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Dead Internet (2023)

Have you plucked away at this thing they call the ‘Internet’ lately?

At that golden fin de siècle of Y2K, where promised dreams felt limitless and infinite beneath the neon daze of confetti-striped streets, we looked ahead to a new age brimming with open expansiveness, optimistically shushing the pablum-spouting malcontents who might’ve presaged the coming doom like some Times Square vagrant shouting ‘ Repent! Now, one can hardly check the weather without a withering barrage of pop-ups and eye-splattering Captchas (decollate the bastard who invented those)—the patience-testing digital Koans which seem custom-made to irritate, incite, and befog; a sort of cruel jest of social experimentation by the Wicked Wizards leering down at us from on high of the Silicon Valley welkin. What was once a thriving ecosystem of web locales, authored with distinction and personality—a biodiverse bloom of the interesting and outlandish, the outré and quirky and sui generis—has been displaced by a collection heap of homogenized ‘E-Commerce’ cyber-edifices, evoking the sterilization of Middle America into an endless sprawl of hyper-commercialized blandness.

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