Money is one of the reasons why today's internet fucking sucks
I wrote about my hate for money before. It's not that I hate money as a concept. Conceptually it's fine, it's just that what we built around it, as a society, is becoming increasingly awful. And it's especially awful in the context of the web and it's an unsolvable problem in my opinion. There's two things, when combined, make today's web, for the most part, absolutely atrocious:
- The expectation that things should be free
- The goal of making money, as fast as possible
There's also this free-for-all mentality where everyone seems to show they care about the integrity of the whole system but in reality they're there for themselves and their priority is, guess what, making money. I'm generalising obviously, not everyone is like that but sadly a good chunk of the web is—or at least feels—like that.
And we won't stop it. There's just no way around it. As long as there's some financial incentive people will keep playing the game. We yell and scream when we hear about big social media companies doing godawful things with our data and attention, yet we have no issues applying the stupidest marketing tricks to sell some service or product.
Things will not slow down. Things will not improve. Just consider the past couple of years. We went through the insanity of the GameStop stock market shenanigans, the crypto and NFT craze and now it's ChatGPT and AI generation era where everyone is trying to sell some AI service that generates something, even if that something has close to zero value. All that while wasting probably a shit ton of resources.
Where's the human value in all this? What the fuck are we doing here?