But I'm not **NOT** saying it, either

It seems that every few quarters or so, the web (which I will be referring to as "The Internet" and related phrases going forward; I know the web isn't the totality of the internet but it is most of it and it's also the vernacular term for The Web so suck my buttcheeks) get's just a little bit less useful if you aren't just here to passively absorb the noise or to spend money. Search engines become less helpful, they constantly try to replace whatever it was that you were looking for with a vaguely related other thing that is more friendly to some arcane seo nonsense. things like search operators slowly become useless or are simply removed and ignored. Power users are not the primary users of these things anymore. The average internet person is no longer a computer hobbyist or IT professional or programmer; it's some suburban housewife/husband who's about 2/3rds of the way through h/er/is 2nd bottle of Yellow Tail at 12:30 PM on a wednesday who's looking to spend the rest of their day watching tiktok videos of Chinese teenagers eating weird food or videos of other people watching other videos and making smug faces. They're probably gonna eat Applebee's, ordered through doordash, for dinner and they're about as sharp as a bag of wet mice, as a certain cartoon rooster might say.

This demographic's primary concern is passive consumption. They have deepfried their brains in the electric lemon-y glow of the unending bukkake that is the modern online media landscape. They don't know that WW2 happened but they have watched 3 septullian hours of jumpcut-hellscape tiktok videos of internet twinks doing {trendyThing}. They are keeping the local UPS in business based solely on their online shopping habits and they have so many Amazon orders in-transit that they don't even remember ordering half of them. They no longer have the attention span to engage in anything more involved than having the smart TV on in the background, as they watch Youtube Shorts on their phone. Despite paying monthly for the streaming service, they haven't actually watched anything that they put on the TV (because there's micro-content to be directly beamed into their neocortex).

I'm not trying to be smug here...I feel smug, but I'm not trying! These folks aren't inately passive and stupid. They have been cultivated, like some kind of fucked up crop, by the very large and very rich business interests. They aren't entirely absolved of blame, they certainly lacked the awareness to avoid becoming consumer fuckpigs, but there is great effort to make these folks the largest chunk of the internet user pie. Folks who don't make these Galactic Empires gonzo-bux are not catered to and so things that don't create fuckpigs are not given priority.

And so, the thing continues to decay into the slimepod tower from the Matrix, but instead of body heat the machines are harvesting our attention and our wallets. f