The Internets Death Rattle

 

My first day online was in 1997. That is longer than a lot of people have been alive. A very large part of America has never known life without the internet. Certainly no one under 30 has known a world without the internet and probably most under 40 can’t remember what the world was like without the net.

In the beginning (because every great tale about creation begins that way) the internet was much like the wild west. First computers were insanely expensive. My Performa was over $2,500 at that time and when you factor in inflation it was even more expensive. I can’t tell you what it cost per month as I was getting my connection free from Clear Channel Communications as my ex worked there (I’m pretty sure they didn’t know).

I swear I must have looked up every perversion know to mankind. I looked up Nazi and ended up with homos in Nazi outfits doing things I wasn’t going to be watching. Found a few Mexican Donkey Shows, hot lesbian sex, and all the free porn in China. For a 37 year old guy who had to buy copies of a nudie magazine called Hustler in the hopes of seeing a half a dozen pages that resembled porn it was totally awesome. It still is. The porn has gotten much better and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so as most people know what the film “Two Girls and a Cup” is about (if you don’t, do yourself a favor and just let it go and do not look it up).

But of course my weed whacking aside the internet had a ton of information in it. You could look up information …. get this …. without a credit card. Seriously it was free. Worried about a new person moving into the neighborhood just go online and look the person up. No credit card and/or cell phone required. As Jon Townsend, CEO of Jas. Townsend and Sons (now just Townsend Co) stated in one of the company’s Revolutionary War period pieces, “It is getting hard to find anything on the internet anymore.”

It is also getting harder to find people on the internet anyone. Oh sure there are people shopping on the internet. Gaming is also a draw. But when it comes to people being social online ….. not so much. It doesn’t help that the internet Axis powers Facebook, Google and Twitter (and now Minds.com) are just making it difficult for people to be social online. They most certainly are doing that by alienating a huge percentage of the product base (you). Take YouTube for example. YouTube is desperately trying to become the Internets TV station or at least one of them. They demonetized their users so they have to beg for money while picking up more advertisers than NBC. In many of the videos someone else created, there is a commercial every 2 minutes making viewing almost unbearable. I for one will see a ton of markers on a video showing where the commercials are and then not watch the video if it isn’t something I’m not 100% sure I’m going to want to watch.

We have traded our boats for the internet. You know that big hole in the water you toss money into. It is no longer fun to do research online and depending on the topic, if it is anything remotely controversial it is likely to have been scrubbed from the net (unless you know where to look). We have stopped leaving our homes to go shopping, we hardly ever go outside anymore and we aren’t getting much for those sacrifices. We can’t even make friends online anymore without having to cough up our cell phone number for the privilege.

As people get less and less from the internet and at higher and higher cost, a lot of people are just walking away. And as the internet Axis giants add more and more restrictions, fewer and fewer people are interested in using their services. No wonder they are looking for users overseas.

This might sound like a bad thing but it isn’t.

The internet is the evil that has made us all fat and lazy. It has given the leading voice to people most of us wouldn’t give the time of day to. It steals our anonymity and privacy and it sells us like an auctioneer at a cattle ranch to the highest bidders. All while indoctrinating it’s users with the false narrative of a Utopian future of one world order.

Wouldn’t it be nice if a guy could get up at 6am, walk out onto his driveway and pick up the morning paper and get a little news in before the rest of the family got up for breakfast and then church? Wouldn’t it be nice if he was capable of fixing things around the house and the kids were out riding their bikes and hanging out with the neighbor kids while the wife was kneading some dough? Wouldn’t it be nice if people were forced to hang out with each other again because they didn’t have the entire day to play video games. If you’re under 50 you’ll never know how nice those things really were.

Remember that boat I was talking about earlier? How many of us would have that boat out in the driveway right now if it wasn’t for all the time and money we spent on the internet? Probably every single one of us.

I’d think we’d all be much better off with that hole in the water than this one.

Maybe I’m not the only one.