🪴 The website is dead (long live the website)
The Garden #25
Hello, And welcome to The Garden!
This week in the newsletter: Going outside, how to make falafel and... The Muppets?
But first, a three steps guide to kill the internet
🟢 The internet is dead, and we killed it.
Lately, I've become obsessed with the 'Dead Internet Theory.'
You know, that one conspiracy theory that says that most —if not all— of the content you see on the internet is made by bots.
While the theory as you occasionally find it verges on speculative fiction, the fact is that bots are a fundamental part of the internet.
From traffic farms to data scrappers, a big part of the eyes that read the internet are bits of code.
But I think the dead internet theory takes up new meaning when we take an eye to artificial intelligence.
It is my personal policy to try to interact with human-produced content as much as possible.
Easy peasy you would think. And to be honest it's relatively simple
But more and more I'm seeing myself counting fingers on pictures, scrolling past AI-generated tiktoks, and clicking away from websites with names I don't recognize to avoid wasting my time with useless AI-generated SEO crap.
When I want to use ChatGPT I go to their site, otherwise, I'd love to read work made by humans.
🟡 Literally going outside
The other day I saw a post on the r/GenZ subreddit telling people to just log off and touch some grass.
Lately, you see lots of discourse around things like porn, alcohol, or drugs as the sources for the concerningly high levels of depression young people go through.
And although I won't discard any of those as real factors, it would be a disservice to our current struggles, to blame everything just on that.
But nor does it feel like blaming everything on the 'damn phone' is the answer either.
It feels like the world is so old it is tearing apart, and we are on the surface trying to hold it together.
Most likely, depression is linked to all of the above.
But also, once in a while, you go outside.
You feel the sunset on your face, touch some grass, and see a tree so good everything starts making sense.
There are things right here worth fighting for. I look down the street and I see cruelty and injustice, but I also see so much kindness, and so many people trying to make things right.
I guess there's a point to that Reddit post.
🟠 Long live the website
So, what do we do with it thing then?
You know, the recollection of all human knowledge at the finger of your tips.
I feel cautiously optimistic about the whole human enterprise.
I think that the internet is our greatest invention, and I think that despite the direction it has taken in the last ten years, the internet can still be saved and become the great tool we all envisioned.
It doesn't have to become the time sponge advertisers want it to become.
Many people say that the website as we know it is dead.
All the layoffs in digital media would make you think so.
AI-generated websites make copywriting and web development worthless.
And I also think that social media is not the answer to what the internet could become.
I'm sure that the answer to how to create an internet we all enjoy is sealed off in a foreign idea I cannot fathom
I also think that people like to spend their time in good spaces that make them happy.
But in the meantime, the best I can do is to treasure the artists, journalists, writers, and creators I know I like.
Pinning websites or YouTube channels on your browser, and checking them whenever you feel like it goes a long way.
We should try trying to shape the internet into something that serves us and not the other way around.
Long live the website.
Punki Punki 🎶
I’ve been listening to the Kings of Convenience lately
This is one of these band I discovered a while ago and keep rediscovering again and again.
Their 2009 album Declaration of Dependence capture the yearning and longing that only someone in their mid 20s could feel while looking at the world passing by.
24 AN BLOOMING LIKE THE FIELDS OF MAINE 😭😭😭
📹 Buen provecho paisano
I learned to make Falafel the other day, used this recipe and absolutely loved it.
No gatekeeping here, you should totally try it.
📷 Photo of the week
