Maybe it's my age, but for me, the Internet was so much more fun and interesting back in, say, 1998 or so. I miss the days of crappy personal "home pages" on Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire, with "this is me, this is my cat" etc. IRC was still widely used, and I made some great friends on there. I felt like a badass coding simple stuff. There was still an element of popularity contest, but nowhere near on the scale it is today.
It was exciting, and sometimes you'd find the most mysterious stuff online. Even though it was still pretty young, it felt... bigger somehow.I genuinely remember consciously watching it shrink, the creativity withering away as the number of users increased.
The final nail in the coffin, before everything turned beige, was probably the end of the original MySpace. Yeah it was pretty awful, but it was the last notable one of those customizable, amateurish platforms. Tumblr has never quite cut it.
Now everything feels bland. I'm still addicted, but I'm not enjoying it. I hate it at times. I want Facebook, Instagram and Google to just fuck off and disappear, but it looks like we're stuck with them.
But it's not just the Internet.
I think about this stuff every now and then, but tonight I started thinking about it because I was trying to think of something to do to pass the time. I thought about looking for a new movie to watch. Maybe I'm just in a shitty mood, but I couldn't think of anything that would remotely interest me. I can't even remember the last movie I watched. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy some things (Twin Peaks!)... but this is how I feel about the majority of modern life.
Fucking bland, man.
I live in London. I've worked in Camden for nearly 10 years. It too has become beige, subjected to high rents and gentrification just like most other places. I watch tourists taking photos of the impressive graffiti around the area and posting them on Instagram, tagging it with #streetart and #alternative and blah blah blah. That graffiti was commissioned by the local authorities. It looks nice. And you can find the exact same "graffiti" in multiple other towns around London. To me, it just feels like we're being told, "It's okay! We know modern life is bullshit! Here's a piece of factory-bought culture to cheer you up!".
In fact, go to pretty much any urban town in the UK. It's all the same, wherever you go. Why bother?
And on the flip side, does any of what I've said matter? People will likely read this and think, "Oh look, first world problems". But it matters because I want some sense of not only authenticity but of reality. Maybe it's just due to my depression, but I'm becoming increasingly detached from everything and I feel numb. On a larger scale, that could be a dangerous thing.
I hope one day I can create something that I can look at and think "Good, here is something original".