Falling Out of Love With Computers

I’ve been thinking about when I first fell in love with computers. It started early—somewhere around the third or fourth grade. Our first family computer was a 486, running some version of Windows and, more importantly, MS‑DOS. I remember typing random commands into that black screen, trying to make sense of it. I wasn’t very good at it, but it felt like magic.

We even had a printer that could print banners—multi‑page signs you’d tape together, crude and wonderful. I made posters for everything, just because I could. There was also some little space‑shooting game, and I thought it was incredible. But my real coming‑of‑age moment came with our next machine: a Pentium 100 MHz running Windows 95 with a one‑gigabyte hard drive. A gigabyte! I remember being told that was an unfathomably huge amount of storage. It probably was, but I had no idea what that even meant.

When the Web Was Weird #

Then came the internet—dial‑up at first. My family didn’t want to pay for access, so I used an ad‑supported dial‑up service. I figured out that if I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Delete fast enough, I could kill the ad process before it launched, leaving me blissfully ad‑free. That little hack felt like discovering fire. We had nothing but dial‑up for several years, and I would often stay after class at school to use the computers they had there because they were faster with better internet than what we had at home.

From there it was IRC, mIRC, and late‑night rabbit holes into Linux and weird corners of the web. I first cut my teeth on programming by learning to use mIRC’s built-in scripting language–which was quite bad–but it was enough to get me started. The early internet felt infinite and alive, a wild, untamed frontier. You could talk to someone on the other side of the planet, which in the mid‑’90s was nothing short of sorcery. The information firehose was intoxicating. Every link led somewhere new; every page felt like discovery.

Then came Google—back when it was actually good. Before that, we had AltaVista, Yahoo, and Lycos, but they were messy, clunky, and stuffed with garbage results. Google changed everything with PageRank: a simple idea that the best pages were the ones most linked to by others. It worked. For a while, the internet became genuinely useful.

But then, of course, Google became an advertising company. It started selling our attention to the highest bidder, literally auctioning what we see and when we see it. And it turns out that was one of the most profitable ideas in human history.

Today Google makes hundreds of billions of dollars a year in advertising revenue. Google—while not technically the world’s largest company—remains among the most profitable. It dominates the advertising economy and wields immense power over the flow of information. It earns tens of billions in net income and stands as one of the most powerful gatekeepers of attention and information. In many ways, Google gatekeeps the internet and the information that’s available to us.

That’s where things began to sour.

Optimization Eats the Web #

Somewhere along the way, the internet lost its soul. The endless innovation of the early 2000s—Gmail, Maps, Wikipedia, Amazon, even the early social sites—gave way to optimization. A/B tests, engagement metrics, click‑through rates. The web stopped being a creative space and became an advertising apparatus.

It wasn’t a sudden fall from grace. It was a slow decline—a creeping rot. Every redesign was a little shinier, a little worse. The ads got smarter, the content dumber. SEO spam replaced genuine writing. The feed replaced the forum. Everything became “content.” Everyone became a “creator.”

Now there’s basically one good website left—Wikipedia—and maybe a handful of half‑decent forums if you dig deep enough. The rest is sludge. Google’s results have grown noisy. Reddit’s full of bots. And the so‑called “social” platforms feel anything but social. It’s all clickbait, doomscrolling, and dark patterns wrapped in a dopamine loop. The only people winning are the ones selling your attention back to you.

It’s strange to say, but I’ve fallen out of love with computers. They once empowered; now they extract. Everything’s optimized for profit, not people. Every design choice, every notification, every “suggested for you” feed is just an algorithm whispering, stay a little longer, scroll a little more.

And maybe it’s not even the computers’ fault. Maybe it’s capitalism’s. The machine just does what we tell it to do: maximize engagement, maximize revenue, maximize GDP. We’ve built a planet‑sized optimization loop for the buy button. Nothing is sacred anymore. Everything’s monetized. The news, the doctor’s office, your inbox, your grief, your joy—it’s all an opportunity to sell something.

Sometimes I think about what all this must look like to an outsider. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there’s this universal encyclopedia of sorts—a galactic travel manual filled with curt and vaguely judgmental summaries of intelligent species. If such a guide were updated today by some advanced alien civilization observing us from orbit, the entry on modern humans might look something like this:

Excerpt from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Earth (Revised 2025 Edition) #

HUMANS (Homo sapiens sapiens) — A semi‑intelligent primate species notable for its brief flirtation with curiosity before settling comfortably into the attention economy.

Having once invented tools to explore the cosmos, humans now devote the majority of their waking hours to staring at small, glowing rectangles that display advertisements, arguments, and images of other humans pretending to be happier than they are. This ritual behavior, known locally as scrolling, appears to serve no clear evolutionary purpose, though it does provide a reliable revenue stream for several trillion‑dollar entities collectively referred to as Tech.

Social interaction has been largely outsourced to “platforms,” where humans communicate by exchanging symbolic gestures called likes. These digital affirmations carry no nutritional value but are considered essential for maintaining self‑worth.

Economically, humans have achieved a remarkable level of efficiency: rather than hunting, gathering, or creating, most simply purchase things they neither need nor can afford from an omnipresent corporate deity called Amazon, which delivers nearly everything except meaning.

When not shopping or scrolling, humans engage in a peculiar performance art known as content creation, wherein they document their own existence in pursuit of attention points from strangers.

Physical interaction between humans is increasingly rare and typically accidental—occurring only when two individuals, both absorbed in their devices, collide head‑first on a city sidewalk to great surprise.

Current projections suggest that within the next century, the species will either merge with its machines entirely or perish while attempting to upgrade the Wi‑Fi.

Sometimes I imagine some curious alien anthropologist dictating that entry while peering through a telescope at New York City—a trillion flickering blue screens glowing in the night, each human hunched over their private portal, eyes down, scrolling like it’s a sacred act. And honestly, they wouldn’t be wrong.

So now we have trillion‑dollar companies fighting for milliseconds of our time, while we mistake motion for meaning. The news cycles around outrage because outrage sells. Even politics has become an engagement strategy. Everything feels like a performance now, even authenticity.

And yet I’m still here. Still using computers every day. Still addicted. Still dependent. I make my living on them. I can’t just walk away. But I’ve been trying to rebuild a relationship with reality—to spend more time in places that don’t have screens, that don’t have an algorithm deciding what deserves my attention.

Trying to Look Up Again #

I go outside more. I talk to people in person, awkwardly, imperfectly. I try to look up. Everywhere I go in New York, people are walking around with their heads down, faces lit by little rectangles. You can’t walk a single block without seeing it—the quiet tragedy of a thousand disconnected souls scrolling in unison. The city’s alive, but nobody’s here.

I don’t want to be one of them. I don’t want to live my life as a vessel for ads or as data in someone’s engagement dashboard. I want to exist in the real world again, even if that world is messy, awkward, and analogue.

Maybe I’m not alone in this feeling—and maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Maybe others are falling out of love with computers too.