The author of ‘The Stars in Our Pockets’ on eschewing the internet

When I saw (actually, misread) the title I was hoping it would be about Samuel R Delany's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" which is a complete knock-out SF book and probably the best thing Delany ever did. Oh well.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stars_in_My_Pocket_Like_Grains_o...

It often feels as though almost everything on the internet post 2000 or so has been an enormous bait and switch. Build a good service people like, get a lot of people hooked on it, and then gradually fuck it up in an attempt to generate some kind of revenue.

I, personally, hate it. Its depressing to see a technology so full of promise (seem to, anyway) regress. Become less magical, less useful. Its no wonder young people are skeptical of capitalism - it seems to literally be eating the goose. Not even the goose that laid the golden egg - just the goose, in hopes there might be a golden egg inside.

I don't think I'd ever give up the internet altogether, but I wonder if there is a place for more thoughtful interaction with the internet - e.g. like how RMS browses(has a daemon download a page and email it to him for offline viewing).

You can still access all the information that way, but the "click ->dopamine hit, click ->dopamine hit, etc" training like you might get scrolling through reddit or social media feeds is interrupted by the time delayed nature of your browsing.

I hadn't heard about RMS' daemon before -- that's brilliant! I think I may do something along those lines myself.

It feels that way because it has been exactly as you describe. I can only assume it's youngsters who have been doing the undeserved downvoting. If you look at the timeline, you can get a feel for why, and who:

1988/9 First ISPs and connections outside academia

1993 Eternal September, AOL let the great unwashed out on to the net. Damn annoying for six months or so, but the net recovered.

1994 First spam, and colossal in scale. Two bottom feeding US lawyers filling every usenet group with US Green Card spam.

1995 NSF end their ban on online commercial activity.

First e-commerce kicks off, and it's all a bit hobby-esque, and even large businesses are adopting netiquette habits. Like linking out, providing chatty informative pages for no other reason than "because", etc. Putting an e-commerce order somewhere might get you a lovely long chatty thank you email direct from the owner, or a hand written note in the box. The internet still feels like something remarkably different to meatspace.

By the millennium, the year AdWords was born, as the first dot com boom turned into a full on idiocy fuelled bubble, it was the birth of bait and switch. There's a whole ballooning category of "internet marketers" with gloriously scummy SEO, fraudulent sales tactics, learn to spam better courses and worse. Like all easy way to riches sales, the only way to get rich is with the easy way to riches book, subscription or course parting fools from money.

Now everyone commercial, from the largest 5 world companies down, are internet marketers of the worst possible interpretation of the term. Commerce, scam and affiliate slice forced into everything. Bait and switch all the way down.