The Death of Connectivity Online in Exchange for Algorithmic Cyborgization

I got my first computer when I was eight years old. It wasn't anything fancy, an old Windows 95 box that barely worked. But when my parents decided to upgrade to a shiny, new, Dell Machine running Windows XP, I was more than happy to do whatever it took to get my hands on the old family PC. The deal that I struck up with them took place in early February of my seventh year. They agreed that if I kept my room clean for the remainder of the year, that come Christmas Day, the computer would be mine. Needless to say, there wasn't so much as a sock on the floor of my room for the rest of the year. At the time I shared a room with my younger brother, and I specifically remember having to work twice as hard, cleaning up not only my own mess, but his as well. Come Christmas day though, all the work paid off and the computer was all mine.

If you lived through this era of computing, I probably don't need to tell you there wasn't a whole hell of a lot that I could actually do with the machine. A lone Windows 95 Box without an internet connection in the middle of the south Texas woods in 2005 or 2006 wasn't exactly a portal to anything dangerous or exciting. But for an eight year old me, it was more than enough to capture my attention. I spent hours on end sitting in front of that old PC, toying around, learning everything I could about it. I spend days cataloging every CD in the house. Ripping individual CDs, manually adding all the metadata that was available to add in an early version of Widows Media Player. I toyed around with the screen savers (particularly the maze screen saver), breaking random things, painstakingly fixing them - I even managed to convince myself that I had drawn the attention of law enforcement one night when I tried to print without a printer attached, and got the dreaded message:

Even when I managed to find some old Ethernet wire and figure out how to run myself a dial up connection under the house to my bedroom, all I ever really managed to figure out how to do was slowly download album art for my Media Player library. Still I spent days manually downloading images online, often queuing up ten or fifteen album covers to download before going to sleep and adding them to my Media Library when I woke up the next morning.

Eventually though, things changed. At some point the old dial-up connection was replaced with a fancy new 5Mbps internet connection. The old Windows 95 box got replaced with whatever the cheapest laptop Dell sold at the time was, and my days of cataloging old CDs were replaced by days of hanging out on sites like VideoCopilot, Creative Cow, Reddit, and more than anything else; YouTube. Now, my ability to learn about my new computer was virtually unlimited. There wasn't a single thing I wanted to do that I couldn't find a video tutorial or online article telling me how to do. These were the early days of the internet culture we find ourselves a part of now. Back before the days of hyper-monetization, algorithms and far before you heard the word "influencer" as much as you hear the word "breakfast". Even when I did get on sites like Facebook or Twitter there was no algorithm pushing some content to the top and silencing other content. Posts were simply displayed chronologically, and seeing posts from someone you didn't explicitly follow was almost unheard of. The content was still out there, you could still learn about any topic you wanted to, or jump down any internet rabbit hole that caught your fancy; but you did have to go find the content yourself as opposed to having a few billion dollar companies simply decide for you what you'd be viewing for the day the second you open one of their apps.

These were the glory days of social media. People put content online not because they thought it was a good way to make some extra money, but because they had a real desire to create and contribute to the zeitgeist. Communication was different. There were trolls and people who would say disgusting things online that they'd never say in person. Buy largely you could effectively communicate and learn from complete strangers in a way that I don't know is possible today. I spent much of my teenage years on Twitter connecting with other aspiring filmmakers and creative-types around the world. I was able to learn a massive amount on the same platforms that I now wan't nothing to do with simply by asking. I could message industry professionals and have a conversation with them as if I was just a co-worker, and not a thirteen year old kid. I even found my first job the same way I had learned the skills to actually do that job. I simply saw a company that was hiring a motion graphics artist, clicked on the Google Form, saw they wanted a link to a demo reel, and then spent all night putting together a reel to send them by the next morning. It wasn't anything special, thirty seconds or so of miscellaneous designs, half of which I put together the night before, but it was enough to get me in the door.

By the time I was graduating high school in 2016, the seams were already more than apparent. What was once, through Twitter, a platform that allowed me to talk, learn and share my creations; became a platform that only accepted arguments and inflammatory content. It was around this time that Twitter first moved away from a chronological feed and replaced the feed with an algorithm that decided for users what they'd like to see. There was resistance to this of course. For years I continued to use Twitter and simply opted to use third-party apps that would allow you do nix the algorithm and simply use Twitter the way it was originally designed to be used. But the world had already shifted. It wasn't long before Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and every one else began to embrace the world of algorithms and trading in user data. It's not hard to see why, it's clearly profitable for the companies, but it's also not hard to see the damage that this shift has done to our culture.

I, like everyone else saw the recent footage of Charlie Kirk's murder. The difference is that while everyone in the news media and general public seemed to be shocked and appalled by the social media firestorm that followed in the immediate aftermath, I was not. Whether we're talking about the way that people on scene immediately tried to exploit the murder and start live-streaming, being sure to tell everyone their TikTok handle Or the outrageous posts from people on the political left attempting to quietly justify Kirk's murder Or the equally outrageous attempts from the political right to use the murder as their vehicle to advance their political agenda What's very clear is that for a not insignificant percentage of Americans, Kirk's assassination was not viewed as a murder at all, but rather, nothing more than an opportunity.

