Communities, relationships, and navigating the enshittification of absolutely everything
(I wasn't sure if I should post this in ~talk or ~tech. I went with ~talk because I feel like I'm about to spend a whole lot of this post rambling. Also, be warned: This is a long post.)
A summary of this post: My personal decision to try to preserve my own online privacy, the chaotic equilibrium that is me attempting to make sense of my feelings towards AI and the current zeitgeist, and the tiny concessions I've had to make in navigating all of this makes me feel, at best, tired, and at worst, a crazy person. I am tired of the direction the internet is going, I am tired of the endless discourse about AI, and my chronic tiredness is all marinating together into a tired admixture of tired chicken soup.
First of all, hi everyone. I don't post here as often as I maybe would like to. Randomly chiming in with a big ol' post like this a bit daunting. Participating in an online community isn't a muscle I flex very often nowadays, which is actually relevant to what I'm about to talk about.
Lately for a long fucking time now I've just been tired of the direction in which the internet, specifically the "corporate web", has been heading. This all started when I first joined Tildes; around that time was when the big Reddit API fiasco happened, leaving a bad taste in my mouth, and it was not long after when AI started to become A Big Thing. If you had asked me why these things had left a bad taste in my mouth back then, I wouldn't have been able to respond with anything articulate, just "big tech bad".
In the three years that have passed, I've developed enough of an opinion and have gone through enough soul searching to give a more concrete answer to why I don't like how things are going:
- Everybody wants my data, and I'd rather not give it to them
- I am tired of finding figurative AI hairs in my figurative sandwich
- Every company wants infinite growth at the expense of everything that made that company good, if it was ever good
- It's really hard to find a third space on the internet these days
- Almost nobody I know cares about any of this
Among privacy-conscious folks and small internet communities like Tildes, none of the above are particularly novel thoughts. And yet I think about all of this frequently enough that I felt the need to post a topic here for discussion. In this post, I'm going to get on my little soapbox, recount how I got to this mind space, and attempt to explain why I find all of this both endlessly tiring and constantly present in my mind.
Everybody wants my data, and I'd rather not give it to them (and almost nobody I know cares about any of this)
In the past few years I've taken the steps realistic for me in order to protect my online privacy. Why? Well, I hate being advertised to. I hate the idea of surveillance-as-a-service. I'm fortunate enough to be able to just pay for, or configure/self-host, things that do the thing they're supposed to do without knowing that I'm a 512 year old nonbinary alien from like, Nova Arrakis Prime the 2nd, Esq. or something (I am not that old, that is not how I identify, and I'm obviously not from there). I just don't buy the idea that everybody on the internet is a consumer who needs to accept this compromise in order to participate. Again, this might not be novel for a lot of you reading.
For me this has involved switching away from Gmail as an email provider, ditching Windows for Linux everywhere, cancelling my YouTube Premium subscription, deleting Facebook/most Meta stuff, browsing behind a VPN, etc. Some things I'm working on going further on; some things, like deleting Instagram, I don't want to do because that platform is how I connect with a lot of my friends. Essentially I've done what's realistic for me.
All of this has worked out fine for me. My quality of life has not measurably changed as a result, other than maybe the fact that it's slightly inconvenient to open up a new browser session and log in to my otherwise-abandoned Google account just to interact with a random Google Sheet someone sent me.
The first bit of mental friction stems from discussions I've had with my partner on this topic. She's also privacy-minded, and so isn't against the idea of taking very similar actions. But she's not in a place where she can just do so as easily as I did, either because it's massively inconvenient for her (all of her data is holed up in Google services), would require a very large mindset/workflow shift (She is not technical enough to switch to Linux without a ton of friction, for example), or would damage her relationships (It's completely unrealistic to get everybody she knows to switch to Signal tomorrow - hell, she doesn't even want to do it herself to message me). I want to be very clear that none of this is inherently bad or a stain on her character or whatnot. My point is that privacy looks different for everybody, especially over time.
Extrapolate that friction out to people who aren't as close to me though, and it feels somewhat like dying by a thousand cuts. Not in the sense of mental anguish, just general fatigue. Over 50% of my communication with my good friends takes the form of them sending me memes on Instagram. I react and reply because I'm not just going to ghost them because of muh privacy. But there's that like 1% of my brain that goes "yeah I wish you wouldn't do that". I have not bothered to ask them to stop, because I don't (yet) care to proselytize to them in the name of privacy at the risk of shutting down what is effectively one of their love languages.
