I know it’s generally frowned upon to do victim blaming, but the lusers (how the BOFH calls them) have a part in this. The internet corporation did the same thing old-school corporations did, and that’s taking a product and squeezing the most money possible out of it. The current state of the internet is just a product of what the userbase wanted and the corporations delivered.

I’ve spoken before with people in offline about the state of the internet. People like me with similar background. People who are now in their late thirties, and discovered the internet at the turn of the millenium when they were teenagers and avid for knowledge. Internet was very limited back then. Technology was fairly expensive, internet connections were limited not only by speed and duration of access (remember dial-up?) but also by the lack of content and ways to access the existing content. This meant that people that managed to become on line were fairly smart. People that created on the internet were smart and creative. With the natural progress, the technology got cheaper, access got way easier for the common people. And common people is neither smart, nor creative. They easily became the most populous part of the internet and theif focus switched from creating to consuming data. I was tempted to say “knowledge”, or “information”, but people online don’t look for these, mostly merely look for entertainment. Big companies saw that, and understood that even the act of consuming internet actually creates something. It creates metadata, it creates a breadcrumb trail just perfect for Big Data and AI to crunch their bytes on and create monetary value.

It’s easy to throw the blame on the big corporations (and they surely are to blame), but keep in mind that the state of the internet was decided when we gave cheap internet access to every creature with opposable thumbs and a quarter of a brain.

PS: Reaction tiktoks are not fucking content, go and do something useful, like wash some dishes at a McDonalds.