Pen's Blog

What the Web Shouldn't Be

Apr 14, 2025

Well, welcome to 2025, everyone. The biggest threat to democracy is Elon Musk, professional money guy and tech tycoon. He owns Twitter. I guess that's a thing. Bitcoin bros keep scamming each other in some strange financial ouroborus. AI bros seem to have a giant hate boner for actual art. How the fuck did we get here.


When I first made my website, it was in fashion to write a web manifesto; a statement on what you think the net should be. I don't know how popular that sort of thing is anymore, I've been on a bit of a hiatus. However, you may consider this post to be mine.


What is the internet? The internet is magic. If there is a god, it is the internet. We have created an artificial god, and our hubris, our greed, has come to roost. Consider for a moment what life was before we invented the internet. It's creation is the single most important historical event, paralleled only by the discovery of fire and electricity. And what did we choose to use this god for? Money. Our governments forsake the chance at infinite knowledge, infinite fun, and infinite companionship, to put money in the pockets of a priveledged few.


You should be mad. They stole our apotheosis. We had an utopia in our grasps, and they sequestered it. Fuck it, even if you ditch my hope, if you think the only good thing the internet could be used for is cat videos, they still took that from us.


There are a lot of issues when creating an argument from nostalgia. I recognize that the early internet kinda sucked for a lot of people. It was really white, and really male. It had a high barrier to entry, not everyone could get a computer. Trolls have existed about as long as communication has existed. I recognize that the internet has never actually been completely perfect. However, I think that it would be entirely dishonest to ignore the fact that the internet has genuinely degreaded since it's creation.


Knowledge

Out of the principles of the early internet, knowledge has suffered the most typical degredation. There are still places to find information, for those who know where to look. However, truth has become harder and harder to find regardless.


News media is full of yellow journalism and clickbait, seeking not the truth, but outrage. Misinformation runs rampant on social media. Some will attribute this to AI, but misinformation far predates generative tools like ChatGPT. How many flame wars have been fought over falsehoods? How many people have been tormented because of lies? So many people allow themselves to be controled by hatred rather than any reasoning, and our websites? The moderators entrusted with stewardship? They're biased, or overworked, or told not to intervene by their bosses. It's a shameful display.


What of the reliable sources i mentioned at the beggining of this section? Well, you'd better be paying thousands to be at a college, or luck into a scholarship. Despite the potential to spread information infinitely, academia remains insular. So many publications are locked behind paywalls or academic credentials, despite the fact that the cost to distribute web media is mere pennies. Don't get it twisted, I believe academics should be paid. However, when we have machines capable of retrieving any piece of knowledge from written history for just the cost of electricity, it's abhorrent to lock that knowledge behind economic status.


Communication

Communication and knowledge go hand in hand. After all, how are you supposed to know anything without first having it communicated to you. The internet has managed to produce some of the worst ideas ever. The alt-right is one of the most powerful forces in politics, despite the fact that they're all miserable losers whose ideas are based entirely on fiction. What went wrong here? How did forums and newsgroups full of experts descend into baseless hate?


As always, profit motive is the issue. Twitter and Facebook make more money if you're angry, because then, you stay on the website longer, trapped in some miserable spiral of hatred. I don't mean to sound like a boomer, but seriously, the problem is that damn phone! Modern social media websites encourage a miserable mindset, because they have everything to gain and nothing to lose from doing so. Who cares if a few colored people die from neuvo hate movements?! Who cares if young men keep getting radicalized into commiting school shootings! Who cares about rising depression and self-image issues! As long as the cash keeps flowing, the party is still going!


Fun

Out of all the principles I've outlined, fun is still the most intact. Despite it's relative stability, our current fun would seem alien to our predecessors. Think to the halls of early internet video. The cringy lolrandom humor. The edgy flash animations. These early viral videos served for entertainment alone. The modern internet's entertainment media is more polished, yes, but is it honest? There's so much slop out there, so many AI generated voices regurgitating posts from other websites. Every time I look at YouTube Shorts, I get sucked into an alternate dimension for hours, unable to remember anything. There is still meaningful content produced, but when our seventh most popular app is TikTok, I don't think I can say the majority of content online is really good. It's just passable. Just enough to get you to click, watch a few ads, and continue watching. Are you entertained, watching your 20th short of the day? Or are you merely distracted, just trying to fill an empty void at the center of your soul?


Open Source Software and Leftism

You can just go and download software, for free! What the fuck?


Dear reader, why is gmail free? A cynical onlooker might say that it isn't. That the cost of gmail, and other free services like it, is exctracted through advertising. That your data is sold to the highest bidder, that the product isn't the service, it's the user. While that is true, there's also another reason. Nobody would use them if they costed money. Email is an open source standard. If gmail started costing $5 a month, sure, you'd get a lot of hangars on, but a ton of people would just jump ship. You can make your own email server pretty easily. The same goes for social media. Following twitters collapse, many users left for bluesky or fediverse services. Open source software forces a certain level of anti-consumerism onto the web.


That's not to say there aren't efforts to squeeze money from the web. God knows there are, we just went over the various how money has ruined the web. The bones of the web are leftist, but the blood transfusions have been capitalist for a very long time.


Degradation of Anonimity

I don't take as much umbridge with this issue as the other ones I've covered, but I still think it's an issue that exists. Simply put, I do not understand why anyone would put their face online. Seriously, did you miss the online safety classes they made me do in school? Do you need to see the Garfield poster? "DON'T YAP ABOUT YOUR YAPPY ONLINE!"

I admit that Garfield isn't the most reliable source regarding internet safety, but still! You're not supposed to share your personal info online! Yet I see people constantly leaking sensitive info online. I hate how normalized this is. On the old internet, nobody knew that you were a dog. Nowadays, people demand to know if you are. I especially hate bills that aim to make it mandatory to use an ID to use the web. They're turning my god into a surveillence state :(


Conclusion

If I had my way, the internet would never have opened for buisness. Finance, money? All of that is stuff that should have been left behind. We constructed a god, a library, a city center, and a canvas. Corporations bulldozed it to build a shopping mall. We should have nipped this in the bud and never let corporate interests buy the internet out in the first place.


I wish we could go back, I truly do. I wish we could bulldoze the shopping mall and take back cyberspace. But now, millions of people work at the mall. They depend on it for their paychecks so they can feed their families. We are between a rock and a hard place. The internet is dying, but if we cured its illness, it would put the livelihoods of many in danger. Repairing the internet has to be a gradual process, and I can't tell people how to do that. Ultimately, I am merely one person, complaining about patterns I've recognized.