The thing is, they either aren't aware of the degree of data collection going on on every major internet platform, or they don't care. I do not believe myself in the slightest to be superior to them because of this. I don't fault them for either, and I, again, don't care to intervene because I don't want to be the person that gatekeeps the entire internet from them in the name of rebelling against big corpo.
So yes, I would say the majority of my friends are not as opinionated on this as I am. Because of this, I sometimes feel I'm a little crazy whenever I propose to my partner the idea of self-hosting our own file storage, or when I happen to say "Yeah, I try not to use Google Maps really. Why? Oh, I just don't want them to know where I've been". But then I talk with those of my friends who share this mindset, or browse online communities which do, and I feel normal again. And then I bounce between these circles, and I feel, I dunno, weird.
Interlude: The AI bubble and my pride as a software engineer
Frankly, I don't know how to feel about AI. This is compounded by the fact that I am a software engineer both by trade and as a hobby.
As a cultural phenomenon, I am pretty sick of it. I cannot stand AI-generated ads, AI-generated media, AI-generated writing, AI-generated whatever. I also cannot stand ads about AI-generated ads, AI-generated media, AI-generated writing, or AI-generated whatever. The last time I was spoonfed information about a topic to a remotely comparable degree was back when crypto/NFTs were the monster of the week. This round of industry hype has felt orders of magnitude more prevalent and exhausting.
As a software development tool, it's... fine. I was pretty against AI-assisted coding at first, but after having learned how to properly utilize it (whatever "properly" means), I've found it pretty helpful as of late. I'll usually hand-write the code and patterns I want the LLM to use, tell it "ok, now do this everywhere", approve/reject its output, and it gets a lot right with an acceptable amount of post-fact correction from me. It's also been useful as a learning tool: These past few months I've been working on a project that involves data mining/parsing a proprietary encryption/encoding format for a reasonably popular video game. I was not comfortable working with binary formats to this extent before, but after several back and forths with Claude and an earnest effort to understand just what the fuck it was writing to my codebase, I feel somewhat more knowledgeable now.
The tension I've had to balance given my above stance: I work at an AI startup.
Everyone around me is AI-pilled out the wazoo. This isn't meant to be an insult. They're all great people whom I get along great with, and I like my company/don't hate our vision enough to jump ship (inhales copium). It's just that I constantly have to deal with stuff like:
- Vibecoded PRs, which I have the wherewithal to push back on when appropriate, but in so doing must balance maintainability vs. urgency (and all that other pragmatism crap that comes with being a software engineer)
- AI-flavored communications - I do a mean ChatGPT impression. "That's an excellent observation. The tension you're feeling isn't imagined. It's real. If you want, I can break down the reasons why people tend to pour the cereal before the milk—just say the word."
- Building the meta-inference layer through a combination of carefully curated ground truths, a robust evaluation pipeline, and a multi-step, quantized agent selection algorithm that's resilient to both external disturbances and continuous platform evolution (this is basically a real sentence I had to read in an engineering strategy document someone put out)
And so, similar to the privacy dilemma I spoke about earlier, I find myself constantly doing mental gymnastics while working here. I am one of a few cynics in a room full of zealots (Again, I'm not trying to paint myself as some pariah here - I'm in this situation by choice, I'm just trying to note the juxtaposition). It would be easier if I just flat out hated the idea of AI to its core - I could just leave and choose not to engage with AI anything - but no, I use it, and I find it useful. In fact I enjoy applying software engineering principles to AI, because it's an interesting set of problems to wrangle.
Again, death by a thousand cuts. Firstly, I hate the prevalence of AI in mainstream culture, and I hate how it's being pushed as a panacea in my industry. Secondly, I don't hate AI as a tool. Thirdly, I'm surrounded by the first thing. Fourth: I have to explain my job to my friends and family. Doing so usually results in them asking me surface-level questions about AI (which I don't mind entertaining), them relaying how AI is god/the devil because it made them look like a Disney character (which I am tired of dealing with), or them asking me what my opinion on AI is (if I were to give them the whole story, it would be this entire post, so I just go "eh, it's fine").
