...and this one is just wonderful! - as Richard Metzger of the fabulously bizarre Dangerous Minds, [informing its regular readers - of which I am one - of a forthcoming new direction for the site] tells it like it is:
The glory days of the internet are long over. It had a good run, but it’s done.

I’d compare this sorry state of affairs to the history of widespread cocaine use in America, it’s almost the exact same story. [[Okay, okay, it’s not even a remotely similar narrative, but don’t harsh my analogy!) At first, it was all fun and games. Pure and undiluted nose candy for the masses. The 1970s must’ve been incredible! But then the Devil’s dandruff starts getting stepped on. Unscrupulous dealers began cutting their Peruvian marching powder with baby laxatives and veterinary dewormers. Ultimately it becomes more of a situation where the dealers were cutting their baby laxative with cocaine and not the other way around. Now it’s all just garbage.

And that what’s happened with Internet content, too. When everyone got online in the mid-90s, it was fun and wild and fascinating. New and novel experiences awaited. Fast forward to today and the World Wide Web is sadly akin to a selfie and meme-filled version of WALL-E’s junkyard planet or an ocean full of plastic bottles and other human-created detritus. A friend of mine once described what we did at Dangerous Minds as “panning for Internet gold” but I told him I thought it was more like spelunking in a dank cave, standing in a river of shit wearing hip-high waders and a gas mask.

Today’s internet is by and large a highly toxic HAZMAT site. Assholes are everywhere you turn. You can’t escape them. But on top of that, all the creativity has vanished. What started as a massive outpouring of cross-cultural communication, international information exchange and just plain HIGH WEIRDNESS has turned into a filtered, Facetuned selfie-infested septic tank of “LOOK AT ME” frivolity, knucklehead narcissism and abject idiocy. The rise of the TikTok “expert” dolling out their supposed wisdom in 45-second increments seems to me an especially pernicious development. These people are seldom experts on anything other than hashtags and yet they all apparently have an audience 10X that of CNN’s.

With the AI apocalypse rapidly encroaching upon us it’s about to get even worse. I knew it when I first saw that Star Wars if it had been directed by Wes Anderson video. “Hmmm, that’s kinda clever” immediately gave way to “Okay I get this and I can’t be bothered to even watch it to the end.” It was a watershed moment for me and when I realised THIS SHIT IS THE FUTURE....We’re going to do something different. Something that’s not been filtered or Facetuned or to be found anywhere in this cultural wasteland full of regurgitated garbage. Something with actual experts who know what they’re talking about and can speak intelligently for longer than a minute. Something that will make you smarter.
Wow!