I’m Entering My Curmudgeon Era

My current project: I've been dusting off the old hard drives with my ripped CD collection and loading them into an iPod. A 20-year-old piece of tech with its click wheel intact, no WiFi, and no algorithm feeding me recommendations I didn't ask for. The result: I've started listening to music - actually listening to it - in a way I haven't in years. Giving it my attention. Not taking it for granted, not treating it like day old shrimp at a discount buffet.

And it's not just the iPod. I've been turning my phone off for extended periods, feeling that strange mix of liberation and disobedience that comes with rejecting the default. I've been opting out in small ways. Taking back space where I can. Getting offline. Writing notes by hand. Watching DVDs, instead of paying Disney+ and Netflix their growing, grasping monthly fees.

And I've been thinking: maybe this is my Curmudgeon Era.

Not in the nostalgic, “things were better in my day" way.

More in the "I refuse to be gaslit by modernity" way. I refuse to pretend that constant connectivity has made us happier. I refuse to buy into the idea that infinite scrolling is anything but digital debt—time spent, nothing gained.

I love technology. I love the Internet. But I hate what's been done to it.

I hate that everything is optimized for engagement instead of meaning. I hate that we treat labor exploitation as a feature, not a bug. I hate that the same billionaires who gutted local journalism now act like slop is the answer. I hate that we've spent two decades building digital spaces only to end up with walled gardens owned by the same five companies, keeping us pacified and consuming.

You hit a certain point, and you stop playing along.

You start to see through the "creator economy" that turns creative people into gig workers, underpaid and overexposed. You see through the "community" pitches that are just data-harvesting schemes. You see through the hype cycles of unbundling and rebundling, decentralizing and centralizing that - somehow - always end with a handful of dudes in Silicon Valley holding all the keys.

I don't necessarily think I can win some grand ideological war - but I just don't want to live like this. I don't want to spend my days being pulled into engagement loops, being conditioned to see the world through algorithmic popularity contests, being funneled into the same predatory business models masquerading as progress.

I want friction. I want intentionality. I want to listen to an album because I chose it, not because it was shuffled into my ears by a recommendation engine. I want to write, read, and think in places that don't depend on ad revenue or growth hacking. I want to use tools that exist to serve me, not extract from me.

I'm not interested in Silicon Valley's venture-funded mountain of shit.

Not anymore.

I'm interested in fighting for the future. I'm interested in fighting for my own attention, autonomy, and ability to exist without being packaged into a product.

Maybe that means fewer shallow connections, fewer dopamine hits from notifications. Maybe it means building slower, smaller, in ways that don’t scale. Maybe it means embracing things that feel outdated, inefficient, unoptimized—because they let me be human instead of a data point.

I’ll keep carving out my little spaces. I’ll keep resisting the churn. I’ll keep choosing what I pay attention to, what I create, and what I let shape me.

If the internet is going to be anything worth saving, it won’t be built by the same hands that wrecked it. It’ll be built by the people who refuse to let it be anything less than ours.