The Modern Internet was our biggest mistake

"Hold on a minute, you need to enable cookies so we can track you online."

"Stop right there, your browser is 5 milliseconds too old, please update."

"Please scroll endlessly on your social media until you feel so brain-rotten, you can no longer consume content. Then take a break and come back for more."

We've seen it, we've heard it all. As time progressed and our excitement about the great information hightway died down, we made the horrifying realization that others were utilizing our excitement to push the most profit and engagement out of their products as they can. Now, anything that targets children is intended to keep ahold of their attention and get the most bang for their buck, while teenagers and adults have to deal with "algorithms" that give us what the system thinks we want, and we just have to take it in.

It wasn't always like this, and content on the Internet was more rewarding when you explored. You could find new interests by stumbling on somebodies webpage, or find ones that suited your own and join a small community. Sure, it wasn't as easily accessible, but that was the joy of it. Now, you are forced to be fed by a machine that takes in what you've seen and generates a list of other things you might want to see. Exploration on the Internet isn't encouraged anymore, and is often way more difficult. The creations of users that made the web a more personalized experience disappeared, and ISPs shut down their existing website services.

It's easy to blame the increasing demand and desire to make computers affordable, but I think it's more of the introduction of the first iPhone that truly rotted the Internet to its core. While cheap computers made the Internet more accessible, smart phones made it portable for anyone, anywhere. To any advertising agency looking to make a big profit for it and its customers, it would be foolish to not see the incredible amount of cash that would flow from this.

While social media had in some form already existed, there was a personality to them. You could customize your profile on them to your hearts content, and it still felt like you were looking at the sites of other people with emotions. But considering you couldn't always slap a desktop site on a mobile phone, it became common to redesign services in a way that would allow easy flexibility between the two platform. Restrictions were made, and in time, customization was stripped down to basic profile pictures, banner, and names. It wasn't just appealing to mobile web browsing, but it was also dumbing down our society.

Now we live in an age where logos are simplified for no legitimate reason, sites are so minimalistic but are also large and run on so many frameworks, finding communities and other people that share similar interests no matter how weird or borderline disturbing is way too easy. It's an age that encourages mindlessness on a platform that we ended up growing attached to too much.

Now your data is collected on the daily and sold to the highest bidder, your freedom is restricted, and the discovery of cool sites dedicated to specific topics are now barely holding on if at all. It's an Internet that was ruined. If Steve Jobs didn't go up on stage and announce their new Apple iPhone in 2007, we might be having a very different conversation today.