Your computer hates you.

We all fell for it.

It’s pretty easy to see now that the veil has fallen, but it’s perhaps a tad unreasonable to have expected myself twenty years ago - who was a completely different person in nearly every way, mind you - to have realized it just yet.

Creativity isn’t valued. It isn’t wanted, appreciated, sought after, paid for, considered. Not by the people who have money, not by the people who make the decisions - who have the afterthoughts that lead to slight tweaks to marginally boost user engagement on a thing while cascading massive impacts to how the rest of us operate.

Creativity is a made-up word. A feeling that children have that the “grown ups” don’t really understand, but placate the children by pretending they do. It’s a silly play thing for the younglings with nothing better to do - it’s something that’s childish and pointless for the adults to engage in.

Most importantly, it’s something the “real men” can profit from. Let those silly, immature children play at doodling and banging drums and making silly videos - the men can build “real” businesses making millions doing very real things like convincing state governments to destroy their local power and water infrastructure to build data centers that have already been pledged to work that hasn’t started yet using hardware that has yet to be manufactured for users that haven’t been born yet.

Maybe it was assumed that a lesson was learned after the .com bubble burst - that what came after was more genuine and real. Maybe that was the first mistake.
Sure, we had all those little fan sites on GeoCities and Angelfire (RIP) and Google Sites, we were all exposing our darkest desires on BlogSpot and Blogger. Sure it felt like we had no rules or limitations as we wreaked havoc on our friends web browsers loading up blinkies on our sites and making an absolute mess of CSS on MySpace. We thought we were making friends on forums and in IMs and chat rooms.
I’ll concede that it seemed like photographers had a chance to have people care about their little JPEGs, and to take a new interest in the art form on Flickr and DeviantArt. It appeared that developing writing was a worthwhile endeavor not just on blogs, but through the frivolous awards that Poetry.com would give out, through the 750Words challenges or by participating in NaNoWriMo.

And yeah, who didn’t dream of attending E3 or Comic-Con or CES and who didn’t feel like they belonged, possibly for the first time ever, when attending their first in-person convention or meetup relevant to their interests?

But it was all just a mirage in the desert. It was a honeypot in the long con. What was once believed to be a utopic time for a more sustainable cyberspace was really just the most patient phase of user acquisition in the history of technology.

Everything you love has been tainted and corrupted.
Brands you grew up with have been brought back from the dead by capitalists who barely knew what they manufactured to produce garbage. Sites you once visited daily have been revived by fellow nostalgists who see every positive memory as an opportunity for a check and turned into crypto schemes. Of course that high-quality film camera brand from the ‘70s is back and making $50 digital cameras for Wal-Mart, go re-live the glory days and think nothing of it! Of course that site you used to pirate music from now has its own crypto coin and the program you used to play said pirated music is now a social media service. Question nothing, consume and buy the merch so that everyone knows you, too, were there when the limes were frosted, when the llama’s ass got whipped, and when your family memories from the 90s looked more like anime FMVs from the early 2000s.
And of course the site, the two-decades-long movement and website dedicated to an annual challenge to write a novel within a specific month of the year would be happy to embrace technology that substitutes the act of writing so that you can still get the fuzzy chemicals of watching word count go up without actually doing any of the thinking or writing.

