Everything Is For Sale (Dignity Not Included)

I remember a past time, a golden time, when this interconnected space called the internet was a different place. It was a place to show who you were, unashamedly. GeoCities and MySpace existed (don’t miss them), Google did not. It was a place to build spaces and pages with primary colors, and behold the hideous ugliness that resulted and say, “I. Made. That.”  And it was created, for no other reason than to make something and maybe – just maybe – someone else would find it.

That was then, this is now:

The internet has largely transformed itself into the digital equivalent of a mall, where everyone wants to sell you something, or get you to subscribe to the latest trend.  All in all, it’s all the same as the next website, except “it’s our special take on it; subscribe to / buy our XYZ, not the other one”. Every website seems to have a pop-up window, and some try to block what you are looking for. Others are so full of advertisements and banners that you have to search to find what you were really looking for.

We got smart and installed ad-blockers. The websites, desperate for hits and money, punched back, sometimes forcing us to “disable” the ad blocker, as if what we were doing was….bad. (quick tip: love Safari – when the pop-up does not give you the option to close it, just hit the Reader Mode and it all goes away).   :)

When we go home (or wherever we live) we close the windows, turn off the lights, and leave the world outside. We then connect to our social media to upload photos of every single waking moment of our life (stopping to actually live that life, in order to better document it). What we are wearing (or not). What we are doing. Where we are doing it. With whom. It’s kinda the equivalent of living in a glass house, taking off all your clothes, taking out a megaphone and announcing to the world that the party is at your place.

Ewwwww.

I guess no one will really stop for a moment to actually think about what (and why) we do what we do when we connect. We’re too busy turning off our brains to do what we always do.

So many people are worried that AI will soon be smarter than humans and we should stop developing that technology. I’d say that humans are in such a rush to stupidify themselves that IA won’t have to overtake us at all – we’ll just dumb ourselves down until AI passes us by naturally.

Photo used: pixabay.com