Not the whole Internet obviously. Just the main parts of it. Like Google, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. The golden age must have been the day before ChatGPT came out and the day before Elon Musk bought a social media platform. I do remember a time where opening a social media app, I could probably get a decent amount of information about the world and my friends. Opening Twitter now, I get nothing that makes me feel remotely aware and I feel like I have no friends on there. The Twitter algorithm seems like it now hyper-fixates on any post you spend more than 3 seconds looking at. And then it gives you more of them. A lot more of them. There’s weird racism posts, innuendos, adult content ads, zero news or friends, weird glitchy videos. I’m in a silo that isn’t even of my own making. And even if I do look at something racist for 3 seconds, it is because it is so outrageous. Why would I not take pause and wonder how someone can post something so brazen so publicly?

Instagram is different in that I feel like everyone runs a personal magazine and those that don’t are buried by an algorithm that favors advertisers, suppresses news, and so on. The real news? You gotta pay real actual money to get real actual news. And that removes the advertising, right? Nope. You still get advertising. The New York Times… Runs ads! On its paid version! Excuse me? I canceled that immediately. I’ll give you guys a hack: There’s a website (archive [dot] ph) where you can go and paste any news article into and it’ll pull an archived version of the site without the content pay-wall. Have fun.

Anyway,

But at least TV’s a good deal? All you can eat buffet for a small monthly fee? That was how I remember it working. Now I find more things worth watching on the iTunes store than I do on the streaming apps. So why even bother having them? And the iTunes store shows me the tomatometer score. Paying 20-60 Dirhams for a highly-rated film has somehow been cheaper for me in the longterm if I sit and run the math against time spent actually watching and enjoying a movie or show. I’m almost guaranteed a a better enjoyment per dirham rate than if I was watching the drivel on Netflix, which at this point feels like they’re just throwing anything at the wall to meet some sort of quota. Also, TV shows on Netflix are all filmed with the same plastic sheen slathered on top to make them look good on a TV but the shows look artificially “clean.” And that’s not a compliment.

Google? Doesn’t work at all. Thank God YouTube search is still working well but Google itself cannot show me useful results anymore. Every single first page link is a blog post that is so obviously written by AI, there’s no more substance. No more surprises. Nothing “new” to glean from the information you’re searching for. Want the best restaurants ever in your city? It’s the same list vomited out over and over again. Want to figure out what’s wrong with your tummy? We’re not super sure, your symptoms can be present in all diseases ever and you’re dying, Ahmed. Consult a doctor. Want to understand a certain concept? Here’s a carefully curated brief that doesn’t take into consideration the depth at which you’d like to learn and nerd out about a topic. Oh, you WANT those details? Well, buddy, I simply don’t have them for some reason. Check the hard-to-read wiki. All this because I wanted to learn about the industrial process to manufacture silicon wafers, I am losing my mind, people.

Even the silliest things have turned into such sad carcasses of what they once were. I used to regularly visit Kotaku dot com for gaming news. It was a wonderful little blog with really great op-eds, nice long-form written reviews, great little exposés, fun interviews with top brass, whatever you want. Kotaku is not even trying to be its old self. All the old guys have left, they weren’t replaced properly and the website continues to be stabbed at and gutted along with all the other sister blogs that used to form a part of the larger Gawker network. But why? Why couldn’t a normal business owner just buy them and not try to shake things up. If it ain’t broke, for the love of God, leave it alone. And the story of Gawker specifically is sad because it was ruined because of the pettiness of their new owner, not because of their ambition. How can something like this even be allowed? 

There’s no world larger than the screen I’m looking at anymore. A few years ago, the Internet still had those infinite possibilities. There were plenty of forums and moderators who took time to carefully curate them. They were organized and fun, you met real interesting people, you talked to them about life and exchanged cultures and found weird and quirky solutions to a lot of your specific problems. Now? Everything is locked behind a paywall, every app asks you to watch an ad, every social network is a vehicle for the most brain-rotting and addictive material that literally presents you with zero added-value. There’s absolutely nothing left on these apps that is worth looking for or paying for. Having a streaming service is a net-negative. You’re asking a generation that grew up with file-sharing on Limewire to pay monthly for content that keeps getting removed from the service. You’re asking the generation that grew up with sophisticated and self-policed forums to use a service like the new Twitter that has become a cesspool for the worst of the worst to have louder voices than the people that actually affect change in global society. And owned by a man that has, on multiple occasions, shown himself to harbor racist views towards Arabs and who egregiously champions the cause of the oppressors. I can’t anymore justify paying for something like this, not least of why because I’d originally thought that paying for the service would mean I got a better service. And so, I’ve canceled it. They told me the service runs to March 2025. So be it.

I’ve always had a naive belief that if I pay for something, the experience I will get will be marginally better. I’m a customer willing to pay for an above-standard experience. I’ll pay for news, movies, video games, more leg room, a better view, and for front of the hotel valet. I don’t mind. I pay for the stupid Duolingo jewels so I can keep learning. It’s all nice, it adds to my little life and my small delusions that things can be better for me. But on the 2024 Internet? I’m running a net-loss of added value. I’m buying negative value, almost literally. The only things I find still worth paying for as subscriptions are Apple One, ChatGPT 4o and Midjourney image generation (and of course for the license to the exquisite ahmedalshaer dot com domain). Other than that, I’m happy just paying as I go as the options and breadth of content available to the pay-as-you-go customer are much better than those that are available to individuals that are paying for the walled gardens like Amazon Prime or Netflix or Starz or whatever. And if the logic is to pay for all of them at once to have access to everything at once, then let me tell you, my friend: That is some faulty logic. These fees add up fast. And you know what the net amount is? Double that of a traditional Orbit Showtime satellite box! Ridiculous. 

Where did we fumble the ball, man. Instagram is a meme-sharing DM platform, Twitter is just garbage, Reddit is liberalism+, Google might as well be called Gateway-to-Reddit, Netflix is B-Movie Central (feat. Standup Comedy!), and the rest of the Internet flounders as it becomes more and more difficult to even find it to begin with since Google is no longer servicing its customers properly. I mean, sometimes you’d have to scroll two whole times to even see the first natural legitimate result to your search query! This is the end result of the Internet? This is what it came to? A vast interconnected superhighway for all public-facing data… and this is what we have to show for it? On phones that cost 5,000 dirhams? It’s just sad, man.

But at least I have my own little corner of it all to myself. Even if it all burns down lol. And at this point, I think those last 2 sentences are going to be my personal mantra moving forward.