and they're not posting the relieved denzel

the ongoing global pandemic of 2020 (and beyond?), in participation with the grotesque demon currently in the white house, has been knocking people off their hamster wheels left and right and making us look around, and i mean like really look around, like really look around, in real life.

it was in this state of mind that i revisited the net (1995), which reminded me what the internet was like when it was new.  it was a real, magical place.  specifically what i wrote down while watching was:

in 1995, the internet was simple and colorful and beautiful. a place where people could come together to share information and love, with nothing but hope for the future. in 2020, the internet is a toxic wasteland of lies and hate, designed to suck all the money from your veins while destabilizing the free world

i thought about the websites and blogs i used to write, and how nice it was to have a solid home on the internet.  i think geocities even used to have virtual neighborhoods, with like street addresses for each website.

now everyone's on social media like facebook, twitter, and instagram, where the point is for little bite-sized pieces of content to float by and disappear down a surging river of disposable memes.  the apotheosis of this is the "stories" section, where instead of posting something that scrolls past people's feeds for a second and then quietly settles in the dirty drains of your profile for pretty much no one to ever look at again, a "stories" post is actually self-destructing.  it flashes in front of your followers for five seconds and then later that night, the app deletes it so it's like it never existed.

like you never existed.

that bums me out.  i think it's nice to be able to visit the things people have spent time creating for the internet.  so i finally decided to make a new blog (this one).  a thousand years from now, this will be here on the web.  can we say that about facebook and twitter?  look at myspace.  myspace was built of precious comments and blogs and events and photos from our lives.  it all got nuked and now it's a chernobyl of scraps and broken links.

for the past two years, i was doing movie brackets on facebook.  every day, i posted four new games pitting ranked and seeded movies against each other until we narrowed it down to the big winner, with categories like best vampire movie (interview with the vampire), best tom cruise movie (also interview with the vampire), and even the best joan or john cusack movie (it was being john malkovich, as if no one has seen in & out).  sometimes there were even fun discussions in the comments.  but the archive of a facebook page is impossible to explore.  you just have to scroll forever or know what you're searching for, and maybe you'll find it but probably not.  and when people delete their profiles, their votes and comments all go with them.  they erase themselves entirely from your past.

facebook is switching to a new design in september, and part of this renovation included taking away the polls.  so the brackets are done.  we were right in the middle of a las vegas bracket.  we'll never know for sure now that the best las vegas movie is showgirls, although i do know it, in my bones, to be true.

but this is simply the latest float in a long, sad parade of reasons why facebook is a deeply flawed way to connect with friends.  another big one is the fact that all major social media hubs have been hijacked by malicious trolls and bots whose sole purpose is to stir the pot until we destroy ourselves.  and it's working really well!  most facebook threads i see on public pages tend to devolve into rote, bitter exchanges of gifs, emojis, and memes.

no joke, at least half of twitter is trolls and bots.  and although they only exist to artificially inflate the far right, they're also known to pretend to be on the left so they can rile up both sides at once to create more conflict and chaos.  and they don't always just say the political thing outright.  frequently, they talk in code.

so for example, if you want to attack the left, you can condemn star wars: the last jedi, and if you want to glorify the right, you can praise any zack snyder movie.  i've seen many twitter accounts made up entirely of comic book movie flamebait.  most of those are not real people.  but what's worse is that some of them are.

i was 13 when i first surfed the world wide web, and the information superhighway i explored was pure and good-hearted.  it was nothing like the hellscape of today.  today's kids are being invited into a bad faith hate machine, and they end up happily feeding themselves into it, because they think that’s what the internet is supposed to be.

the real dream of the internet is something far more extraordinary.

we should all have blogs, where we communicate thoughtfully and honestly, and we should all visit each other's blogs and leave comments.  i think that would engender more substantive interactions between friends, better insights into each other as people, and i think it would even make it more difficult for foreign governments to fill your feed with radicalizing propaganda that convinces your grandma that hillary clinton is eating pizza made by a deep state cabal of pedophiles trafficking abducted child sex slaves.

when really it's just probably regular normal pizza