THEY RUINED THE COMPUTER
Think about how you use the computer in your daily life, whether it be your desktop, laptop, phone, games console or any and all electronic devices in your life. Do you feel satisfied at all?
More often than not, the computer just makes me sad recently. And whilst part of it can be attributed to me changing as I grow, a large part of it is the general enshittification of the entire net. I still use the computer every day, I use it to play video games, to message my friends, to read articles, to create music, to create my video game, to create art. But the entire experience as a whole has diminished in lots of minor ways, but they stack up over time.
BEFORE
For me, using the computer really started back in the late 2000s, using MSN messenger and browsing early YouTube. This was back when Windows Vista was the primary operating system in my life, and your desktop would be filled to the brim with widgets, that 8-year-old me never utilised in a meaningful sense, they were just cool to look at.
And still, they were cool because I put them there and could mess around with them whenever I wanted to, slowing down the booting process to a halt through choice.
The internet felt like a different place back then. Everything felt like a secret club in my mind, even the most benign forum or corridor of the internet providing an insight into the lives of the users themselves, as if peeking behind the curtain, or screen, I suppose. I will never forget the feeling of wonder and discovery I felt with the internet in those days.
YouTube was very cool back then, there wasn't a lot in the way of monetisation, though it wasn't far over the horizon all things considered. It was a time when people were just uploading for the love of the game, few made money, and even fewer cared about it being a long-time career. I distinctly remember searching for Yume Nikki videos, as I would regularly be stuck and have no idea what I was doing. More than a few of them contained screamers back then.
I had more independence on the computer when I built my own computer in 2011, it had a random i3 processor and a GTS 450. This could mark the beginning of the end in a lot of ways, though I still thoroughly enjoyed my time back then, the creeping changes were obvious in hindsight. I spent a lot of those early days playing games, primarily Counter-Strike and Garry's Mod, since they came bundled together and Trouble in Terrorist Town was all the rage back then. Social media existed back then, but it still felt like something only adults used to me. I never bothered with any of it, just using Skype to chat to my friends, and YouTube to watch and upload mostly gaming related content.
I didn't bother getting on social media until the early 2010s, around 12-16 years old. In retrospect, I still think this is too young to be on these platforms, and even now.
NOW
People were annoying on Twitter 10 years ago, but it wasn't the same kind of annoying you find now. Now, Twitter is full of Nazis emboldened by the dumb fuck who bought the website, and on the other hand, kids who didn't have socialisation during the most important years of their life due to covid, spending all that time (and their time now) on this dogshit version of the computer we have today.
Nothing on the modern computer works as it should, you have constant issues, bugs, advertisements, constant data harvesting, cookies to accept, updates to install, programs to re-install, programs to uninstall, due to it being found out they were stealing data from you the whole time (and you better hope you see the article telling you about this!). As someone who is technically minded, I can navigate these occurrences with relative ease and figure it all out in the end. But, I think you have to consider what all this does to your brain. We use the computer every day, all day, and all of it is full of these tiny frustrations, orchestrated by companies who don't give a fuck about providing functional products anymore.
In the end, it's all about your data, and harvesting it for advertisement. You'd think Unity Technologies would care about being a functional game engine, but nope, your data is their business, who gives a shit if all the developers relying on their tools have constant issues with the software, or if they fire the engineers who keep it running smoothly. Advertisement and monetisation comes first.
The people I find myself surrounded by on the internet has never been worse. I have many great friends who I've known for over 10 years online, and some that I've also met recently who I like a lot, but I just mean in a macro scale, I think the general population or discussion on the internet has degraded immensely these past 15 years. There is no longer a disconnect between our lives outside and inside the computer, and despite this, people act like absolute freaks online. In ways that if exposed to their friends, their family and people they admire, they would be embarrassed.
I love my computer as a tool to create art and learn, but corporations are trying their best to make everything else about the computer as bad as possible. Individualism is at an all-time high, pursuit of profit is at an all-time high, the degradation of the computer is at an all-time high, and it fucking sucks man.