New beginnings

Until recently I've blamed technology for the lack of true human connection. I've always hated how social media is today and I've hated how it has made us glued to our phones. Recently though, something changed. I was browsing through Neocities and reading some articles and whatnot. It has started to become my replacement for watching youtube mindlessly. Thus I came across this article on blogs and the old internet.

To someone like me the old internet seemed like paradise. There weren't any big websites that collectively controlled the internet like today. It was a collection of personal websites. People initially made things for fun. They would post blogs about their lives and share other cool things for the world to see. The thing that spoke to me most was "intention". Back then if you had to see something, you had to look it up and click on it. There wasn't any for you page, there was no algorithms. You saw things only if you wanted it. Now if you wanted to make something, it was even harder. You had to code things by hand, there weren't any systems that did the work for you. Making things were tedious work. Thus, if you posted something, there was intention behind it. You really wanted to post that thing otherwise you wouldn't have gone through all that tedious work.

That didn't last for long. Convenience killed intention. To read a bit more about it, (click here).

There is no sense of control anymore, intention doesn't really matter these days. Everything is controlled by the "algorithm". Why bother thinking about what to see when something else can do it for you. Why think at all when something else can provide you with all the thoughts and images. I haven't even started talking about short form content and how it fries your brain. Add that to the mix and you don't even get the chance to think.

So what now, if it isn't corporate then who is to blame? Human nature sadly. Where there is fame and fortune to be found, we simply lose our fucking shit. We ruin everything for the sake of it. It's not just social media, you see it everywhere: music, films, games, anime and the list goes on. So what's the answer, should we stop monetizing everything. No not really, that would be unfair, some people actually deserve all the fame and fortune.

So what can I, a naive fucking 19 year old propose as a solution. It's rather simple, it about regaining what has been lost. Intention. It's about choosing what to upload and choosing what to see. It's about not mindlessly consuming content. It's about learning to think again. I remember this once scene from this movie called detachment. I'll link it here (click here). These days we are so used to having an algorithm show us different options on what to watch, we don't really think about what we would actually like to see at all.

That being said, lets be real for a second. Just because one guy is self-aware enough to know what he wants is not really going to fix anything. For something meaningful to happen, the change should come naturally to people. It should be the new cultural thing, but we are too busy raging over various things important and not important for that to ever happen. Truth be told, we're fucked.

That being said I don't think all hope is lost though. The biggest proof of that is this platform "Neocities" itself. Even in the corporate controlled, influencer infested social media there are people that are truly worthy of being an influencer. There are people who make art in it's truest sense. When I see that it brings me hope.

Thank you for reading.