You know what? I feel old. Also pretty angry and very disappointed. Cause things were not supposed to look like they do in AD 2024. Let me quickly explain: I grew up with the Internet. Right, maybe Gen Z will find it strange but Gen X were the first generation that used the net since its inception in the 80’s. At first, the net was a university tool, linking American and European scientific institutions. At the beginning of the 1990’s, the Internet became a public domain. Schools and private homes were connected (I still remember how long the modem connection took and how slow it was!!) and we all became, as we were called back then, the Netizens. Chatrooms, video games forums, first social media sites – suddenly in 1990s we all had access to this in a computer’s lab at school. Internet cafes became super popular for those who couldn’t use the Internet at home. It was a revolution happening before our eyes. I have become an active user almost immediately, researching school work, spending countless hours collecting artworks from JRPG’s and anime and saving them on floppy discs. You know, life was good and I was your typical teenager, not very different from the teenagers online today. There was a real sense of belonging, a community spirit. The more people joined, the more common the Internet became, the worse it got. And now, we are in a place where this lovely, very useful tool created to share knowledge is used to harass, limit and incite hatred.
“The Internet” single cover by Delilah herself
Delilah Bon hits things on the head again. Another single and she is telling everything that I wanted to say for a long time. The Internet, in its modern form, really went to the dogs, with big apologies to the lovely doggos. Arrival of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006 changed the way people actually use the Internet. I browsed pages, going into a rabbit hole learning about things I didn’t know. Right now, an average Internet user is not looking for information, they are scrolling social media and getting engaged there. When Twitter first emerged, I was working for a well known Polish video game developer and we used it to survey users to learn about their preferences for new video game characters. The chosen ones were a Black club singer turned zombie hunter and a bi-racial boxer. If we did the same survey today, I fear our feed would be spammed by bot accounts, nickels and scams. Oh, and we would be called names, cause that’s how X rolls under the guidance of Elon Musk.
There are many things that are very wrong with the Internet that Delilah mentions in her song. First of all, the rampant misinformation about politics, society and minorities. Delilah sarcastically raps for listeners to keep scrolling cause it brings the money pouring in. She is dead right. The drama, social polarization, extremism, radicalization and culture wars are all fruits from the same poisoned tree – the growing limitation of the Internet.
How can the Internet be limited you may ask, if it now is available in every part of our world, on every device one can imagine. Availability sadly doesn’t translate into freedom. Back in the 90’s, the Internet was not owned by anybody, the idea was still intact that it would be a public domain, open, free archive of all human knowledge. Something like the Star Trek database – everybody was to benefit from it. You could use any browser you wanted, you could create a successful website for your art or music and build your own community on it. Today, you do not have that power. Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, X, Meta or Chinese government backed TikTok are fighting over the ownership over the whole thing. A recent study says that the Internet is actually disappearing. This is the effect of big corporations limiting what we can find and the monetization of search options. It is really hard for people to find good quality pages when social media takes up 70-90% of daily Internet use of an average person. Another issue is the almost total monopoly of Google Chrome, a great browser in itself, but highly biased with its search options. Paid content and suggested websites clutter the search results making it hard to find private, smaller pages. And the content promoted on Chrome is divisive and radical. Try searching for Trans rights, and the first results you see are from right wing think tanks and groups that meet the criteria for a hate group. Try searching for feminism and Andrew Tate, Carlson Tucker or any other misogynist affiliated with an equally misogynistic Fox News will pop up. This is not a coincidence – those who have money are getting preferential treatment. Google makes a fortune from their keywords search (paid content) and SEO (search positioning) to deliver things that will divide and anger us. Nothing sells better than drama, lies and misinformation. And if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it somehow starts living on their own. Add social media to the mix and people who mindlessly share without checking, will send it to the ends of the earth.
Delilah by Helen Tate
The tech companies are not liberal and they never were. I see many people peddling the myth of very successful people who are geniuses and they made millions through their inventions – i.e. Elon Musk. The problem is those old white men come from millionaire backgrounds, they inherited the money. They are also conservative leaning, anti trans, anti women (Musk just welcomed his 12th child with his 9th partner) and eager to get richer. They use their popular platforms to give prominence to right wing politicians, populist speakers, groups that are sponsored by various regimes including Israel. It is hard to fight against that, far-right think tanks in the US and Europe are handsomely sponsored by the Koch empire, millions are poured into pro Israeli organizations active on US campuses to frame any criticism of Gaza genocide as antisemitic. The outcome is very simple: we are seeing distorted versions of reality that favours conservative narrations. And this has a massive effect on politics, society, and young people. Trump or Marie Le Pen didn’t appear out of thin air. What was once a fringe, extremist concept, now has entered the mainstream. People are angrier, radicalized, porn addicted. Young men are targeted by toxic masculinity, women lose their rights to abortion, trans people are portrayed as monsters. Divide and conquer – the oldest political strategy in the world still works perfectly well. The gap between men and women’s political beliefs is now the deepest it ever was – women are becoming more liberal, while men are turning more conservative. What you see on the Internet stays inside as Delila eloquently puts it. It may even enter your home – the phenomenon of taking online feuds into real word is known as Internet bashing, in extreme cases people have travelled to their online enemies homes, broken in and inflicted real violence, despite never meeting them offline before.
I wish more people were as brave as Delilah. She is not afraid to speak up about women’s right to abortion, about sexual scandals in the Catholic church, about young men treating their partners like shit, about social and economical inequality women face. I have been praising her for years, but what she is doing now is on another level. Lauren Tate is no longer a teenager, she is a very talented artist in her prime that speaks her mind and makes fantastic music. “The Internet” stands at 4 minutes and 21 seconds. It was written and produced by Lauren herself; she is also responsible for the single’s cover. I would classify it as Queen Scene meets KORN with a really catchy keyboard part in the refrain sounding a bit like a crazy carousel music. I haven’t heard the full album yet (this single is the forth one Delilah released so far) but my guess is, it will be one of the LP’s highlights.
I do not want to finish this review on a depressing note. A lot must be done to keep the Internet as we knew/know it but we need to fight. Support grass root organizations, support artists that are engaged and political. Buy their albums, spread word about their music and what they stand for, vote in elections for people who support democracy and equality. Check articles online before they are shared and be generous with the ban button especially on Twitter. Remember don’t feed the trolls and do not be discouraged by the negativity. It will pass.
There is a battle to be won and if we stick to it, we shall overcome. “The Internet” is out today, independently.
Follow Delilah Bon on social media at:
https://www.delilahbon.co.uk/
https://www.instagram.com/delilahbonofficial/
https://www.facebook.com/DelilahBon
https://open.spotify.com/artist/5JUFYlgwsbqpLcU9TMlsve
https://twitter.com/DelilahBon_
https://soundcloud.com/delilahbon
https://www.youtube.com/c/DelilahBon
https://www.tiktok.com/@delilahbon
“The Internet” is out today, independently.
Rita Dabrowicz
Indieterria 