I don’t loathe AI; I despise the lack of control and fearmongering. I don’t revile social media; I despise the lack of control and transparency. I don’t detest the modern internet; I mourn the lack of control and the freedom it once promised.

Much of my writing is about the relationship between people and technology. It’s about our relationship with platforms, AI, the web, digital culture, and the increasingly strange and obscure machinery sitting between people and information we consume.

The platforms we use every day aren’t built to inform us; they’re built to extract information and our most valuable asset of all, attention, from us.

Social media platforms present us with endless streams of machine selected detritus. Each image, update or video is carefully curated algorithmically to keep you engaged. To keep you clicking, to keep you swiping, to keep you reacting, to keep you docile and disconnected from the real world long enough for these companies to build complete profiles of you, where you work, who you know, what you like to eat, when you sleep, and anything else they conceivably package to sell to advertisers.

AI, sorry, generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is even more insidious. They don’t just want your attention; they want your intelligence as well. They want to harvest every piece of information ever created, distill it down, and sell it back to you, all while getting you to do the work of training their “intelligence” and becoming dependent enough on them to hand over your hard-earned cash.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, even said as much:

We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter

All too quickly, that frightening dystopia is becoming a reality for many. The internet is replete with examples of people who can’t write a speech, send an email, or even respond to text messages without asking ChatGPT how they should respond first.

Some of my own clients have become so reliant on the ease of gen-AI product descriptions that they ignore their own years of expertise, my urging, and fail to add the personal touch. It costs them sales.

Yet, gen-AI can have its uses. It can be helpful for quick research, brainstorming or even entry-level coding, and it’s certainly a very useful tool for wealth redistribution as it catapults snake oil salesmen to billionaire status.

Generative AI does not live up to the marketing or the hype, however. If it lived up to just 5% of the claims vomited forth by their founders and marketing departments, it would be positively world-changing.

World-changing it definitely is, just for all the wrong reasons.

It’s a modern-day nostrum.

Control: to exercise restraining or directing influence over.

Modern internet platforms don’t want to compete with other platforms, other forms of entertainment, or anything that may, even momentarily, monopolise your attention. That’s why a lot of apps mysteriously (“my bad, it was a bug”) have all their notifications turned back on after an update, even after you’ve expended the effort to deliberately and systematically turn them all off.

Shareholder profit has a direct correlation with how much of your attention is controlled.

We live in the “attention economy” after all.

You may have surmised that I do not like the level of control that these companies exert upon regular people.

Having grown up in a time when your computer would do nothing except sit there like a glorified doorstop unless you wrote a piece of code, and having witnessed the “birth” of the public internet where every website was an ugly masterpiece of handwritten HTML (we didn’t even have CSS until Internet Explorer 3), I mourn the freedom that has been lost to convenience and corporate interest.

Some, fuck, most of you reading this post probably never experienced those times, and I’d bet that many of you don’t recall a time without having the ever-present, attention-sucking smartphone in your pocket.

The freedom and hope we had for the internet back then came at a cost. If we wanted to get something out of it, if we wanted to partake, we had to put something in.

Symbiosis. In order to participate, we had to learn how things work, a little HTML (not just for building websites, but to format comments on bulletin boards), how to search and find information before the advent of modern search engines. In return, the internet gave us a magical world full of knowledge, friendships, and some really sketchy shit. But we grew along with the internet. We made it.

Today’s users mostly just exist in it, at the whims of corporate decision makers whose only real guiding star is “does this increase shareholder value?”

My goal, expressed primarily through this blog and promoted via social media, is to find like-minded people and encourage others to actively challenge and change the nature of the internet.

We all use it. We all rely upon it. We live and make our living on it.

Until relatively recent times, we all had the ability to shape it, to mould it, to build our own places and communities, to make it our own. Creators were like little rocks in a stream, individually deflecting the water a little, but collectively diverting the river of the internet to places it was never designed for.

Recent years have brought us to a place where traffic, information, and even intelligence is controlled by multinational corporations that control even what information we can search for. The river has been dredged, and locks have been built to control the flow.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can build our own tools, build our own “internet” that exists separately from the corporate walled-gardens, and bring back the freedom and promise that was the open-internet.

Imagine a place where we can learn, grow, make friends, and experiment without being digital livestock for corporate attention farmers.

That place used to exist, and there are enough tinkerers, creators, programmers and simply curious people out there who would love to be part of it, if only they knew it existed.

Let’s explore that together.