Welcome To The Internet

Have a look around. Anything that brain of your can think of can be found.

The internet has been a major part of my life. I'm part of that weird spot between Gen Z and Gen Alpha, but it doesn't change the fact that the internet is something I grew up with. It's the place where I first discovered my own identity as aroace, but also the place where I was back when I had a Sonic The Hedgehog obsession (you can probably tell where that went). It's been around for a long time, and I wasn't there to witness it's early days, but I still got to see other things. The internet now is not what it once was, it's honestly changed a lot in the last few years. Everything must change, I will admit that. Nothing's going to stay the same forever, that's just the reality of living. I feel though that this change is not in the spirit of what once created the internet--it was once made up of different communities and actual human beings. Now though, it's just AI slop and corporate entities battling for your attention and money.

I feel like AI has taken everything over. It's inescapable to me, no matter what I try. When I look something up, the first thing I see is an artifically generated overview. When I try to find cool art on somewhere like Pinterest, some art turns out to be AI. Even Tumblr has AI, but luckily it's only the ads. No matter what I try, AI stalks me, and I can't be the only one who feels this way, right? I hate the machines that try to churn out their approximation of human art, because it lacks the soul and effort behind true human art. I know I already ranted about this in a seperate writing thing I uploaded here, but this is still important to my overall point on the negatives of the modern interwebs. AI is everywhere. I just... it feels like the internet has been enshittified, in a sense. AI bots talk to other bots, making it seem like the internet is alive, when there are truly fewer and fewer people. That Twitter AI bot, Grok, is being used to undress women and CHILDREN without their consent, which should actually be illegal, it should be treated how it is, a fucking crime. AI is being used as a replacement for real human effort. I hate content farms, I truly do, but there was a point in time where real people worked on those god awful videos, not it's a machine churning them out and the person running the farm makes way more money than they deserve. It sucks, it really fucking sucks. AI is not something that can replace humanity, no matter what. At it's base components, it's just ones and zeros, code taking the approximation of text, images, or videos. We need to remember that.

People are prone to sucking, that's a fact of life, but I feel people hide behind the veil of anominity to say genuinely awful things about others just for the sake of saying them. To return to my example of Grok, when people are rightfully pissed that their photos are getting edited to be more sexualized by some dude prompting an AI, they are the one who is blamed, all for posting the photo, and then they are hit with more AI edited photos of them getting sexualized. It's all superficial to the people who do it, the people in the photos are nothing more than toys that they can jack off to. It doesn't matter what they think, it's still fucking awful. That's not the only instance of people being horrible though...

The alt-right pipeline and echo chambers are all pretty prevelent nowadays. I'm gonna say it for what it is, alt-right ideoligies: nazism. The way people are given these ideoligies at the start of the pipeline is things that may seem rational to these people, or promises of something better. As they fall further down the rabbit hole, they are given more and more extreme things to believe, and if they continue on, they'll reach the end with a heart full of hatred for others that are not like them. It's a belief system built upon irrational hate and lies, plain and simple. These beliefs are nothing more than hatred, no matter how they wish to spin the story. They lure unsuspecting folk in with promises of a better life, only to feed them lies and hatred. I hate how prevelent this all is nowadays. It's only growing larger and larger, even people at top of the government (Donald Trump) are spreading lies. No, not every "illegal" immigrent is out to destroy America, and doctors are not performing gender affirming surgery on minors. The kids are not alright, especially after you shut down the suidice hotline.

I'm a trans teen myself, as you may know. I'm scared, I really am fucking scared. I'm scared my rights are going to be ripped away from me, I'm scared that I might be killed just because of my gender identity. I'm fucking scared.

I know this was originally supposed to be about the internet and what it is today, I'll get back to that in a moment, I swear. I'm just scared, I'm scared of and pissed at the government. We have a literal racist, queerphobic pedophile as president right now, someone who has been defying the constitution to further his own agenda. People are being taken away because of their skin tone, and even american citizens have been killed by ICE. Women aren't able to get abortions anymore, even if their own life depends on it. Even though all the horrible policies Trump has put into power, I still see support for him. It's just... I don't know how people can justify and support what he's done. I should probably save that for a different piece of writing for a later time, this was supposed to be about the internet anyway.

Most of the internet has concentrated into major sites, with a lot of others existing but seeing only a fraction of the visitors the major ones get. Those sites get greedy, they want more money, even at the cost of their visitor's own experience. I know companies have to make money to stay afloat, that's just the rule of this world, but at a point, it gets to be straight-up greed fueling their decsions. They stuff the site with ads so they can make more money, lock things behind paywalls, even if the visitors protest. Greed fuels large companies, not the people.

It may seem all doom and gloom, but I want to offer some advice too. Try going to smaller websites, or making your own personal one (not with AI, obviously. Coding can be a good thing to learn), boycott companies when they make a dumb descion, and try to avoid Twitter in general, that place is full of discource and borderline illegal content. It may seem the world's going to absolute shit (because it is), but you gotta do what makes you happy. You can't focus on all the bad stuff, it'll blind you and make you cynical. I know I've been talking about all the bad of the internet with this, but there's still good people and good things on it, you just gotta look. The whole world doesn't suck, but most of it does, to a degree. What you have to do is find that thing that makes you happy, that brings you some joy in life, and you have to run with it. Keep that thing close, and hold it tight. This world's a rollercoaster of events right now, but you're gonna keep that thing, you hear me? The world's shitty, but that thing isn't, and at least a bit of the world doesn't have the bar being used as Satan's drying rack.

The internet's just that, a net of interconnected digital lands. Sometimes, you have to travel through places you hate before you make it to your paradise, and sometimes, you just have to make it yourself. That's why I have this website.

Just before I end this off--yes, the title is a refrence to that one Bo Burnaham (or however it's spelled) song. It's accurate and a banger.