“Reader’s Voices” – How I Learned to Stop Loving the Internet
Internet, You’ve Changed
Internet, it’s been a while. How long have we known each other? Twenty years? Remember the early days. We saw your slow beginnings, at 56k, your handcrafted sites where we had time to read a magazine while you loaded a page that an enthusiast had painstakingly created. We smiled at your display bugs and laughed at your first GIFs. Our hearts were pounding as we opened our first email inboxes to discover messages from our friends or family.
We didn’t quite know what to search for on your search engines, and you didn’t quite know what to find. You were still a curiosity, a fun component of a computer that we turned on to make three clumsy drawings, a poem, an essay, or play a video game. We didn’t yet realize the importance you would take on in our lives.
Robin Hood of the Webs
We watched you grow, become beautiful and popular. And little by little, but ultimately suddenly on the scale of our lives, we saw what was once just a promise come to fruition: you became our window to the world. A formidable medium, a sage with encyclopedic knowledge. You made information, knowledge, contact, and instant travel available to us. Hours and hours of surfing the waves of an ocean of data.
We started chatting with our friends and with strangers. Giving our opinions and exchanging ideas on everything and anything. Signing up on your sites and forums, subscribing to your newsletters. Exploring your resolutely infinite network with a sense of freedom. You reproduced the world itself in a digital version that we could visit. You made us gods in office chairs.
We started talking about revolution. It was one. Because let’s face it, you seemed to put all of humanity on an equal footing in its sharing of information, knowledge, and culture. After your beginnings reserved for the wealthiest or most technically savvy, you were now the Robin Hood of the webs. No need to be rich to have access to a dream video-audio-library. We loaded eMule to the brim and finally had access to what cost us so much before.
You met all our needs without asking for the slightest compensation, if we put aside the payment for our access and the cost of the PC. There was an alternative, assertive, ethical side to being by your side. You were an engaged and militant adolescent, who succeeded where many had failed: in connecting people, giving them the same opportunities and the same rights, and redistributing intellectual wealth.
We partied together. Evenings showing each other who knew best how to take advantage of you to find the catchiest riff, the most shocking fall, the cutest cat, the most revolting fact. To the one who would be the best friend with you. Hours watching you in the depths of the pixels. We started talking to you a lot about ourselves too. About our lives, all our insignificant facts, our unfiltered thoughts on your blogs and on your nascent and reassuring social networks, because it said of us that we were surrounded and that we could never lose contact with all these wonderful people that we met in our emancipated lives.
Come on, we can even talk about an orgy. Of music, funny, silly, breathtaking videos. Of series to binge-watch. And of pornography. On this level, you surpassed yourself to offer us an immediate and complete relationship to sex. We didn’t suspect the thousand and one ways we had to make ourselves feel good and bad. But there was always one to suit us. That’s all you: you always have something that speaks to us, that touches us, that moves us or that excites us.
Indigestion of Cookies
Having become an adult, you have become scattered. We didn’t quite realize it, but you were in our perfect image. And all the crap from which we thought you were out of reach ended up catching up with you. The haters of insulting comments, the extremists, the fanatics, the pedophiles, the authoritarians finally had their place in your big house. And then this truth that we didn’t want to see: you cost us dearly, Internet. Are your terabytes of purring cats, opinions and stars to rate the slightest nut, counter comments and fountain women worth the treasures of energy swallowed up by your data centers?
So, for you to live well, the big corporations offered you a job. You became their commercial showcase. Your revolution has spawned the biggest fortunes of our time, outrageous and cynical. You disguised yourself as a sandwich man, covered in ads from head to toe. Now, whatever our request, you talk to us about purchases and money. You lured us with immediate access to everything: we have lost the value of certain things. You have become a mass consumption. We considered that access to information was a fundamental right, forgetting that its development required a skill that is acquired and paid for.
What choice do you leave us today? We thought we were free and evolving: you were spying on us and reselling our personal data. Oh, we knew it a little, but when we wanted to impose limits on you, we realized that you might not be such a good friend. It is now impossible to consult you without paying a subscription or agreeing to be registered. The slightest search is drowned in advertising and subjected to an indigestion of cookies that you offer us as the faceless of Chihiro offers his corrupt gold. You only talk to us about immediate, truncated, unverifiable and paying things.
You’ve changed, Internet. Or maybe it’s me. I’m becoming a boomer at 40. I no longer feel the enthusiasm I felt twenty years ago. Understand me. You flatter our primary needs until our eyes burn with addiction, making us scroll through humor, pornography and hatred to fill the void in our lives. You squat our beds and our sleep, our moments of availability at the expense of those we love. All this to make us buy compulsively. To comfort us in the only ideas that suit us well. You become the relay of all propaganda and you set us against each other.
Finally, you have become the toxic and dangerous friend who spreads fake news and silly challenges, who counterfeits with a great reinforcement of AI, who catalyzes school bullying and of whom we end up saying that we do not want him to be with our children. You’ve changed, Internet. It would be better if we saw each other less now.
Jérôme Korona, Portsall (Finistère)
The World
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