elle's recent reading

Now the culture is most exemplified by people whose entire end goal appears to be empty profiteering.

Large parasocial platforms transformed the internet into a hostile and impersonal place. They feed our FOMO to keep us clicking. They exaggerate our differences for "engagement". They create engines for stardom to keep us creeping. They bait us into nutritionless and sensationalist content. Humanity cannot subsist on hype alone.

We invite the users to realize the essential role they play on the Internet: when they start their own website, when they send comments, criticisms or warm letters to the webmasters, when they exchange tips and hints in the newsgroups or by e-mail, they provide an independent and free source of information that others would like to sell and control.

In the thirty years that passed, we have allowed exactly this type of soul-deadening tyranny to take hold of cyberspace — an unavoidable consequence of consolidating this once distributed and quirky medium into a small number of massive platforms.

I read a comment on one of your posts that said, “this helps me realize that if I just put my phone away for a while, a lot of stuff feels exactly the same way it did 20 years ago.” There’s a longing for a time when going online felt like an option or a destination, now it's this ambient thing that everyone is a part of.

humans.txt