The Internet of %Y (=2025).
Media diets never work. Drink this media-oil-infused tonic instead.
It’s a nearly-new year, only one day used at this point. So let’s waste no time. To crack the year open, here’s talk of some of the internet behaviors you’re likely seeing.
A style tip for weeding your browsing.
Picture this: your web has links to bad content! And without hovering your mouse over a link, you cannot easily tell whether the site is bad. You find yourself spending seconds per day hovering links, only to find them not worth clicking! Read on for a marginal improvement!
This mainly applies on a desktop, for use with add-ons like Firefox Add-ons: Stylish or Firefox Add-ons: Stylus. You can easily identify sites you don’t want to visit in links by adding a global style with a rule like:
a[href*="dumbsite.example" i],
a[href*="evilsite.example" i] {
text-decoration: line-through !important;
}What this does? It says if there’s a link (anchor or a) with an attribute ([]) of “href” and its value wildcard-matches (*=, using case-insensitive matching i) with the domains “evilsite.example” or “dumbsite.example,” we want its style modified by setting text-decoration as line-through or a struck-text style. We use !important to ensure no site-specific style rule overrides ours.
I make heavy use of user styles, and this was a good way to easily avoid links to sites I don’t like. You could even go the other way, if you really like a site:
a[href*="diehealthy.org" i] {
font-size: xx-large !important;
}Or if you’re in the northern hemisphere and want to identify Australian websites with ease? Not so easy!
a[href*=".au" i] {
display: inline-block !important;
transform: rotate(180deg) !important;
}The problem here is that we can’t use full regular expressions, and so we can’t know for sure if the match is really the country TLD of Australia or some other part of the URL. (For example, the Au file format uses the .au extension.) But if you’re willing to accept some false-positives, it will work. The same is true of the above examples. If you ran into a link like “https://www.goodsite.example/hey-dont-visit-evilsite.example” it will also match. You have to weigh the odds of confusion against the desire to easily avoid sites you want to avoid or otherwise change links based on a fuzzy matching scheme.
Age Cohorts and c.
People should feel no need to identify with, nor contrast themselves with, their age cohort. It’s basically astrology. You’re not your age cohort, never were, never will be. Age-grouping does have uses in some statistical contexts (which have their own definitions or more reasonably simply use years or ages). It has as much value as a which-old-witch-from-The-Wizard-of-Oz-are-you quiz, even when it comes to picking out what toast to eat. If you see it outside of a very limited statistical setting, simply throw a blanket over the author’s head so they will think it’s night and go back to the pub.
I use this to segue to a larger issue on the internet and the web: That of the devil.
Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. We may ask what is relevant, but anything beyond that is dangerous. He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that: do not listen.
Father Lankester Merrin in The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (1971).
The adversary we meet on the internet is not a fork-tongued imp that has hijacked a young girl’s mortal form (hopefully), but that of a myriad entities in everyday conflict inside a complex social-political-economic system. They are still in many ways our adversaries. They do infect the minds of our fellow humans with all sorts of noxious and silly ideas. We must know this, and we must approach the internet with the right mentality.
Let’s say you’re browsing the web when a billionaire suddenly buys the site you’re reading (and hopefully not this one!). You should not keep reading the billionaire-owned site unless you are being paid. Average peoples’ thoughts are valued at two cents (USD). That amount hasn’t been adjusted for inflation, ever. Meanwhile a billionaire? They can afford to pay you to read their thoughts, and they ought to, for the quality seems most lacking. Refer above to my magic CSS snippet, add that site to it, and move on. That is, unless you’re being paid. If so, you should join a union for people being paid to read billionaires’ thoughts. You’ll need a union to protect you as it’s surely a hazardous profession you’ve chosen.
But individual billionaires are not the top worry circa 2025. There are pink slime news sites that pretend to be bona fide news outlets. Some of those are run by nation-states even if they pretend to be in your home town. Others are run by corporations. In both cases, they want to fool you into adopting their political views for free, just like the billionaires! And we can see the CSS will grow too long if we try to include every bad website out there.
No, we need some kind of brain power to tackle the problem. We need a way to read at least some of the adversaries’ words without being taken under their spell. We need skepticism. The word skepticism comes from Ancient Greek meaning something like thoughtful, but ultimately from some version of a word relating to sight, not sound (“Do not listen.”) as Father Merrin put it. Since we mostly read on the web, it is primarily our vision that lets the words in anyway.
To be skeptical we start by sticking to what’s relevant. For example, articles may quote all sorts of important-sounding people to try to convince you of whatever view it holds. They might even quote a priest or such. But ask first, what do you think of the ideas themselves. Often the quotes are there just to dress up a weak article. If the quotes don’t present new ideas to support the main article, that’s a good sign you can dismiss the quotes.
You should also ask how widespread the phenomenon at issue is. If it only affects a few people greatly, or if it affects many people slightly, these are things to consider. One person may be ill, for example a girl may have become possessed by a demon. But unless she lives near you, how important is it to you? Or if millions of people are only a tiny bit possessed? How important is it to you?
