Algorithms are trash across the board and have stopped recommending anything remotely close to matching my or many others' "interests," and they have long ago stopped trying to serve users. 

The algos of today are designed to serve the platforms that created them. And that means doing nothing but churning out content that keeps people scrolling, that keeps us trapped inside our little tiny walled gardens, addicted to seeing and hearing the same thing over and over, oblivious to everything else the world has to offer. They narrow our opinions and beliefs, they turn us into angry mobs, they surface the same people saying and doing the same shit, sharing copycats, tired formulas and overdone tropes. Now, they’re intent on moving away from human-created content, instead favouring more AI sludge.

Ultimately, they've damaged the Internet. 

I know the answer is to be regimented as fuck and try to control the algorithm, fine-tuning who you follow and who you engage with, smashing the mute/not interested button over and over again, and making your own choices. However, the platforms and tech overlords are doing their best to make it harder, as that makes it easier than ever to manufacture the engagement that keeps their businesses afloat.

They want conformity. They want control. They want to keep it vanilla. They're doing anything they can to hide the chocolate sauce and the sprinkles.