My point with this section: I feel I am constantly doing mental gymnastics to justify the attitude I have towards AI. My stance is somewhat neutral. I read a blog post absolutely glazing it, I roll my eyes. I read a blog post absolutely trashing it, I roll my eyes. I think about AI, I roll my eyes. It's all just so tiring.
And also, as is evident by now, I have an Opinion about all of this. Am I crazy? Wouldn't it be a lot easier if I could just roll over and accept AI for what it is?
Turbo capitalism has fucked up how I navigate internet communities (and almost nobody I know cares about any of this)
The most recent development that's caused me to think about the topics presented in this post is Discord's recent rollout of its identity verification system. There has been plenty of discourse on this topic as of late, so I won't go on about too long about it here.
I view this motion by Discord as the next step in the enshittification of that platform. Given my views I've shared on surveillance capitalism as well as AI's effects on the industry and the garbage shoveled into the world by its most annoying proponents, you won't be surprised that my reaction to this news is negative, and I am currently deciding on whether or not to divest myself from Discord completely.
This decision is a small dilemma for me. On the one hand, muh privacy. On the other hand, I am part of a server centered around that one video game for which I'm working on that side project, and leaving the platform means severely reducing my participation in that community, because there's no way in hell they're moving that server off Discord. I don't know which way I'm going to go. This is also the same dilemma that occurred when I decided to partially divest myself from Meta and the like: Do I care about my relationships with my friends/family more than I care about muh privacy? (Yes).
(I feel like I'm finally getting to the point of my own post here...)
I'm very tired of the fact that these small dilemmas and points of contention have been popping up for me fairly consistently over the past few years. If we all just held hands and prayed I'd have it my way, I wouldn't have to choose between being an outsider in X community and *~\muh privacy~*, and I'd be 6'3" and jacked. But the way the corporate web is developing towards the endless rat race of turbo enshittification, I feel the rate at which I'm going to have to make these kinds of choices is going to be as consistent as it is now, or it's going to go up. Probably until I die.
Epilogue: The side project I was working on
I mentioned I was working on a video game side project. I feel it encapsulates the gripes I describe within this post pretty well, because it contains the following elements:
- Parsing binary data of a proprietary encoding/encryption format (I previously didn't know shit about how to do this, so I used AI to help me do it/learn more about the topic)
- A website which acts as a game database/search tool for in-game entities (I wanted to contribute to a community I'm currently deciding whether or not to somewhat isolate myself from)
- A Discord bot as an alternative method of interacting with the application/a way to submit drop table information, all of which must be crowd-sourced (Discord Bad. I figured I'd just stand up an authenticated REST API and let others do a Discord integration if they want, but still, I wish I wasn't about to force myself to cut this out of my roadmap.)
If you managed to read through all of that, thanks. I've been writing for like an hour, and I feel my ramblings have become more nonsensical than usual.
A summary of this post (copied from the beginning): My personal decision to try to preserve my own online privacy, the chaotic equilibrium that is me attempting to make sense of my feelings towards AI and the current zeitgeist, and the tiny concessions I've had to make in navigating all of this makes me feel, at best, tired, and at worst, a crazy person. I am tired of the direction the internet is going, I am tired of the endless discourse about AI, and my chronic tiredness is all marinating together into a tired admixture of tired chicken soup.
I don't think this one makes sense. Discord is doing this not because it wants to, but because it's forced to due to government regulations. The UK and Australia have already passed laws that would require it to do age checks, it needs to do so in many US states, many European countries like France also require it to do so, and the entire EU has laws in the works that would require age verification.
There is no actual benefit to Discord to do this. Any actual information they can gather from your age verification - which I genuinely don't think they are doing, but let's assume they are - is worth jack shit. What's on an ID? Your age? You don't think Discord can estimate your age?
The most worthwhile data is actually the raw text for the LLM companies, not your government ID.
And meanwhile they lose paying customers, for zero gain. Discord would love if children went on gooning parties in NSFW channels as long as they were paying for nitro. It's like wondering if casinos are doing age checks because they want to steal your data.
That's why there is no escape from this. Any alternative, if it gets big enough, will also have to do age checks. Mastodon in the world of Twitter clones is an example. The big servers have to do age checks in the UK. Is what it is.
