The internet isn’t fun anymore, and it’s everyone's fault
I’m probably the millionth person to say this this week, but the internet just isn’t fun anymore. Beyond the fact that I’m a 30+ year-old adult who had the privilege of experiencing the birth of the internet; beyond the nostalgia I might feel for a time that no longer exists and will never come back; I honestly think the internet isn’t fun anymore because its users no longer know how to have fun with it.
Social media and this terrible culture of approval that has been embedded into our brains and routines have ruined the fun. And beyond that, the fact that the value of what we do or share online now revolves around interactions has ended up killing the digital spaces we once used simply as an escape from the real world.
Everything on the internet now has to have a purpose beyond just sharing something with the world; everything has to generate interactions, sell, provide value, make people think, express a political stance. It’s exhausting —unbearable, even— to take things so seriously all the time, everywhere.
The post I published yesterday about how I was fired ended up being shared on Hacker News. Almost instantly, my blog visits exploded to the point where it was impossible not to notice. As soon as I had a chance, I rushed to Hacker News to read the comments. The post was flagged a few hours after being shared there, which, in my opinion, was completely understandable. What surprised me, however, was reading several of the comments and realizing that my piece had been taken with an overwhelming level of seriousness.
For anyone too lazy to read my previous post: basically, I wrote about how my boss fired me through a message, sharing his personal and financial problems to justify it. In short, by the end of that real-life conversation, I somehow ended up being the bad employee and the bad person for pointing out his lack of empathy and professionalism in firing me that way, while throwing in irrelevant personal details.
To be completely honest, the whole situation struck me as very strange —and, to a certain point, even laughable— because of the sheer irony of it all. That’s why, as a sort of creative exercise, I decided to tell the story while imagining myself reacting exactly the way my boss probably expected me to react to his reasons, which (to me, someone who had just lost his job) were, of course, irrelevant. Why would I care, boss? I wish I had a mortgage to pay haha.
The post is ironic, satirical, and cynical; because I chose to have fun with something that could have easily ruined my vibe for weeks or even months.
Back to the Hacker News thread. Many of those comments judged the text as “rage bait”, overanalyzing the few details I shared to try to piece together the puzzle of what happened, and judging the situation from entirely fictional angles; always missing the point of the text, which was to be an ironic critique of the stale practices of the capitalist system we’re all already used to. You know, the usual.
What amazes me is that a text published on a personal blog could have that kind of impact, being labeled almost immediately as “rage bait,” as if its sole purpose was to generate engagement. As if I had sponsors or was making money from this blog. As if I were somehow relevant on the internet.
It’s incredible how, nowadays, the natural response to engaging with other people’s “content” online is to look for that sinister angle that must be there to create engagement, conversions, or sales. And I completely understand it, because that’s exactly the level to which we’ve ruined the internet, and it feels like there’s no way back.
Nobody wants to have fun anymore; they just want to argue and overcomplicate everything, like we say in Mexico: “buscarle tres pies al gato.”
Booooriiinnnggg.