"From unstoppable slop, to “enshittification”, to a digital world peopled by automatons, all of these ideas have a useful explanatory power. None, on its own, sufficiently captures the problem. The internet suffers from a cluster of disorders, some with overlapping symptoms and causes. I’m interested in uniting them all under a bigger tent, one that accounts for their similarities and for the role of human decision-making in bringing us to our current predicament.
Borrowing from the world of public architecture, I think of it as the “hostile internet”. Through deliberate choices, and some unintended consequences, the architects of the current consumer internet have created a thoroughly commercialised, surveilled and authoritarian space where basic functions are seconded to the extractive appetites of the monopolies overseeing the system. And it’s making us miserable.
(...)
Like the Moynihan Train Hall, today’s internet isn’t really designed for us, but rather to elicit certain responses from us, responses which, to put it loftily, are hostile to human flourishing. The tech companies’ growth-at-all-costs mentality has scaled their products’ flaws and vulnerabilities — and their second-order social effects — in proportion with their billion-person user bases. The hostile internet is a witch’s brew of explanations for how one of humanity’s most important inventions has produced so much simultaneous prosperity, inequality, disruption and social upheaval.
The result is that today’s internet seems to, if not make us actually crazy, make many of us seem crazy. Always connected, always posting and consuming, we resemble madmen now, giving voice to thoughts that are normally the province of the eccentric ranting on a street corner."
https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef