I read this article today, The Cost of Living in Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet Empire – The Ringer, and a few things jumped out at me:

“I believe that almost everyone actually hates almost every interaction with almost every algorithm online”

and

“I miss the human internet with an intensity that borders on homesickness”

These two statements most definitely reflect my feelings.  I’ve been struggling to really describe what happened to the internet, but I think it’s accurate to state that the internet as experienced by the majority of users has effectively transitioned from the “human internet” powered by millions of individuals and entities into the “corporate internet” in which the Big Five (Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) have become so pervasive that is effectively impossible to use the internet without them.  This, in turn, has lead to a world in which the priorities of those companies define the landscape for everybody else.  

Is it even possible to live in the modern world without interacting with these companies?  I suppose you could avoid using digital technology and you could attempt to only frequent venues that similarly avoid digital technology, but it is likely impossible, short of living off the grid and growing your own food and building your own tools and furniture.

But online, well, the internet would no longer be functional for much of anything if you attempted to boycott any of these companies.  I’m not really talking about a boycott, I am talking about how much more interesting the internet was before it went into orbit around these particular stars.  Today’s internet is simply not all that interesting, not all that engaging.  It’s shallow, vapid, cheap, stupid, and ugly.  Almost everyone hates how it works and almost everyone uses it incessantly anyhow because of social networking, apps, virality, and the rise of the internet as a surveillance marketing platform rather than an information sharing platform.  

It’s fairly easy to live without Apple, mostly.  Microsoft too.  You can buy a Linux-powered laptop and a dumb-phone…  er, I mean feature phone, and at the very least you are not on their platforms, directly.  You are likely still using their products in other ways, but let’s be honest here, the two oldest tech giants made their bones by selling computer platforms, not monetizing consumer engagement, and they are the least threatening of the Frightful Five.  20 years ago, when the internet was wilder, you still probably accessed it using a computer powered by an operating system from one of the two, or Linux, or OS/2, or something else, but it really didn’t change the experience of the web.  That was just personal preference.

But then along came Google, then Amazon, and then Facebook, and each one more and more made you, the consumer, into their product.  They no longer wanted to sell you a product, they wanted to sell YOU to somebody else who wanted to sell you a product.  As all the ad revenue was pulled into their orbits, newspapers and magazines and web sites and everything else online was pulled and bent out of shape, homogenized, centralized.  Less interesting.  More boring.  Shallower.

Why?  Because, quite simply, the internet is people and the things they create and share.  People tend to create and share only in places and ways that other people are likely see, hear, or read and more and more that means on Facebook, or Instagram, and when they do self-host, the only way people will find it (if at all) is via Google search.  The internet may have vast swaths or information, but the number of independent gateways to that information is now quite small.

This new corporate internet is nothing like the fun it was before and it’s a pity.  Wishing we had the old one back isn’t nostalgia, it’s just missing something that was special and interesting, like local radio stations before Clear Channel.  The rest of the internet exists, but it’s more like a ghost town.  Old link sites that go nowhere, unmaintained blogs, and other detritus, all the traffic went to the corporate web and since the internet is just people, and people are the internet, if all the people spend 99% of their time on the same handful of platforms, then those effectively become all there is.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  The internet was supposed to be a radically decentralized, democratized, and free platform and it still is…  kinda…  technically…  but it really isn’t.  It is still possible to setup a computer in your own house, run your own stuff on it, use exclusively open-source, and even live without a FB account or ever shopping at Amazon but since so few people actually do any of this, you will be missing out on where most of human culture takes place these days.  The baby pictures you won’t see, events you won’t hear about, and interactions you won’t have will leave you on an island.  You’ll pay more money to buy things you will have more trouble locating.  

There are movements underway to try to claw back some of the freedoms we have surrendered.  One in particular, https://indieweb.org/, seems really focused on providing alternative solutions to the problems we are currently solving via the corporate web but as Kashmir Hill’s amazing experiment at GizModo demonstrates (https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five) you really can’t boycott them in the sense of never using their services.  The internet just doesn’t really work anymore without these companies.  They own the damn thing.  The best the rest of us can do is work to demonetize ourselves, get out of their funnels.  We will never wind up back in the pre-corporate web and sometimes I find myself just wishing to ditch the web for whatever comes next.  Maybe the DAT network (https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/beaker-decentralized-read-write-browser) or something like it, but, well, that’s just another ghost town…  for now.  I don’t have a solution, maybe there isn’t one, but I miss the human internet.  It was so much more enjoyable…