idea seeds that will gradually fruit



i want to use technology differently dear god i want to use technology differently

my general current situation: windows 10 user, hEAVY laptop (bulky friend!!! so big. one terabyte of space), iphone user, I typically use technology pretty standardly? and that's what i want to change because standard technology use in 2022 is yikes :(((( i hate ads i hate spotify ads i hate that the youtube algorhythm knows my brain in ways god didn't plan for. it sucks! i'm sick of it! fuck the ads and bury the corpses of our corporate overlords. the machine of capital is ever churning and wringing and stretching our minds and bodies.
i'm listening to formative memory "the internet is here" right now though and like. i love the internet. i love technology, i love and see so much potential in the internet, and in my own usage of it. it just feels like i'm using it in kind of a sick way lately. and there's a lot of stuff that the corporate side of the internet (youtube, tumblr, etc... basically the 5 social media sites and apps that the internet seems to be fixated around) has given me that I've loved. especially when I was younger, and had youtube. the algorithm was around by the time i was really watching youtube, and i formed so much of my identity on youtube. i grew up with my dialup connection being my way to access the world. i went on sites like mathisfun.com, mindbluff.com, yknow. i was on this social type of site where you would create a fake nation and roleplay with others in regions, nationstates.net. i got called slurs on there once and it was fucking terrible but that was one rare moment in years of being happy and forming a community back when i was 9, 10, 11 years old. that's where i made my first sockpuppet account! i even downloaded tor and looked around the dark web and hidden wiki. a friend in elementary school told me about trying to visit a .onion site on a normal browser and it was filled with popups but he hacked through them anyway. i uh he may or may not have been telling the whole truth but that was fun to hear about and i believed him at the time. (till he tried to trade me a Raykwaza [sic] pokemon card with 800 hp and i called his scams out. he was a cool friend lmao) yes, nostalgia blurs things, but what i'm getting at is that i had the combination of having been a kid who had that last era of being too young on the internet while other kids were not on the internet. boomer 20 year old, and yes parenting is hard, but ipad babies terrify me. i've already learned in my language acquisition courses that the human brain literally has to interface with real life humans in order to acquire language. when babies are exposed to language through 2D mediums like video, they do not acquire the language. it does not register as communication. and oh dear god these poor pandemic babies. and zoom classes, and.... well, youtube put "welcome to the internet" bo burnham on right after this so yeah. man. the whiplash between 2016 Internet Is Here and 2021 Welcome To The Internet.... yes yes it describes each of their eras yes its a cultural touchstone and also reflects my 14 year old and 19 year old-current feelings on the internet respectively,,,,,,
i like youtube. i like refreshing and seeing new videos, i like edits, i love youtube culture (very specific parts,) i will always support my favorite youtubers. i won't stop using youtube. i already have an adblocker that works on it, so that's covered, but at the same time I do hate the algorithm? especially lately. my behavior patterns have trained it in a very annoying way and it rarely shows me anything new, or anything that i wouldn't want to be delivered via subscription box anyway. i also love making videos but oh god the analytics. dan really put it well in his video Why I Quit Youtube. you know how fucking disturbing it was to look at the analytics for my 34k view animation of me being vulnerable about my transition? i looked at the videos they would click to get to mine, i looked at what search terms they would use. fetishization. obviously trans people on the internet get fetishized but i saw the truth stark in my face and it broke me in all the ways life was breaking me over 2021. it took a long time, privating a lot of videos, etc to go through all my issues with that. i'm just now considering Maybe Actually Making Videos cause I want to so bad. Also I think I've caught a sneaky algorithm glitch or strategy on youtube? When I click on a Your Mix playlist that has a certain video on the cover, the song will play, two more will, and then the first song will play again. i think it's to check if you're still listening. youtube iphone does the "video paused. keep listening?" thing too but i think this is more subtle because it makes you go to the tab and change if you don't want to hear that song again. or maybe it's a way to see if you're paying attention. i know i'm anthropomorphizing a computer program but seriously this shit is insidious.
what i think i want to do is escape all the algorithms trying to tailor content for me. use youtube in a way that resembles old sub boxes/RSS feeds?, maybe look stuff up sometimes, and create content. tumblr's layout that isn't the damn new for you thing is alright but i really hate what both them and reddit have done with the shitty "sign in sign in sign in to look" or get the app thing. but tumblr is fine when it's just the blogs i follow. other shit though? i mean i have an instagram and an art instagram and i like them and it's the way old friends keep in touch with me but i can do something about that. i hate the explore page i hate the explore page and honestly i don't really give a shit about what everyone else is doing on there anyway. it's scary to be someone young in 2022 with friends hundreds of miles away that is trying to go against the social media grain because i don't know if some of these people would ever talk to me again but like. i don't want instagram anymore. i want to archive everything i have on it and delete it and leave a link to get me somewhere else. has everyone forgot what doxxing is ?!?! and now our whole personas have to be "real" online. defeats all the fucking point in my opinion.
my partner and i look at old geocities archives a lot. we love them, they're all interesting, and they look as hand-coded as the pages on tilde.town do :) thats part of the reason i like town so much. people here are also internet amish like me. again. 20 year old boomer but that site mindbluff? the only ads are sponsored hyperlinks in a corner of the page. they don't track you (as far as i know unless you click on them) and i don't want to be forced to put ads on a page or a thing i create but for people who want it, hell yeah hyperlink ads. idk man. people use decentralized social media here like mastodon and that's cool but i don't want a new social media i just wanna be on my internet amishry. or at least be conscious of how i am using the internet and not let the algorithm use me. this is also scary but necessary as a disabled person because as time goes on my mobility will probably get lower and lower (idk it might fluctuate but like ill be dead or 60 one day) and my reliance on the internet for connection and entertainment will increase. but as far as actions i think i could actually take that would make sense:

like yes new laptop new phone but also oh god consumerism and let me get something built to last please. i'll have to really research it. should buy secondhand or something. it's hard to balance paranoia and privacy concerns together but i can definitely make some changes.
felt good to get this out either way. i'm so glad i finally made the website i dreamt of coding when i was 10. :)