My wife said this the other day, frustrated once again by the Internet.   She was trying to find a crossword puzzle generator, a website she had visited recently to help our oldest with his homework.  She believed that this would be easy.  Who wouldn’t?  An hour later — and still no crossword site — she was ready to unleash her fury on anyone who’d listen.  This was me.

I didn’t mind.  She was right.  The Internet is, pretty much, a huge, sprawling mess of humanity.  There’s no central index, no reliable way to find just what you’re looking for when you need it, and the software we all use to access it, in a word, sucks.  Yeah, that’s right, sucks.  It sucks bad.

For example, 900 gazillion people use a web browser each day, some as a normal part of their jobs (or goofing off during them), and it can’t fundamentally help you find anything you want.  About all it can offer is a listing of places you’ve been to before that ended up frustrating you, along with a collection of links to places you once thought were interesting (that you probably found by accident) but now seem pretty stupid.  Well you may have been drinking.  And you’re not alone, as it turns out, if the actual content out on the majority of websites is any indicator.

I swear most of it was written by drunk people, extremely drunk, unhelpful people, who felt compelled to tell other drunk people what was on their mind at the moment they wrote it with better illustrations than Shakespeare.  How all this generates billions of dollars of capitalization is better left to economists from impressive universities with lots of acronyms after their names.  I’ll bet they’ll be drunk as they explain it to you.

At some point, the Internet became useless.  I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure this happend right around the time guys like Jeff Bezos became billionaires for figuring out ways to sell us lots of stuff.  Lots and lots of stuff.  So much stuff that most of it is bound to be useless.

Ironically I work in the field.  Yes, the same useless technology pays our mortgage and puts food on the table.  That’s irony.

“I have to go through the maze to find a site that’ll just tell me without making me buy something.”