Here we distinguish between important per se and important to you. Things can be important without being important to you. Most of the things in the world that are important probably aren’t important to you. Think of importance like a piece of mail. You probably don’t get a lot of mail. Only those pieces that are addressed to you. In terms of important happenings, there are two ways they can be addressed to you. First, they could affect you directly enough. They are happening in your city, your town, like that. They could also simply be interesting to you. That’s the same in one way, that those things you find interesting are your psychic town or city. If you like baking, your mind lives part-time in baking town, and baking-related content is addressed to you just as much as if it were about the place you live.
But you know where you live, and you know when a piece of mail has been misdelivered. You can’t rely on the articles to decide that question for you! Just because they make a big stink doesn’t mean it’s a big stink. We’ve all heard the phrase ‘to make a mountain out of a molehill.’ Sometimes the adversaries do just that, but other times they turn the telescope round the other way and make it seem like a mountain is a molehill.
A girl I carpooled with way back in my school days (don’t worry, she wasn’t possessed!) used to talk about learning the new buzzwords. Buzzwords are a good sign that something is going on. If you start hearing a new word being thrown around, or an old word in some new way, if there’s a buzzword, there’s probably some PR group behind it. That doesn’t mean you should ignore it, but it does mean your skepticism should go up.
To sum up, you should be skeptical. If certain signs present themselves in an article (useless quotes, buzzwords), you should be even more so. But ultimately it’s up to you to decide whether you care at all, and if so how much you care. Don’t waste your time trying to decide that too much or too finely. If something is really important, you’ll be hearing about it for a while, so you can revisit it later. If it never was important, you may never hear about it again once the PR budget runs out.
That PR budget is a good example of a structural weakness of the adversaries. They have budgets, and budgets work off of time schedules. The nature of public consciousness means attention is always shifting, so very few campaigns have budgets to push some temporary idea for longer than a few weeks. The PR folks have to jump in, wave their flag, and get to the wardrobe department to get ready for the next one. When you hear of some new thing, you can go to your calendar and flip six months ahead in time, and mark down ‘check if that buzzword is still around.’ And you can safely forget about it for six months, including all the follow-on articles. Chances are you won’t miss anything.
The other piece of that is it’s a low-key mistake you can easily admit if you buy into some narrative that creeps up on you as you play with a Ouija board only to find yourself hijacked. Simply chant, “This is so dumb. So, sooo dumb. Completely idiotic.” You can then forget whatever quagmire you accidentally stepped in, and go about your day untroubled.
Mind the mix.
The mix is how content of various sorts comes together. In the olden days, the editors of newspapers were responsible for the mix. The programmers of television were responsible for the mix. They would see what was in the pipeline, and figure out how to put more important items (to them, to their owners) front-and-center, while striking a balance so that the content wasn’t so overwhelming and so choppy.
These days a lot of our time is spent on some form of social media. That system does not yet have good taste. If it’s got an algorithm, well that probably only makes it worse. But when you’re browsing social media, whether videos or images or text, there’s a good chance it’s not properly mixed. You’re likely to bounce from some nice or even fun content into something quite heavy, man. You don’t owe any of the content more than a fair shake. All content is yuck until proved yum by your tastebuds. So if there’s something no más in the feed, be like water and run off.
There are times for heavy. If you want heavy, go to it. But if you’re just casually browsing, maybe taking a break, looking for diversion, heavy does not belong! Don’t pretend it does. Don’t open the door if it knocks and you’re not there for it. Consider it office-hours. You will only see heavy things during the time you’ve set aside, unless it’s an emergency.
If your social media is competent (e.g., Mastodon or some other piece of the Fediverse), it probably has tools to let you hide from your main feed some keywords, tags, and so on. Use them. If you want or need to see those things otherwise, you can visit them directly (again, assumes a decent provider). On Mastodon you can visit your server with the path /tags/example to see recent posts it knows about with the tag “#example”. That lets you keep the yuck and yum separate.
For other media, like reading the news, it may be more difficult. Using an RSS reader can help. It will let you look at items on your own terms. But unless it has better filtering options than the ones I’ve seen, it has its own challenges. Each item of content is equal, so you still run into the mix problem.
Whatever the media, it’s important to engage on it when and how you choose. Daily habits can help, such as not reading the news first-thing if it tends to put you in a sour mood. But you also need those habits to be flexible. That can mean forfeiting the news—not just skipping to catch up, but marking it as read—on days you can’t read it. It also can mean adjusting your habits. Once a week instead of every day, for example. (This is a good practice generally. If a source of news isn’t updated that frequently, don’t check it as often.)
All these methods, filtering, delaying, avoiding, being selective, are ways to impose your taste on the mix.
Will the future fix these problems? Will the adversaries vanish? If there’s one thing I know, it’s that the waves keep on coming. Tomorrow washes today away, and the next washes away tomorrow.