Shocking behavior? Yes. But, un-predictable? Not even close. We've seen a steady rise in this kind of behavior for at least the past decade. People pulling out their phones to record or live-stream a shooting or an emergency situation, as opposed to putting the phone down and actually trying to help. People competing on a daily basis to try and say the most outrageous thing that will draw eye-balls to them. There isn't an area of our culture that hasn't been harmed by social media algorithms. It's in advertising, it's in politics, it's in daily life. Even if, like me, you've completely removed yourself from social media over the past few years, it's not as if you haven't felt the same effects as everyone else. The algorithms and constant draw of a chance to become internet-famous has infected enough of us now, that no one can escape it's effects. Even if Facebook, X, TikTok, YouTube and every other social media platform in the world ditched their algorithms tomorrow and returned to chronological feeds, turned off monetization; it still wouldn't solve the problem. The damage has been done. We've already been trained to think like an algorithm even if what we're saying isn't being fed into one.

The clear irony of course is that this reality is precisely the opposite of the one made by companies on the frontiers of the internet. Online communities were meant to be decentralized, free from corporate or government control. And in the early days, this was more or less true. There weren't five websites that made up 90% of internet traffic, rather millions of individual sites created by passionate people who were interested solely in sharing their ideas with the world. But where organizations like Alphabet and Meta originally claimed to be an answer to monolithic control and the stifling of communication, they've simply become exactly the thing they were designed to replace, but with a much a higher degree of efficiency.

Now, we're left to ask the question; is there something we can do to fix this? It's not as if there aren't corners of the internet free from the effects of algorithms, monetization and "influencers". Much of what I outlined as being a positive part of the early days of the internet still exists, it's just buried under a mountain of click-bait thumbnails and outrageous tweets. But there isn't any real reason why everyone couldn't simply abandon the platforms that have ruined us tomorrow, delete their accounts, set up a DNS filter to block the sites from tracking us, and return to a simpler time. But it would require a good deal of sacrifice. The issue however isn't a technological one, it's a human problem.

Years ago some internet dwellers coined the term Endless September. This was way back in the days of dial-up or nothing being the standard level of internet connectivity. Back then the way that most people gained access to the world wide web was through a university. Every September a new group of students would be turned loose on the websites and forums of old, annoying veteran users with the way that they broke community norms, violated forum rules, and polluted what was, for most of the year, a source of intriguing discussion for most members. Then, as utility companies caught up with the time and Megabit or better internet connections became the standard, the internet experienced a September influx that never ended, and a part of internet culture died.

Back before anyone could get online by puling a computer out of their pocket, it took real effort to get onto the internet. In a lot of cases there was a massive premium to be paid for a suitable internet connection, but even when there wasn't, the level of technological knowledge required to set up your home network alone was enough to filter out most potential users. Those who did manage to get online, not only almost always had a basic level of understanding about the technology they were using, but also knew what was required to protect these new technologies from corruption. Early history of computing and networking is full of individuals who saw deep into the future, and understood the consequences of exactly the problem we're dealing with today, before it was even created.

But this is the problem that comes with any new technology. At first it's just a few users, and users who truly understand the limitations and capabilities of the machine. There weren't car accidents in the early history of automobiles - at least not ones caused by the things that cause accidents today. In the super early days of cars, owning one meant you probably built it yourself. But even after that, simply starting a car required a great deal more knowledge of the machine than just pushing a button. To get into a position where you could successfully be driving down the road, the end-user had to have a great deal more knowledge than modern drivers could ever dream of possessing about their own vehicles. But, of course, slowly, over time, the technology became better, the price of entry become lower, and the required knowledge became nearly zero. Before you know it, we arrived in a world where there are a million and a half car crashes a year caused by people looking at their phone instead of the road, just in the US.

The problem isn't unique to the internet, or to computing, but it is greatly exacerbated by the incredible speed in which technological advances in these areas can be made. There is good news here though; it's not all that difficult to actually break free almost entirely from the world of algorithms. An increasingly reasonable way to break free form Microsoft, or Apple is to make the swap to Linux. I did this years ago, and have since converted at least twenty friends and family members over as well. Services like Invidious and FreeTube make it possible to watch any YouTube video without dealing with YouTube's tracking or algorithm. And while there are some promising alternatives to the social media sites that capture most of our attention, it's just as easy to simply stop using social media all together, and just talk to people. A quick profile set up with NextDNS and a simple configuration of a router will block out all of these sites in their entirety. At that point the only thing left to lock down is a cell phone, which, admittedly is the one area where there isn't an amazing or easy solution available yet. There are custom ROMs that can run on Android devices and "De-Google" your device, but these come with their own problems.

The technological problem, isn't the hard one to solve though. It requires effort and social-consciousness to break free from all of this. The biggest hurdle: simply convincing people that there is a problem. Being willing to go through the effort to consciously disassociate from platforms that do us harm, requires individuals either realizing the problem for themselves, or being convinced of the problem. Either way, the process can only happen one person at a time. It's a painstakingly slow speed, especially when the enemy that we're attempting to break free from is one that can move at the speed of the internet. But it's not impossible.

However, there is one last point worth mentioning here. The frontier-era of the internet is over, almost certainly dead and gone for good. There isn't a reality in which suddenly 90% of the world once again doesn't have access to the internet. Part of what we are now experiencing is an unavoidable consequence of human nature, and that's not something that can simply be negotiated away. We can embrace alternatives to social media, sites like Mastodon or run to even further de-centralized corners of the internet, IRC chats and the like. But at some point we have to accept that the same pressures that led Twitter, Facbeook, YouTube, Google, Microsoft and all the rest to become the antithesis of what they once claimed to be, will exist with any platform that rises up to take their place. Like it or not, this is the world that we live in now. Steps can be taken to mitigate it's effects on us, but there is no removing it entirely.