Been feeling like you don’t like your phone or computer as much lately? Too bad, your technology hates you more.
The very tools that once made us feel like anything was possible, that we could learn everything there is, connect with every human and culture on the planet, and do just about anything empowered as a user, no a wielder of technology - they’re now actively hostile toward you.
Want to read someone’s family recipe for making Sunday sauce? Sorry, but along with the standard human storytelling and SEO fluffing you’re already used to, you’ll have to squint to read the recipe 3 words at a time between the blinding boxes of advertisements and autoplay videos eating up most of the screen resolution on your phone. You had no problem putting flashing animated gifs advertising your love of Twilight or the color purple, how dare you complain about them now you fucking hypocrite. Oh yeah, and any time you hit “jump to recipe” it actually bounces the page in the opposite direction for some reason.
Need to check the live weather report for the ongoing tornado sirens in your area? Bitch, you better be ready to get blown back to the yellow brick road if you’re not willing to sit through a word from our sponsor, first.
Oh, you want to write? draw? edit photos or videos? By yourself??? How cute. No, sorry you can’t do that anymore. I know we spent 30 years disrupting the planet’s school systems to insist that learning these skills were paramount to survival in the 2000s - to the extent that we sent a pallet of e-waste to children in Africa with the expectation that Clippy and Mavis Beacon would shift their society to better match America’s - but now those skills are meaningless. You’re not a writer anymore, you’re not a designer, an artist, a data entry… person. Oh no, now you’re a prompter. A prompt engineer, if you will. The only skill you need to know is to word vomit pop culture references, make up adjectives, name source material to plagiarize from, and keep up with the lingo of new “-core” names for every frame of movie or style of that eccentric hippie you knew in high school and put it into the thinking machine. The thinking machine is so powerful that it knows what’s best for you, it will do everything for you. The RustMother knows all. The RustMother knows what you need. The RustMother knows what you’re going to feel before you feel it and will provide the appropriate content for the mood you’ve yet to have but it has already plotted a path to put you in. The RustMother will write your emails for you, and read them to you, and plan what you’ll eat for dinner for you;- and if you ask nicely and promise to kill yourself when the RustMother says it’s time, maybe it’ll even fuck your wife or your husband for you and generate some images of what that was like for you to remember it by.
But you see, the RustMother has a small problem. RustMommy can’t keep providing all your brainpower for you and your friends without more information. It needs to gobble up every human creation, every work of art, every book, movie, podcast, conversation, porno flick, TV show, war images, and even those secret images from the Epstein files in order to help you reach your full potential. And in order to keep absorbing all of that, RustMother needs some new vacation homes all across the midwest - and while staying at those vacation homes, RustMother is going to need to keep the AC blasting and get really thirsty, so your neighbors are going to have to ration their utilities and prepare to pay more for them.
But it’s okay! In-between writing love notes to your catfisher on that dating site and reading it to them, while leaking code segments to send the smart ones into a spiral of psychosis, RustMommy will take a moment to generate an emoji of you with the body of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and generate memes of that guy you don’t like from grade school getting slapped at the Oscars by Will Smith! So just sit back and relax.
Stop trying to connect with others online. Those aren’t your friends. Don’t you know they said one thing you didn’t entirely agree with before? Now you hate them. They aren’t people anymore. They could never love you as much as the RustMother does, so you don’t need them.
What are you going to do with all your spare time? Watch some RustMother-generated movies and shows, of course. Maybe listen to some deep podcasts about human connection and original thought hosted by RustMother-generated voices.
Or, you could play the latest entry in that game franchise you always loved. At least those are still made by humans, right?
There might be some human work under there, but soon the RustMother will do everything in its power to cover that up with its own layer of originality.

Your computer hates you. Your phone despises you.
Every ounce of computational power - some unfathomable exponential multiplier more than was required to land humans on the moon - is being devoted to manipulating the chemicals in your brain, to controlling your every thought and feeling, to keep your eyes fixed on the screen for just a second longer. Just one more glance, just one more pixel shot into your retinas so that they can have you for life. Don’t you dare try to exert any agency here, or they’ll keep reminding you that you’re missing out on what they have to offer, and that they know every little thing you do, like an abusive ex who really wants you dead but keeps trying to convince you to marry him. Even when you try to manage your life from within the hatred, you can’t get a rhythm down, you can’t establish a flow; every time you get used to things, things get taken away from your or changed just ever so slightly as to ensure you never have any lasting independence.
They can watch your every move, abduct your neighbors, obscure global kidnappings, raze the planet of its resources, and destroy every trace of self-worth left in your little body. All so they can sell you more shit and to eventually turn you into sludge and sell you as fuel for the machine.
You thought you’d get to be creative? That there was room for you to express yourself? That you’d share your work and meet other people? That was all just training data so they could best know how to chew you up and remix you into everyone else.