Sick of the Web

It's all wrong and it's not going to get better.

This is part 1 of a two-part pros/cons article about the world wide web. As you may have guessed by the subject line, this is the “cons” article.

I should have quit working on the web in 2001 when the friends I respected most left the dot-com crash and got jobs as elementary school teachers. That would have been a good idea. Instead, I gambled everything and tried over and over again to make things work in a world I had lost interest in. Now that I’ve been self-employed and working on the web (teaching, making websites, and writing) for over 25 years, I have some thoughts to share.

The Internet is Killing Me

I have a lot of baggage and built-up stress from all my years spent working online — not to mention the health problems it’s given me over the years (including vitamin D deficiency, bad eyesight, tendonitis, obesity, high blood pressure, anxiety, migraines, shingles, and sleep deprivation). I loved having employees and trying to create the business I wanted to work for. The problem is, I don’t like having clients (nothing personal, clients!) and I don’t like the web.

The Internet isn’t Real

I love learning, and I love teaching other people what I know. But, when people try to talk to me about the internet or computers, the conversation always goes one of two ways: if the person I’m talking to is a normal person who doesn’t work on the web or in computer programming, it will start and end with them saying “I can’t possibly ever understand anything about computers” and me saying “Stop it, sure you can!” I’m tired of that conversation! If the person works in tech, they’ll want to talk about the new programming language they’ve been learning or how excited they are about the latest large language model and their spouse will wait in the car while I listen and wish we were talking about baking bread or something “real.”

Social Media Has Ruined Civilization

I wrote a book about Mastodon, which is the open source and friendly alternative to the mess that was formerly known as Twitter. Blue Sky is sort of similar to Mastodon. I don’t care. The answer to the world’s problems isn’t for everyone to keep changing their social media platform. I’ve had profiles on AOL, eWorld, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Elle, Google+, Instagram, Mastodon, Blue Sky, and others. Every thought I ever had during the 20-year period where I cared about social media is on the web, and there’s probably no way for me to delete it all if I even could remember all the places I’ve barfed up my thoughts to strangers. But, you know what? It doesn’t matter. Posting on social media just begets more posting on social media and pretty soon you’re spending your entire day and night thinking about what to post on social media and hoping you’ll get some ‘likes.’

Summary: I’m Sick of the Web

I’m sick and tired of the web. If I weren’t self-employed, this would be a good time for me to take a sabbatical, ride my bike across the country, climb Mount Everest, and buy a motorcycle. I’m not going to do any of those things, though. I’m going to keep teaching and writing on the web because I’m excited about it and I still love it as much as I did when it was brand new in the 1990s. I’ll tell you about that next week. But for now, please don’t talk to me about the web. I’m sick of it.