What's for Breakfast?

YouTube was, for me, the last hanger-on.  I had abandonded Facebook years ago.

I had dipped my toes in Bluesky briefly, and even scrolled through 
Mastadon (SDF's instance).  I had regularly scrolled through Reddit and even
posted a few times.  I had also been hanging out on some discord channels
in the retro/vintage tech communities.  But I have since abandonded all of
these mostly because they make me sad, mad, or some other emotion somewhere
in that end of the emotional spectum.

It feels like there is a concerted effort to generally bring negative feelings
into existance and to squelch any and all positive ones.  The term 
"enshitification" encapsulates companys' attempts at just making their
products and services worse.  Generally it is assumed to maximize profit in
the short-term but in a few cases it seems that some of the moves that I've
seen done have probably ended up costing the company more than if they had
just left things alone.  It really feels as if their end goal is just to make
people less happy.

The reason YouTube was the last thing from the corporate shit-o-sphere that I
was still consuming is because of my morning routine.  I have a bowl of 
cereal and a mug of coffee.  I *could* hop on a BBS.  I *could* get on IRC.
I *could* get onto COM over at SDF.  I *could* do a lot of things but all of
these require the use of both of my hands and they're busy lifting spoonfulls
of Captain Crunch into my face so ... It's YouTube.  Entertain me YouTube, 
give me some good morning content to get my day started, part of this 
delicious and nutritious breakfast!  

Political content, fuck that shit.  I'm so tired of it.  I am not to blame
for what's going on here, I vote every chance I get including local elections,
primaries, etc...  And there's nothing I can do about the state of America
right now.  Add on top of that the click-bait-y titles these tubers use:
"Ohio is turning BLUE!", uhh no it's fucking not.  I live in Ohio and every
weekend I see MAGAts flying their trump flags from the backs of their trucks
and their bikes and their trikes, I see their MAGA hats at the flea market,
and I understand the level of gerrymandering in Ohio and why votes from my
county have zero effect on how "blue" Ohio is.

So, switch over to my other account, where that algorithm is trained to feed
me retro computer stuff.  This I'm starting to lose interest in.  Not lose
interested in vintage computers just YouTube channels about this because 
there's only so many times you can watch "The history of Commodore", or watch
me open boxes of stuff viewers sent me for free, then support me for doing so
by paying me on patreon, otherwise I'd have to get a job and wouldn't that be
terrible if I had to come down to your level and actually working for a living.

Okay actually that last part isn't quite fair.  First off I understand there's
about 4 times as many people in the world today than there was when I got here
and not nearly 4 times as many jobs.  Plus being a full-time YouTube content
creator *is* a job.  It's just a job without a 401k or health insurance.  It's
a job that could end without notice at any moment because someone at YouTube
decided to delete your channel.

It's something that started out as a hobby and the videos you produced showed
the passion and interest and now, deep down, you'd really like to put this
all behind you and move on to something else because we humans only really
feel engagement, fun, and excitment when there's novelty; when we're learning
and doing something new, broadening our horizons.

But instead, here you are, working your "career" as a content creator, in one
particular genre, with so many thousands of subscribers, stuck having to do
the same thing over and over and over because you've pigeonholed yourself into
it.

Sorry for your predicament, but I'm more sorry for the end result of your
predicament:  The videos that get thrown into the corporate trough which is
then presented to me, the pig to consume in my feed.  Even the word "feed"
rubs me the wrong way today.  I am used to using the internet with intention.
We used to explore the internet, we used terms like navigate and surf and 
burrow and hunt.  We didn't sit there in one place (on one site) constantly
consuming content chosen for us by our "masters" as it was delivered to us,
we were not livestock stuck in a pen subservient to the great and powerful
hands that feed us.

We were hunters, we went where we wanted to go, we found what was there.
We were homesteaders, we staked claims of our own in the form of standing
up our own personal home pages, and gopherholes and IRC chat channels and
telnet BBSs, etc...

Well.  I feel like our hunting muscles have atrophined but if you start slowly,
if you make a conscious decision to not go into the pen and walk up to the
trough and eat the grule and instead go out with a bit of hunger in your
belly; a hunger for novelty, a hunger for something with passion, a hunger for
something that no one made a penny on then you can nourish your soul while
you're enjoying that Captain Crunch.

.