What Is Wrong With The Internet
Commodification
On the Modern Web, You are a commodity. Specifically, you are a Brand and therefore the original owner/creator of one or more Products. The most important Product that you create is your Data— a concept that covers literally everything you do and everywhere you go. Social media, the cornerstone of the Modern Web, first became profitable (and therefore "sustainable" under capitalism) when it started keeping track of your Data and selling that Data to advertisers and other profiteers. The Modern Web is so invasive that it exists everywhere in our day-to-day lives and completely dominates our state of living. It defines our social opportunities. It demands that our Data is who we are, reducing humanity to a string of numbers and tags that can be owned and sold.
Commercialization
As a Brand, You serve an important role both to capitalism as an institution and captialism as a market. As an institution, capitalism wants you to work and be profitable for the sake of promoting capitalism. As a market, capitalism wants you to be profitable to advertisers and other companies for the sake of fueling the economy.
In other words, as long as you are on the Modern Web (and Everybody is on the Modern Web) you are either selling something or you are being sold to someone else. You are worth more as a gear in the economic machine than you are as a living breathing human being. The products you buy and the products you sell are literally your entire existence on the Modern Web; everything else is a soothing tactic, a conglomeration of "fun features" and "comfortable spaces" that ultimately take your money and your individuality as a person.
Anti-Intellectualization
Because Data (Information) is the core of the internet's profit complex, raw data— media, analysis, scientific studies, news, and educational materials— have been commercialized as well. In other words, it has never been more expensive to educate yourself on the internet. It has never been more expensive to own (or more often than not, rent) books, movies, TV shows, and games from the internet. Literacy is at an all time low. Technological literacy in particular is almost nonexistant on the Modern Web. You are more likely to find someone who knows how to Sell a Product than you are to find somebody who knows how to make a website or put together a computer.
As a result, the internet has been restructured around users who are ignorant of how the internet works. Computers have been redesigned to be most accessible to users who are ignorant of how computers work. And, most disturbingly, social media has been built from the ground up to service users who are completely dependent on social media. This is how corporations are able to take control of our digital presence; we do not think that we have the tools to exist on the internet without them, and so we become reliant on the corporations to provide us with their version of the internet. People beg social media to change its policies instead of leaving. People beg hosting sites to lower their rates instead of self-hosting. People happily pay for services that they could learn how to do themselves. This is how the crypto boom started in the first place, and it is why social media has become such a cesspool of toxic bullshit thinking. Something needs to change.
We will not have a unified, decorporatized Web until we can teach users to create that unified, decorporatized Web. Ultimately the internet can be made for us users, or it can be for the companies that have done nothing but strip the internet of its joy and purpose for the past thirty years.