Right, I don't think I disagree with that. I will say that the conclusion I jumped to and the sentiment I hold towards Discord for doing this is colored a whole heck of a lot by the general attitude I express in the rest of the post. I did catch wind that one of the reasons Discord is doing this is that they're trying to IPO, and the board hates porn (rightfully so, in the case of the illegal kind plus whatever other nefarious shit is going on on that platform). I mentally lump this in with other instances of "company does X invasive thing in the name of going public/the big bucks", which I have a negative perception on things belonging to that category. My perspective is jaded here.
Yes lol. I take issue with the way they're going about doing this, partnering with questionable vendors and the like. I get that solving the issue of irregularly occurring problematic behavior happening on your centralized platform isn't easy. But wouldn't it be nice if they were doing this because they cared, we all sang the kumbayah and solved this endemic issue with positive messaging, education, and proactive moderation efforts? (please read this sentence tongue-in-cheek; I am not offering a productive solution, rather I am waving my hands furiously)
Eh, yes, it would be good if I didn't conflate these things. If I were to extend this analogy into shaky territory though, I also think casinos have a predatory business model which I take moral issue with. If you squint hard enough you can almost draw a parallel with my attitude towards Discord's news.
So "enshittification" probably isn't accurate there. Maybe "enshittification-adjacent".
I jibe with a lot of what you've written here, and have some of the same attitudes and feelings. You mention it's been a long time, but I'm not sure how long we're talking. I've been strictly on Linux since the mid-2000s, and I can't remember exactly when I deleted my Facebook and Twitter, but I think it was around 2010-ish (possibly earlier--I know I switched from Gmail to Fastmail in 2012 and I had already been off most social media for a while by that point). The thing that I stuck with the longest was Reddit, finally deleting my account around (I think) 2018. Actually that's not entirely true, at some point since then I created a Discord account because so many god damn projects rely on that as their sole source of documentation and support, but I just deleted that too in the face of the recent face-scanning announcement. I've also been using some variation of de-Googled Android phones or straight-up dumb phones for around 10 years now. I guess the point is it's been a long fucking time for me, too.
I'll still point things out to my wife and kids--like I've convinced them to avoid Tik Tok, and when my wife was considering Ring cameras to monitor the merchandise at some shops that she runs, I convinced her to try some other more privacy-respecting options--but these days I can't really muster up the energy to proselytize the importance of privacy and speaking against corporations with your wallet outside of my immediate family. It just feels so much like a losing battle, like you're trying to go up against all the billionaire-run corporations all by yourself.
I'm also a software engineer, and my approach to AI so far has been limited to treating it as a SearchEngine++. In fact the only one I interact with is the chat bot that comes along with my subscription to the search engine Kagi. Usually it can point me in roughly the right direction, and it provides links to its sources that I can follow up on if I'm suspicious it's feeding me bullshit (which probably happens about as often as not). I don't work for an AI startup, but I do work with other engineers who have consumed far more of the AI flavor-aid than I have. I think that my co-workers might view me as the old-man-yells-at-cloud meme when it comes to privacy/capitalism/AI, and that suits me fine for now. Down the road if the AI hype-men prove to be correct and the job of software engineer morphs into something akin to babysitting AI agents that do all the fun and interesting stuff for you, that will be my signal that it's time to step away and maybe help my wife build up her retail business instead.
I dunno what the point of this ramble of a response is. I guess just to let you know that I see you and you're not alone.
Thank you for that last bit, it does feel good to know I'm not alone here.
For me, I only started caring about privacy enough to do something about it starting around 2023 or so. I ran Ubuntu for like 4 months at one point in the 2010s as a learning exercise really, as I was pretty new and just trying to get into software development. That turned into macOS once I had fully gulped down the tech hype kool aid (plus all the pitfalls that come with being a starry-eyed junior developer). Anyway, my tenure isn't as long as yours, haha.
But yeah, it definitely feels like you're preaching to nobody when you start talking about privacy to folks who don't know/care/have to/want to know or care. Much less the feeling of "going up against all the billionaire-run corporations all by yourself", as you aptly put it.
