“Those whom the Gods wish to destroy,” says the adage, “they first make mad.” Actually, that’s overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it’s been clouding our perceptions of what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that.
Examples? Everywhere you look. Take Google search that, once upon a time (1998), was elegant, efficient and a massive improvement on what went before. You typed in a query and got a list of websites that were indicated by a kind of automated peer-review called PageRank. Now, the first page of results from a search for “high-quality saucepans” produces a myriad of “sponsored” items, ie advertisements.
