I turned off my access to social media for the past 4-5 months, and seeing from the outside in, the things that seduce our attention, is horrifying. Our attention is at the behest of the internet giants - tech, media, and celebrities, and they 'earn' it by giving you a rush every time you interact with them. This is the synthetic kind, the manufactured rush of familiarity that is harmful to us in the long run, but hard to know in the moment. These mini dopamine rushes keep your engine whirring while you do nothing, creating an anxiety cycle from realizing every so often that you have been stationary. This is scarily similar to traditional drugs like cocaine, heroin, meth, and even more to soma from Huxley's 'Brave New World.'
I found myself having more time, being more present and able to start peeking from the shackles of the conformity-loop, a happy side-effect of the internet we have no choice but to consume. As young apprentices out looking at the world, on a journey to find new highs at a pace we feel 'flow' at, we are fed and taught to seek out the stories of everybody we think is more successful than us or is doing more with their lives. Our brain likes structure, to impose a pattern induced model constructed to fit the evidence, drawn from sensory data. We start biasing our data set towards the 90th percentile (real snd the fakers) and normalize unreasonable standards. The internet companies are taking advantage of that; they pull you into the web and use the billions of hours of behavior data available to "increase retention" by sucking you deeper. They are taking away our creative forces by feeding us depression.
I am scared by how much it had a hold on me.
As somebody who on the inside of these startups, knows backend architectures and how loose security at a growing company is, you are aware of just how much data customers leave behind as they traverse the internet. These bits, a like here, a comment, or a group, or a link you shared or a song you listened to, or a link that blew your mind away, a book you post a review about; it's all there, feeding computer algorithms. We should start by reclaiming that data, create our own data repositories of the 'internet we leave behind' that you can add to, invite to, and even create experiences through.
Over the past month or so, I have been thinking about decentralized internet and how smaller self-contained pods could be the breakaway internets of the future. Power needs to be redistributed, so we stop creating "company-empires" benevolent so far, but far too powerful and unchecked. An internet you maintain for yourself, not to share with the world to get likes but because your brain told you that this was valuable to hold on to. All the data would live on your device or in your personal (portable) cloud.
I keep coming back to this idea of an internet reversal, where your behavior profile hangs out jobs to complete, and the internet finds the economic equilibrium cost to getting it fulfilled. A huge stock market, survival of the fittest.
A good entry point is to make the capture of the internet easier, and thats what I am trying to solve with the MVP. As we continue to consume internet at bearkneck speeds, really absorbing almos nothing. The cutting edge of content is coming up on personal websites, self-authored content and we rarely remember to hold on to it. We need to start gathering, containing, and categorizing our traces of the internet. It is time we became foragers again, as we were built to be.
Anyway, some thoughts...excited for the vision forming in my head but don't have it articulate enough.
(The beginnings of a manifesto for the future of the internet)