EDIT: Oh, I forgot I had something to say w.r.t. agents doing all the coding. This is a tangent, but at one point in my career I took up a people management role. At first I hated it because I wasn't coding and doing the fun stuff (and honestly I still prefer being an IC), but it did open my eyes to the "doing by influence" side of software engineering. It ended up being a valuable experience for me even as I'm back in an IC role now, in that I'm more comfortable contributing to my workplace in ways that don't involve coding, and as a result I feel I'd be a lot less depressed if Claude was writing all my code for me, because at least I know I'm useful elsewhere.
Don't know how that lands with you or how relevant it is for you, but it's yet another thing that crosses my mind frequently. Though I wouldn't mind also just retiring and farming turnips or something.
That was an fun and engaging read. Thanks for sharing. You voiced many thoughts that have been running through my head for the last 5 years. A little bit after the COVID restrictions lifted I had an epiphany. I don't know what it was about the transition from isolation back to normal life, but a switch in my brain flipped and the sight of any advertising triggered a visceral reaction against being manipulated. I felt violated any time someone tried to sell me something. As if they were trying to reprogram melt brain against my will just to get me to give them money for a product I don't actually want. When that happened I did a similar social media/privacy purge as you did. Although I did keep yt premium as it actually aids in avoiding ads. Watching long for video essays with ads is absolute torture. I also kept windows as my main OS. I enjoy my video games too much to give it up and my LAN pinhole ad blocking makes it tolerable. In some ways this has made me happier. But I do feel a bit ostracized by not really knowing about any instagram or tiktok trend when friends and family talk about them.
As a fellow programmer, I've been dealing with similar feelings about AI. Especially the feeling of becoming an outcast when everyone around me seems to be joining a cult.
I'm slightly more tentative about AI usage than you though. I do use it extensively for rubber ducking and finding out about alternative ways to do things. But using it for writing important code beyond toy projects or scaffolding is almost non existent in my workflow. I used to use it a lot more in the past but noticed two effects that made me stop. First, even with reviewing all the generated code, my long term understanding of my code bases was lacking. I supper at least for my brain, writing something imprints itself much more strongly than just reading. While writing a new feature was sometimes a bit faster, fixing a bug on code no human on my team wrote took a lot longer than it did before. The second one is I felt my skills atrophying. Having to look up how a library worked or names of methods became much more commonplace.
Yes, this one I worry about. Right now I view hand-writing at least some of my code (preferably the first bit before the LLM has had a chance to vomit all over everything) like eating my vegetables, in that it's just something I should do. Even that's not the best comparison, because I definitely enjoy writing code, I've just learned to be okay with taking the role of reviewer/nitpicker/post-fact editor. As for losing understanding of a codebase, that's pretty tough, and for me I haven't come up with a better way to counteract that than to be disciplined about trying to understand the code.
I feel the same. Most ads these days feel borderline dehumanizing, even if that's just my/our perception. There are definitely good/non-problematic ones out there, though somewhat ironically I don't remember them as much as the loud, bright, and colorful ones that feel surgically manufactured to evoke certain emotions.
Some of these ads are effectively trolling. They're from companies with hardly any users but they want to get attention by being edgy.
I really feel you. I know exactly the pain of just feeling exasperated over the next "we prioritised profit/ease of development/minimising support costs/etc. over user experience", and it's only accelerating.
For me, I've been mildly grumbling since around 2015 from the insidious, pervasive prioritisation of ads over functionality on the web, ever since Google decided to kill search engine effectiveness to facilitate advertising revenue. That combined with how Facebook migrated so much of the internet onto it's platform and got prohibitively shitty to the extent a lot of people voted with their feet, it feels like a huge part of the internet straight up died. Then Reddit torpedoing community and interesting discussion for low effort memes, and the beginning of the attention-as-currency era, it's just so exhausting!
It really feels like in the last decade we have exponentially ramped up on the death of "products and services are there to provide value to the user" and it's replacement with "services and products are there to extract as much capital (directly or indirectly) from the user", especially with the whole move away from consumer sentiment and corporate reputation seeming to matter at all to companies.
I feel more and more of my day to day experience is spent rubbing up against corporate interest, and it is increasingly hostile towards me. It feels bad.
That seems pretty reasonable.
AI is the Current Thing. In the bay area at least, most conversations tend to converge on the Current Thing sooner or later. Some previous current things were:
I totally get that conversation about the Current Thing can get really tiresome. There is so much duplication - people saying pretty much the same thing lots of other people have already said.
