Am I getting old or is the internet just not as fun as it used to be? Are youths even calling it “The Internet” anymore? Given the number of syllables they’d have to say, I’m doubtful. Back in the nineties, it was a concept even a simpleton like me could understand. You spent so much time dialing up its contents and waiting for them to appear, that interactions were entirely intentional. Building a website took legitimate effort, so people didn’t feel compelled to share their every idiotic thought with the world. To disconnect from the internet, you would go to the one hulking PC that your whole family shared and simply hit the on/off switch.

Three key factors in our current era make my sweet little version of the web seem laughably nostalgic. For starters, devices these days are everywhere and designed specifically not to be turned off. Wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to gather more data on your family! My grill doesn’t even want to go night-night, lest it miss a software update. There is at least one moment every day where I press a button on one of our devices and nothing happens. That layer of intelligence thinks it knows better. Give me the good old days of a solid mechanical click, followed by exactly what I asked for. I’ll live with the consequences.

You can blame another major shift squarely on money. Admittedly, those in my era were a bit spoiled. Some of y’all won’t believe this, but Facebook used to be cool. When it opened to Auburn University students my junior year, enthusiastic coeds rushed to post all their hot party pics and stalk those of others. Online communities blossomed. People shared mostly positive content without worrying about how it would be used. Potential future employers didn’t have access! Neither did our parents!

Many tech giants of today offered a warm & fuzzy feeling back then. Twitter didn’t start out as a place for angry people. Google, Youtube and the like were similarly prioritizing a free, enjoyable experience. Eventually, the party ended. Time to monetize all of the accrued eyeballs and move into the black! Seemingly in a flash, we became the product, sellable to the highest bidder.

I used to get a chuckle out of the ads that mistakenly pegged me as their audience - a feminine hygiene product interrupting my yoga video or a preview assuming I want to watch people talk about sports (humanity’s dumbest invention). That type of miss rarely happens anymore. The nudges also now include way more than ads. Why only market to someone when you can reliably influence their behaviors? Now that’s where the money is. Then maybe they could convince me to watch those people talk about sports and convert the lead after all.

In more recent times, discerning between the real and fake has also complicated matters. In our house hangs a picture of my girls together right after Libby was born. I vetoed it (overruled!) because one of them has a photoshopped face from a different image. The moment is accurate in essence but technically a fake. That’s childsplay, however, when compared to what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is capable of. If you’ve spent most of your adult life trusting your eyeballs on what is authentic, then buckle up, partner. You don’t even have to be good at the behind-the-scenes stuff anymore, as any idiot can have a term paper or a realistic looking video of a presidential candidate generated in no time. I never thought I’d have to insert a note that I wrote all of this by myself without the help of AI.

So where does all this leave us? Dear reader, should I just tell you to get off my lawn so I can return to a polarizing twenty-four-hour news channel and doom scroll my feed? Should I slam a bag of Doritos and let Youtubers tell me their conspiracy theories? Negative. I can do better. We can do better.

Humans, after all, have made it this far. Contrary to what headlines suggest, we’re actually a bunch of independent-thinking, unique beings. Sure it may be tough to find the actual truth but we wrote the code in the first place. The bright ideas of humans propelled us this far into modernity. Surely our ability to be rational, compassionate and understanding can be involved in future progress. It never fails that the person who gets all hot and bothered online is usually much nicer in person. Don’t let the tools that were designed to connect us tear us apart.

Prior to posting that next rant or angry comment, might I ask you to take a minute and think about it? Are you super duper sure? Is yours the only possible true narrative? Will it all be silly in two hours, next week or years from now?

With an emotional interaction, you are giving the algorithm exactly what it wants - the type of hit that keeps you coming back for more. Without even thinking, that phone will magically be in your hands again, and the loop continues.

Instead, try being unpredictably open minded. Throw off the search engines and advertisers with some out-of-character goodness. Learn something new outside your comfort zone. Use your home devices for their intended purposes, like checking the cooking temp of salmon or telling kid-appropriate jokes. Go talk to people in person without your phone as an ever-present accessory. Call me old fashioned, but I still think our diverse collective can get together and have a good time while also celebrating our differences. Homogeneity sucks. If our feeds must be filled, let them be filled with sweet party pics!