The Internet Was Never Built For Freedom
I keep thinking about how we got here. It’s been doing my head in lately, to be honest. I remember back in the 90's when the whole internet thing started kicking off properly. I was a young lad then, a student and spending whatever coin I had going to concerts and festivals. We all thought this digital world was going to free us, didn't we? No more adults and bosses telling us what to think, no more media gobshites on the telly spoon-feeding us rubbish. Just ordinary folk talking to other ordinary folk across the world. A proper frontier.
But I can't shake the feeling we were stitched up from the absolute start.
It dawned on me the other day when I was trying to look up how to service my old laptop... just wanted to swap out the hard drive and clean the dust out to keep the old thing going. Couldn't find a straight answer anywhere. Just pages and pages of ads, pop-ups, and algorithms trying to force me to buy a brand-new model I didn't want, or telling me I wasn't allowed to fix my own gear. The whole thing has gone to shit. I suspect it was never actually meant to free us at all. We just fell for the sales pitch. They told us it was a playground, but they were just building the fences around us while we weren't looking.
Look at the folk down the local boozer now. They’re all glued to their screens, modern life just sucking the marrow straight out of them. It winds me up, seeing good people getting riled up by algorithms designed to make them angry. You see them scrolling through short videos for hours until they look completely knackered, eyes glazed over. It’s not information, is it? It’s behavioural control. They've figured out how to hook punters like junkies, keeping everyone pissed off and isolated so we keep clicking. "Economic growth," my fucking arse. It's just a system built to track what you look at, what you buy, and what makes you scream at your neighbours.
I remember reading somewhere that the military invented the foundation of the net anyway. If that's true, why did we ever think it’d be a tool for freedom? Governments don't give away freedom for free, do they? Now you can't even walk down the high street without a dozen cameras scanning your face, and the tiny computer in your pocket is doing the exact same thing from the inside. Every punter is a walking data point for some massive tech firm. It feels like a massive trap, and we walked right into it because they made the buttons shiny.
Maybe I'm talking shite. Maybe. I’m just a 40-something bloke living off the grid a bit, trying to make sense of why everyone looks so lost these days. Folk look exhausted. There’s a strange atmosphere everywhere now, like everyone knows something’s gone wrong somewhere but nobody knows how to turn the bloody machine off. We traded real communities, real mates you could have a pint with and talk absolute bollocks, for a digital cage.
Still though, you can't just opt out completely, can you? Even I need the bloody internet to book flights and accommodation throughout the year. That’s the genius of it, I suppose. They made it so you can't survive without it, and then they changed the rules. It was never about freedom. It was always about the surveillance, about tracking the ordinary punter, and making sure we stay too distracted and addicted to notice we’ve been completely done over. Something feels deeply off about the whole world now, and I don't think there's any going back.