#algorithims

My fellow millenials: I know we grew up when 'those damn phones' was the cry of disconnected boomers. I know that 'damn internet, go outside' was the cry of people who had destroyed all other third spaces and wanted to eliminate one we had, but. I do want to point something out. When we were kids, the internet was a third space. It was democratic. It didn't have rules, and in some ways that made it dangerous - (be real, how many people do you know who talked to adults they shouldn't have when they were young? Did you? I did, honestly, and only didn't get hurt because I was both clever and lucky). But people knew what the dangers were and people overall knew not to give out personal information, so even if you talked to people you shouldn't have, their ability to make you suffer for it was pretty minimal. The internet, in our youth, was, fundamentally, risk-reward, like a dangerous playground. Yes, there were risks, yes, there were strangers, but no one was there to sell anything (or, that wasn't why it existed) and the dangers were, overall, overhyped, and we were, overall, the ones in charge of our experience. These days that isn't true. All the things boomers were afraid of about the internet - that is was full of predators, that it was destroying our ability to make meaningful connection, that it was destroying our attention spans - is now more or less true to life. And I don't want to say it's because the internet or phones have gotten more dangerous, but it's because they've gotten more corporate. They've gotten more algorithmic. The things that made them wild are gone. They now exist to sell products, to guide advertisers to user data, and when we were kids those tools didn't exist to anywhere near the same degree.

https://twitter.com/soulcruzer/status/1874817018425479402