Internet Sucks
Sometimes I wish I loved you
Sometimes I don’t know what to do
Sometimes I look back on our earliest love affairs:
I had so many hairs, and you were made of everyone everywhere.
Or so I imagined! Actually, just a bunch of me-types,
typing into MUD games, geeking on the weeknights,
hunting drug recipe text files with a Gopher client.
(You’re supposed to be studying, oh no, but you’re so defiant.)
It was giant Usenet porn, over the dialup,
over the rickety PBX which might go silent.
Internet was precious to me, and it remains so.
But it isn’t like in early days. The achy pains grow
ever more insistent, they get inside my melon.
They tell me pretty subtly (I mean, besides the yelling)
that I don’t love you any more, internet.
You used to be a safe home for my nerd heart and my intellect.
Now you’ve got so much hate that you’ve just got to interject.
Now you’ve got too many chefs up in your kitchenette.
Sometimes I’m overjoyed this thing got democratized.
Anybody with a pocket phone can lend a voice against those who talk the lies.
Don’t need to know how the packets work or any server’s status,
just click the big user-friendly button that fills my heart with gladness.
And stop pressing the one that posts your unrelenting wackness.
Yeah, I know how to mute and unfriend (even got some practice),
but how exactly is one supposed to mute the fact that a tenth of our netizens
when offered the chance to shit on anything pull down pants without hesitance,
without any sense of justice, pathos, kindness, or decency?
Now having to listen to assholes is half of what online means to me.
And it seems to be this isn’t brand new. Some people have always sucked.
More trolls per capita, probably: 1989 CompuServe. But!
These days, it’s like all the worst people on earth formed a club
just to light ugliness up and take one drag and proceed to stub
it out in my eye by way of my once-beloved internet.
Could a solution lurk that hasn’t been discovered in it yet?
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