On Tildes, we had to quarantine pandemic discussion for a while so people could get away from it. Yep, it's important, but often you want a break from it.
Funny you mention the Bay Area. One of the reasons for which I like to tell people I moved out of the Bay Area is all of the tech billboards you see going in/out of San Francisco after the Bay Bridge. I visit sometimes, and now it's all AI billboards, and I am still sick of them.
Sooner or later we'll probably have to do that with AI, or at least try to contain them like the we do with the weekly US politics thread. It feels like every other post is about AI these days (not including this one, @chroma, you brought more to the table).
I do try to tag my posts with "artificial intelligence." There's just a lot of news going on.
During the pandemic we had a group devoted to it, but after the pandemic it was discontinued in favor of tags.
Before I get started, apologies if this reply ends up a bit of a ramble. Your post ties into a variety of things I have been thinking about and also talking about on tildes and elsewhere. I could copy paste relevant bits from those comments in here creating a new wall of text, but I'll link to previous discussions instead. Not sure what is better since some people really hate clicking links.
Anyway, on with the actual reply! I can very much relate to a lot of what you are saying. I haven't gone exactly as far as you have (I see no benefit of hiding behind a VPN for example) I have moved away from gmail, am using Nextcloud for my cloud needs, run with adblock, etc.
Also I know for sure you are not alone in this because this blog post blew up on lobste.rs the other day. Which I feel covers part of what you are saying as well.
They aren't novel thoughts, that much is true. But even in smaller communities I still find myself being worn down by specific factors ingrained in modern tech culture.
I am not looking for a echo chamber, I like discussing things from various sides. But, I can relate more to the people who are entirely done with various things (not just tired) like AI, even if I get some decent use out of it.
What I cannot relate to is a different group of people. There is a large contingency of techy people who conflate technology with silicon valley and as a result also turn into "techno apologists" as they see it all through a lens of "march of progress" thing. To them, any friction or error is just a necessary stumbling block on the road to the future, so they brush it off. On tildes it isn't "that" bad, though it certainly is there. Which, in my opinion, does poison a lot of actual possible discussion.
Another aspect of it is the tendency in tech culture to see technology as "neutral" to the extreme. Where it is just "the wrong use of the tool" that is an issue, not the technology itself. Which, certainly in combination with the other point, can lead to some pretty warped logic and lead to discussions where I am just wondering how far down I have to look for the moral baseline.
I think this group of people within the tech sphere have always been around. But they certainly have become more pronounced and encountering them is just really tiresome.
These people also engage with the same people you do. So for all the times you are talking about privacy and the impact of big tech they might also be there handwaving these worries away as not a big deal, giving a good sounding excuse for why it has to be this way, etc.
I think it is possibly both combined with a few other factors. People are generally already dealing with a lot of other things and dealing with some extra thing on top of that can simply be too much for a lot of people. As you said, you are technical enough to have taken steps to move away from a lot of large tech. But, it takes time and effort. Self hosting is not trivial and if you are going to look for other commercial services you might end up outside of big tech but still with a company aspiring to be one of the big boys one day. So moving to the right service also takes a lot of research. Most people simply don't have the time for that as they have other activities as technology isn't their hobby.
Combined with the other voices from the tech world a lot of people will also simply brush it off as it is easier to believe the thing that doesn't impact them right now.
So it isn't as much that you are crazy, but you are in a sense privileged enough to both see what is going on and take actual steps away from it. Which, is still tiresome, just a different kind.
As far as your interlude goes I fully do relate to that. A lot of why this is happening also has to do with what I mentioned before. Just on a corporate scale.
Regarding discord, I saw you already got some pushback there, but I don't think you are wrong in mentioning it. In fact, in your reply to the pushback you perfectly articulate why it is still problematic from a variety of viewpoints. Because yeah, they don't have to do it world wide right now. Sure, law in the making could be a driving factor but equally so can an IPO. Not to mention that some of the verification methods (handwave AI analysis of your Discord habits) very much smells like the sort of corporate rush job of just having ticked the boxes to the outside world. Since some of the laws mentioned are still in the process of being drafted up there is no way for Discord to know if what they are doing now will actually hold up against them anyway.
I don't have a nice paragraph to end my reply. I still have various loose thoughts but to be honest that would result in a much longer rambling post. So I'll leave it at this (for now).