The destruction of 1. my city and 2. the internet

My region is going through a crisis this week. So far, my home and my closest loved ones aren't directly affected. A few of my colleagues have basically had their lives destroyed, though. Our area already had critical issues with housing and healthcare, so this will definitely not help things and make relief really hard for everyone affected.

It's so strange to see the disaster in one area and life going on essentially as normal one mile away. You imagine in these scenarios life would grind to a halt and everyone would go full tilt trying to help rebuild what got destroyed, but of course it isn't like that. I still spend all day in an office and then go home and decide whether to make an omelet or an egg salad sandwich. I am donating, but it feels weirdly impotent and shameful to not be doing something in the real world with my actual hands. Every few months I get the urge to quit my email job and become an HVAC technician or something, where I'm constructing things in reality that actually exist, and therefore I as a person actually exist, because how much of my personhood would evaporate in an instant if the virtual world blinked out of existence someday...?

On that note I've been reading a lot about the internet lately. Everything about the centralization and sanitization of the internet, companies gaming their algorithms, surveillance and astroturfing is infinitely fascinating even if it leaves you feeling so bleak about everything. I've been reading Cory Doctorow's blog Pluralistic, and Stand Out of Our Light by James Williams. If you're reading this and you know any other good books or resources on stuff like this, let me know about them! Anyway, it feels to me like there are very few sites that haven't rotted out by now. I haven't been able to use insta or fb for years. There are a few subreddits I still visit, but whenever I go to the front page I can see the situation is not good. It keeps trying to show me posts from whitepeopletwitter. They're all formulaic, profoundly unfunny screenshots of republicans saying something stupid and then getting clapped in the replies. I'm not sympathetic to republicans but this stuff misses the mark of what "humour" is by such a margin, I'm convinced the whole subreddit is run either by robots or unpaid interns, and it's getting pushed at me suspiciously hard.

Youtube similarly feels bleaker as well. I want to support the creators I like but seeing how they're treated by yt and how they have to adulterate their work grosses me out. Imagine you worked at a factory and the amount you're paid (or whether you get paid at all) was determined by a bunch of rules but you weren't allowed to know what they are and they're subject to change without warning at any time. Career youtubers, even if they started out from a place of passion and enthusiasm, end up having to capitulate to whatever gets the most engagement. Sorry for this comparison, but I get the same feeling about youtubers that I do from non-amateur pornography. Which I can't watch because I get too concerned about the actors—are they being treated okay, was she coerced into anything, does he have to take stimulants in order to do this, do they make enough money that they could quit if they wanted to, etc. From the people in my life who make their living off yt, it always started out as a genuine passion to make their Zelda retrospectives etc. but years on they're scrambling to put out whatever will appease the algorithm. Like porn, they act super enthusiatic but you have to wonder if they're alright under the surface, especially since many have worse revenue and job security than an office job. But anyway, that's a whole thing about the exploitation of creatives, I guess it applies to all sorts of fields. I've had a lot of coffee this morning and no breakfast, so I'm just running my mouth at this point.

My main doomer takeaway is that, if these internet mega-giants are fine building these wonderful little platforms and then running them into the ground and escaping into the sunset with their golden parachute, I have to assume other industries work the same way. Finance, oil and gas, real estate, government. If the people at the top have no incentive to leave things better than they found them, like if they're fine leaving a burning wreck behind once they got their bag, what should we do?

Sorry for all these dark posts, would you believe me if I said I'm actually a fairly happy and chill person irl? lmao