The Vanilla Internet
I’ve written before about how I feel the Internet of today is a shallow, soulless and frankly horrible place to spend any length of time, certainly compared to its early days, where it felt like a place of wonder, an endless ocean of possibilities, of knowledge, and most of all, joy.
That was Web 1.0.
Unfortunately, it was nothing more than a fleeting moment in time. The engagement era — perhaps the social media era or Web 2.0 — has slowly whittled away at this, tearing at the very fabric of what made this place interesting and, more so, actually useful as a utility.
The root cause of the change has been the shift to the attention/engagement economy. When advertising became king, social media platforms, media sites, apps and search platforms realized it was all about keeping a user hooked, sucking them dry for data points to target with advertising.
A consequence of this cynical development was the dawn of algorithms.
And these algorithms have created the Vanilla Internet.
Put another way; we’re into an era of the Internet that could be summed up as “Why try anything else when you can get the same shit fed to you day in and day out?”
Algorithms have been so well designed and executed these days to find related content or to recommend content based on what…
