man i am really mourning the loss of the old internet!! didn't realize at the time that we were living through something that would be so fleeting. i miss stumbleupon and the many weird esoteric hobbyist forums and how creative and collective and liberatory things felt

like everything cool, it is being ruined by capitalism and it really sucks. google - which was SO COOL!! magical! all this info at your fingertips! - is straight up not usable as a search engine anymore. SEOs and experimental AI and endless ads don't work with educational content

when i use the internet now, it's primarily news/social media. research - which i do a lot of at work - is so, SO so much harder to do now. you're wading through endless bullshit and trying to parse out reliable sourcing. you're constantly paywalled. exploring feels hard!!

as a millennial who came of age in the golden era of the internet i definitely took it for granted -- it was so much a part of how i learned to learn that realizing it doesn't.....really exist anymore? is making me feel very vulnerable actually!!

shout out to the school librarians who foresaw this and tried to teach me dewey decimal system to be fair