Clawing back an online existence

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the internet lately. Mostly I’ve been thinking about how bloody unusable it has become, and how the joy of web surfing has been gated behind almost impenetrable walls of AI slop, and hyper-targeted ad campaigns that just get in the way of the information that I am looking for. 

It’s not just search that has been getting me down. The constant enshittification of every service that tries to squeeze every cent out of users, taking away once free features and sticking them behind a cascade of monthly subscriptions is really starting to pile up. 

I know. I sound a lot like the “Old man yells at cloud” meme. I want to pay companies for good services. But it feels like every tech company that is vying for dollars is taking away features from general users to justify their subscription models. Considering Discord just launched an IPO bid earlier this year, I am willing to bet that when they do go public and the dust settles, their free service tier is going to shrink down to something that is barely usable. Don’t worry, I am sure that if you watch a few ads they will let you have an extra 50 DMs for the month or something ridiculous like that. 

So 2026 is the year that i try to claw back a section of the internet that I want to inhabit. De-Googling last year was a major focus, and this year I want to support smaller teams that are trying to make the internet a better place. That’s why I chose Pckt to host this blog. These folks are trying to create interesting, sustainable products that make the internet a more interesting place. That’s a message I can get behind and I want to support. I would much rather send some money to teams doing good work than Musk, Bezos, The Zuck, or Microsoft who seem very intent on dragging us into the dark timeline of online existence. 

But also, I can’t believe I am writing a blog again. This was not on my bingo card for 2026, but it is nice to return to the practice that literally gave me my entire career. Maybe I will relive that story in a post some time.