30 years ago I got online for the first time on some new thing called “the internet”.  I immediately fell in love.  My life was never quite the same after that.

I’ve spent a large portion of almost every day since that fateful beginning participating in the internet.  Building parts of it, reading and arguing, writing and sharing, meeting people, making friends.

I’ve been there for every step of the journey.

30 years ago the internet was a weird, wild, experiment in freedom of thought and it made me feel empowered and creative.  Today’s internet has mostly devolved into a handful of algorithm-dominated app silos that exist to monetize human attention (“engagement”) by grinding through human creativity/experiences/events/pain/pleasure (“content”) as grist for an endless mill which extracts money and power from the majority and concentrates it in the hands of a few powerful people.

In short, the modern internet sucks.  This thing that was supposed to bring about a second great enlightenment is directly responsible for the massive rise in ignorance, tribalism, and fascism throughout the world.  Thanks to the modern, bullshit version of the internet, we have flat earthers, the criminal MAGA cult, and people who make their living as human robots on TikTok.

Take that Nicholas Negroponte.

So what do I do?

I put nucleargopher.com online in 1996, ryansutter.net in 2001.  I can publish writing and music on these sites, and I have, but nobody listens or reads.  If you don’t participate in the bullshit, you don’t exist.  I won’t participate in the bullshit so why bother posting anything at all?  Am I OK with being a tree falling in the forest with nobody there to listen to it?

I intend to figure out how to use the internet while entirely avoiding:

• proprietary apps
• engagement algorithms
• generative AI
• content silos
• user tracking

Can it be done in 2025?  If not, I guess I won’t be online much longer.